Walnut wants to crack open flexibility for healthcare bills

Healthcare insurance, if you're lucky to have it, only covers a subset of conditions in the United States. As a result, patients can often get burdened with horror story charges, like huge deductibles, out-of-network costs and expensive co-pays. So for the uninsured and insured alike, innovativ

Twitch expands its rules against hate and abuse to include behavior off the platform

Twitch will start holding its streamers to a higher standard. The company just expanded its hate and harassment policy, specifying more kinds of bad behavior that break its rules and could result in a ban from the streaming service. The news comes as Twitch continues to grapple with reports of abus

Okta expands into privileged access management and identity governance reporting

Okta today announced it was expanding its platform into a couple of new areas. Up to this point, the company has been known for its identity access management product, giving companies the ability to sign onto multiple cloud products with a single sign on. Today, the company is moving into two new

Building and leading an early-stage sales team with Zoom CRO Ryan Azus

This year at Early Stage, technewss spoke with Zoom Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Ryan Azus about building an early-stage sales team. Azus is perhaps best known for leading the video-calling giant’s income arm during COVID-19, but his experience building RingCentral’s North American sale

E-bikes and earbuds among the first third-party hardware to support Apple’s Find My tracking

Yesterday we noted that Apple launched a new Find My Certification Asst. app, designed to test support for third-party hardware. Find My, of course, has been a long-standing feature for Apple's own hardware like iPhones, AirPods and Macs, but back at WWDC, the company announced plans to open it

How founders can avoid blind spots and make better decisions with EchoVC’s Eghosa Omoigui

Building and maintaining a successful startup requires founders to see the entire playing field. Without that clear view, founders risk missteps when it comes to hiring, raising funds, launching a product or making an acquisition. Essentially, any big decision can end in disaster if a founder loses

Facebook tests Hotline, a Q&A product that’s a mashup of Clubhouse and Instagram Live

Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, has today launched its latest experiment, Hotline, into public beta testing. The web-based application could be described as a mashup of Instagram Live and Clubhouse, as it allows creators to speak to an audience who can then ask questions through

Mexican unicorn Kavak raises a $485M Series D at a $4B valuation

Kavak, the Mexican startup that's disrupted the used car market in Mexico and Argentina, today announced its Series D of $485 million, which now values the company at $4 billion. This round more than triples their previous valuation of $1.15 billion, which established them as a unicorn just a c

Dear Sophie: Help! My H-1B wasn't chosen!

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says

Google I/O will return as a virtual event May 18-20

When the pandemic arrived in the U.S. early last year, companies scrambled to figure out what to do with their long-standing, in-person developer events. For Apple and Microsoft, that meant going virtual — something companies have done with mixed results. For Google, it meant calling off I/O all

Facebook’s tardy disclosure of breach timing raises GDPR compliance questions

The question of whether Facebook will face any regulatory sanction over the latest massive historical platform privacy fail to come to light remains unclear. But the timeline of the incident looks increasingly awkward for the tech giant. While it initially sought to play down the data breach revel

SpaceX launches 60 more Starlink satellites, now at 300 launched in just over one month

SpaceX has launched another batch of Starlink satellites, keeping up its rapid pace of launches for the broadband constellation it’s deploying in low Earth orbit. This now makes 300 Starlink satellites launched since March 4, with 60 on each of five flights between then and now. The most rece

Nuvocargo raises $12M to digitize the freight logistics industry

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of goods flowing across the U.S.-Mexican border each year, the freight industry has remained analog — each side of the border offering up its own maze of bureaucracy. Nuvocargo, a digital logistics platform for cross-border trade, is trying to mo

Black Innovation Alliance, Village Capital team up to support founders of color

"speakable-summary" dir="ltr">Black Innovation Alliance and Village Capital today announced Resource, a national initiative aimed at boosting the efforts of entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) led by, and focused on, founders of color. The motivation behind the project is straightforward. ESOs