How to kick the 10 worst startup habits with Fuel Capital’s Leah Solivan

Fuel Capital General Partner Leah Solivan joined us at technewss Early Stage 2021 to talk about how to avoid early mistakes in building your startup. Solivan has ample experience on both sides of the fence, as she founded TaskRabbit and led it to exit through an acquisition by Ikea in 2017. She sh

As competition heats up, TikTok announces six new interactive music effects for creators

TikTok today is doubling down on its roots as a music-backed creation app with the launch of a half dozen new music effects for creators. The effects, which offer interactivity, visualizations, animations and more, will roll out over the next few weeks, starting with the launch of Music Visualizer.

Streamlit nabs $35M Series B to expand machine learning platform

As a company founded by data scientists, Streamlit may be in a unique position to develop tooling to help companies build machine learning applications. For starters, it developed an open-source project, but today the startup announced an expanded beta of a new commercial offering and $35 million i

Snorkel AI scores $35M Series B to automate data labeling in machine learning

One of the more tedious aspects of machine learning is providing a set of labels to teach the machine learning model what it needs to know. Snorkel AI wants to make it easier for subject matter experts to apply those labels programmatically, and today the startup announced a $35 million Series B. I

Highlights from Berkeley SkyDeck's virtual demo day

With 17 startups participating, Berkeley SkyDeck's Demo Day isn't the largest cohort we've seen by any stretch. The collection of companies is, however, defined by a wide range of focuses, from pioneering diabetes treatments to retrofitting autonomous trucking, curated by the SkyDeck

CaptivateIQ raises $46M for its no-code sales commissions platform

CaptivateIQ, which has developed a no-code platform to help companies design customized sales commission plans, has raised $46 million in a Series B round led by Accel. Existing backers Amity, S28 Capital, Sequoia and Y Combinator also participated in the financing, which brings the San Francisco-b

Authentic Artists is building virtual, AI-powered musicians

Chris McGarry, who previously led music integration at Facebook’s Oculus, is taking a new approach to bringing music into the virtual world with his startup Authentic Artists. McGarry pointed to virtual celebrities like Lil Miquela and virtual concerts like Travis Scott’s giant event in

Pathlight, a performance management tool for customer-facing teams and the individuals in them, raises $25M

The longer we continue to work with either all or part of our teams in remote, out-of-physical-office environments, the more imperative it becomes for those teams to have some tools in place to keep the channels of communication and management open, and for the individuals in those teams to have a

Polestar ‘will have to question everything’ in order to build the first climate-neutral EV

Polestar, the Swedish electric vehicle brand spun out of Volvo Car Group, set on Wednesday a “moonshot goal” of creating the first climate-neutral car by 2030. But instead of getting there through more widely practiced offsetting measures, such as planting trees, the company said it's going

Apple shares more details about its imminent App Tracking Transparency feature

Apple is sharing more details today about its upcoming App Tracking Transparency feature, which will allow users to control, on an app-by-app level, whether their data is shared for ad-targeting purposes. In a sense, anyone using the current version of iOS can see App Tracking Transparency in actio

Acorns' new fintech target is debt management with acquisition of Pillar

Popular saving and investing app Acorns has acquired Pillar, an AI-powered startup built to help manage student loan debt, in its second acquisition of 2021. New York-based Pillar helps consumers optimize their debt payments by focusing first on student loans. It launched in May 2019 with $5.5 mill

Singapore-based retail analytics company Trax raises $640M Series E led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and BlackRock

"attachment_2134917" aria-describedby="" style="width: 1024px">Trax’s co-founders, Joel Bar-El (left) and Dror Feldheim (right), and Trax’s CEO, Justin Behar (center). Image Credits: Trax COVID-19 forced many retailers and brands to adopt new technologies. Retail analytics unicorn Trax e

Accel’s Dan Levine and Scale’s Alexandr Wang will chat about how to create a category on Extra Crunch Live

Alexandr Wang has spent the last five years looking to accelerate the development of AI and machine learning algorithms with Scale AI. The company has raised upward of $270 million since inception and doesn’t show any signs of slowing. That’s why we’re thrilled to hang out with Wa

Avant doubles down on digital banking with Zero Financial acquisition

Avant, an online lender that has raised over $600 million in equity, announced today that it has acquired Zero Financial and its neobank brand, Level, to further its mission of becoming a digital bank for the masses. Founded in 2012, Chicago-based Avant started out primarily as an online lender tar