Amazon goes on the offensive ahead of next week's union vote counting

This week's Amazon public relations push will no doubt go down as one of the odder public-facing strategies in tech. As some of the company's biggest rivals were getting ready to virtually testify on Capitol Hill, the retail giant's CEO of worldwide consumer business appeared to suggest

5 mistakes creators make building new games on Roblox

With Roblox's massive IPO this month, game developers, brands and investors alike are wondering what factors cause the most successful games on this $47 billion platform to break out from the millions of user-generated passion projects. According to Roblox's S-1 filing, nearly 250 developer

Woven Capital kicks off portfolio with investment in autonomous delivery company Nuro

Woven Capital, the investment arm of Toyota’s innovation-focused subsidiary Woven Planet, has announced an investment into Silicon Valley-based autonomous delivery vehicle company Nuro. This kicks off the new $800 million strategic fund, which will invest in growth-stage technology companies

Hub, a productivity platform for technical sales professionals, launches with $1M in funding

Hub, a productivity platform for technical pre-sales, has formally launched with $1 million in seed funding. CEO Freddy Mangum and CTO Karl Gainey founded Hub in 2020. The pair both had experience in technical sales and recognized the challenges of using spreadsheets to manage their business.

UIPath’s meteoric rise from unknown startup to $35B RPA juggernaut

When technewss covered UIPath’s Series A in 2017, it was a small startup out of Romania working in a little known area of enterprise software called robotic process automation (RPA). Then the company took off with increasingly large multibillion dollar valuations. It progressed through its i

Headless commerce startup Swell raises $3.4M

While new headless commerce platforms are emerging all the time, Swell CEO Eric Ingram told me that it remains “really hard to do something new in e-commerce.” Specifically, he told me that most headless platforms (which offer back-end infrastructure separate from the front-end shopping

UiPath’s IPO filing suggests robotic process automation is booming

Robotic process automation platform UiPath added its name to the list of companies pursuing public-market offerings this morning with the release of its S-1 filing. The document details a quickly growing software company with sharply improving profitability performance. The company also flipped fro

Last chance to save on dual-event passes to Early Stage 2021

Procrastinators, last-minute decision makers and overwhelmed entrepreneurs heed this call! Your last chance to save $100 or more and attend both technewss Early Stage 2021 bootcamps expires tonight! You're dedicated to learning the essentials of building a solid early-stage startup, yes? That&

Benitago Group raises $55M in combined debt and equity to buy and grow Amazon brands

Benitago Group, a startup looking to build a big portfolio of Amazon brands, is announcing that it has raised $55 million in new funding — most of it in the form of credit lines to fund acquisitions, plus an equity investment. “We want to take these brands and growth them and run them a lot

What Silicon Valley could learn from China’s Q&A platform Zhihu

China’s largest question and answer platform, Zhihu, began trading in New York at $9.50 per share at the lower end of its IPO range, valuing the company at about $5.3 billion. The aggregate offering size of Zhihu’s IPO and the concurrent private placements is $772.5 million, assuming th

A new Android spyware masquerades as a ‘system update’

Security researchers say a powerful new Android malware masquerading as a critical system update can take complete control of a victim’s device and steal their data. The malware was found bundled in an app called “System Update” that had to be installed outside of Google Play, the

Crypto boom continues as Chainalysis raises $100M, doubles valuation to over $2B

"speakable-summary" dir="ltr">Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company, announced Friday it has closed on $100 million in Series D financing, doubling its valuation to over $2 billion. The round comes just four months after the company secured a $100 million Series C round at a $1 billion valuatio

A first look at UiPath’s IPO filing

This morning, well-known robotic process automation (RPA) unicorn UiPath has filed to go public. The company’s S-1 filing comes after it raised billions of dollars while private, making it amongst the best-funded startups in history. Over the last year, for example, the company’s rapid

No code, workflow and RPA line up for their automation moment

We’ve seen a lot of trend lines moving throughout 2020 and into 2021 around automation, workflow, robotic process automation (RPA) and the movement to low-code and no-code application building. While all of these technologies can work on their own, they are deeply connected and we are startin