Bain Capital Ventures raised $1.3 billion to fund young startups, and young VC firms, too

Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), the venture arm of the 37-year-old private equity firm Bain Capital, announced this morning that it has $1.3 billion more smackers to invest across two funds, a $950 million fund for seed and Series A deals and a $350 million fund for growth-stage opportunities. That am

Snap announces a new generation of Spectacles, streamlined glasses to experience the world in AR

Amid a pre-recorded Partner Summit where Snap took users through a whole set of new tools for Snapchat users, creators and companies, Snap also threw in a “one more thing” at the end that shows the company, after a rocky start several years ago, is definitely not giving up on its hardwa

US Treasury calls for stricter cryptocurrency rules, IRS reporting for transfers over $10K

President Biden’s vision for an empowered, expanded IRS is poised to have a big impact on cryptocurrency trading. According to a new report from the U.S. Treasury Department, the administration wants to put new requirements in place that would make it easier for the government to see how mone

Portside raises $17M for its business aviation management platform

Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management, with participat

Snap emphasizes commerce in updates to its camera and AR platforms

At Snap’s Partner Summit, the company announced a number of updates to the company’s developer tools and AR-focused Lens Studio, including several focused on bringing shopping deeper into the Snapchat experience. One of the cooler updates involved the company’s computer vision Sca

Snap brings partner-centric Layers to its social map used by 250 million people

Snap wants users to get a more personal view of the world around them. While products like Google Maps and Apple Maps have long-relied on data partners to juice the quality of their contextual insights, Snap is hoping it can give users a more hands-on approach to mixing and matching third-party tie

Snap announces Story Studio, a new standalone app to edit stories

During Snap Partner Summit, Snap announced a brand new app focused on creators. Named Story Studio, this standalone iOS app gives you several editing tools so you can make your content look as professional as possible. Story editing tools are still in Snapchat — nothing is changing on this front.

Esper raises $30M Series B for its IoT DevOps platform

There may be blions of IoT devices in use today, but the tooling around buding (and updating) the software for them stl leaves a lot to be desired. Esper, which today announced that it has raised a $30 mlion Series B round, buds the tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage flee

How to ensure data quality in the era of big data

A little over a decade has passed since The Economist warned us that we would soon be drowning in data. The modern data stack has emerged as a proposed life-jacket for this data flood — spearheaded by Silicon Valley startups such as Snowflake, Databricks and Confluent. Today, any entrepreneur can

Eano’s Stella Wu is not your typical construction tech startup founder

Renovating a home is an exciting, yet often fraught-filled, endeavor. One startup that aims to help make the process simpler, cheaper and less stressful by helping people manage the home renovation process has raised $6 million to help it grow even faster. Builders VC led the round, which included

Electric hypercar phenom and founder Mate Rimac is heading to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

A decade ago, Rimac Automobili was a one-person startup in a garage. Today, the EV and technology company founded by Mate Rimac employs more than 1,000 people, has partnerships with Porsche and Hyundai Motor Group and is on track to launch its 1,914 hp, all-electric C_Two hypercar this year. If tha

Geospatial startup Unfolded.ai acquired by Foursquare

Well, that was fast. Just a few months after raising its seed round, Unfolded.ai announced today that it is being acquired by Foursquare. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The startup had raised a total of about $6 million when we last checked in with them. The company, founde

Slicing up pizza robots

So, true story. Over the weekend I was talking to someone about restaurant robotics. It's a concept people often have trouble visualizing — and understandably so. Among other things, there's really no commonly accepted form factor in a category that sometimes is literally a robot arm

Google is opening a retail store in New York this summer

Google has explored storefronts for a while now. Here's a pop-up in Manhattan's SoHo district that we took a trip to some four+ years back. But the company's own branded retail experience has been fairly limited — unsurprising, given that it has always been a software company firs