The Robinhood competitor landscape intensifies as Invstr raises $20M

"speakable-summary" dir="ltr">One of the biggest gripes about investing apps is that they are not acting responsibly by not educating users properly and allegedly letting them fend for themselves. This can result in people losing a lot of money, as evidenced by the number of lawsuits against Robinho

Oso announces $8.2M Series A to simplify authorization for developers

When we think about getting access to an application, we tend to focus on the authentication side — granting or denying people (or devices) entry. But there is another piece to this, and that’s authorization. This is related to what you can do once you are inside the application, and Os

Pixxel closes $7.3M seed round and unveils commercial hyperspectral imaging product

LA and Bangalore-based space startup Pixxel has closed a $7.3 million seed round, including newly committed capital from Techstars, Omnivore VC and more. The company has also announced a new product focus: hyperspectral imaging. It aims to provide that imaging at the highest resolution commercially

In expanded crackdown, Facebook increases penalties for rule-breaking groups and their members

Facebook this morning announced it will increase the penalties against its rule-breaking Facebook Groups and their members, alongside other changes designed to reduce the visibility of groups’ potentially harmful content. The company says it will now remove civic and political groups from its

France’s privacy watchdog probes Clubhouse after complaint and petition

Clubhouse, the buzzy but still invite-only social audio app that’s popular with the Silicon Valley technorati, is being investigated by France’s privacy watchdog. The CNIL announced today it’s opened an investigation into Clubhouse following a complaint and after it got some initi

Writing helper Copy.ai raises $2.9M in a round led by Craft Ventures

Copy.ai, a startup building AI-powered copywriting tools for business customers, announced a $2.9 million round this morning. The investment was led by Craft Ventures. Other investors took part in the deal, including smaller checks from Li Jin’s newly formed Atelier Ventures and Sequoia. The

The Voter Formation Project puts an experimental spin on reaching Black and brown first-time voters

Victories notwithstanding, the 2020 election blew up many of the assumptions Democrats have long held about the American electorate. In Florida, Arizona and elsewhere, Latino voters broke for Trump in unexpected numbers, upending conventional wisdom that the growing Spanish-speaking population will

Stack Overflow adds a free tier to its fast-growing Teams service

Stack Overflow is the default Q&A site for programmers (though the overall Stack Exchange network goes well beyond helping you answer your basic PHP questions). But over the course of the last year and a half, with its new CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar coming on board, the company has also kicksta

SoftBank-backed Indian insurance platform Policybazaar raises $75 million

Policybazaar has raised $75 million as the Indian online insurance platform looks to expand its presence in UAE and Middle East. Sarbvir Singh, chief executive of Policybazaar, told technewss that the startup had raised $75 million, but didn't elaborate. Falcon Edge Capital led the new tranche

Fintech investor Emmalyn Shaw will share why she led the Steady Series A

Investors often say they don’t just invest in products, but in the right teams to solve a particular problem. With Steady, Adam Roseman built the platform based on his own personal experience. His father hadn’t saved enough for retirement and needed to work part-time. Steady is a platfo

Pinduoduo steals Alibaba’s crown with 788M annual active users

For the first time, Pinduoduo has surpassed Alibaba in annual active users, marking the Chinese e-commerce upstart’s meteoric rise over the course of five years. The milestone also indicates Pinduoduo has overcome the early stereotype that it was an app for users in China’s less-develop

Swell Energy’s new deal in New York shows how the company plans to spend the $450 million it’s raising

Back in December, Swell Energy said it would be raising $450 million to support the development of distributed power projects in three states. Now, with the announcement of a deal between the venture-backed startup and New York City’s utility, ConEd, industry watchers can get a glimpse of wha

Unagi expands e-scooter subscriptions with $10.5M in new funding

Unagi, the startup behind the portable, design-centric electric scooters, is launching its subscription service to six more U.S. cities in an expansion fueled by $10.5 million in funding. The startup, launched in late 2018 by former Beats Music CEO and MOG co-founder David Hyman, said Wednesday it

OctoML raises $28M Series B for its machine learning acceleration platform

OctoML, a Seattle-based startup that offers a machine learning acceleration platform built on top of the open-source Apache TVM compiler framework project, today announced that it has raised a $28 million Series B funding round led by Addition. Previous investors Madrona Venture Group and Amplify P