Assembled, an operating system for support teams, raises $16.6M

From the point of view of a consumer, customer service sometimes feels like a monolith, but behind the scenes it can be a very fragmented business, with dozens of companies providing various different tools to help agents do their jobs. Today, a startup founded by three Stripe alums that has set ou

How ByteDance plans to crack the gaming industry

For the last few years, ByteDance, the parent company of short video app TikTok, has been working to diversify its revenue streams beyond advertisement and find more ways to monetize its hundreds of millions of users. One area it is targeting is gaming, which has historically been a lucrative busin

Luminar, Volvo subsidiary partner to sell automated driving systems to automakers

Luminar Technologies has deepened ties with Volvo Cars to develop and eventually sell an automated driving system for highways to other automakers. The partnership, announced Thursday, is between Luminar and Volvo’s self-driving software subsidiary Zenseact. The two companies are combining th

Legl gets $7M to help law firms upgrade to digital workflows

B2B SaaS startup Legl has bagged $7M in Series A funding led by Octopus Ventures for its platform for law firms which offers tools to streamline core business processes such as customer onboarding, due diligence and payments. Existing investors Backed, Samaipata and First Round Capital, and angels

Daily Crunch: NFT artwork sells for $69M

The artist Beeple scores a huge NFT sale, Twitter Spaces are coming soon and Seth Rogen’s weed startup launches in the U.S. This is your Daily Crunch for March 11, 2021. The big story: NFT artwork sells for $69M For the first time, auction house Christie sold a digital-only ar

Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading

Another day brings another public debut of a multibillion-dollar company that performed well out of the gate. This time it’s Coupang, whose shares are currently up just over 46% to more than $51 after pricing at $35, $1 above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Raising

GM partners with startup SolidEnergy Systems to pack more energy in its batteries

GM’s venture arm invested in battery startup SolidEnergy Systems five years ago. Now, GM is tapping the MIT spinout to help it pack more energy into its batteries, the latest in a string of moves by the automaker aimed at accelerating its shift to electric vehicles. GM president Mark Reuss, w

Beeple’s $69 million NFT sale marks a potentially transformative moment for the art world

Today, the auction of an NFT digital art collage from a relatively unrecognized digital artist ended with a purchase price above $69 million. The work, called “Everydays — The First 5000 Days,” chronicled several years’ worth of daily sketches from the artist Mike Winkelmann 

Does your VC have an investment thesis or a hypothesis?

Venture capitalists love to talk investment theses: on Twitter, Medium, Clubhouse, at conferences. And yet, when you take a closer look, theses are often meaningless and/or misleading. OpenVC is a new, open-source initiative to collect and analyze all publicly available VC theses to help founders m

Regenerative agriculture is the next great ally in fight against climate change

It seems that every week a new agribusiness, consumer packaged goods company, bank, technology corporation, celebrity or Facebook friend announces support for regenerative agriculture. For those of us who have been working on climate and/or agriculture solutions for the last couple of decades, this

The 2021 Volkswagen ID. 4 ticks all the boxes, except one

Volkswagen, once a dabbler in electric vehicles, is now betting its future on the technology. And the new Volkswagen ID.4 — a five-passenger, fully electric crossover with a starting price of $33,995 (before federal or state incentives) — is its first global effort to make EVs a mainstream prod

Sequoia Capital puts millions of dollars into Gather, a virtual HQ platform

Gather helps people, well, gather in virtual spaces for any reason, whether it be for weddings, magic conventions, or, just a regular day at work. Over the past few months, as remote workers look for better ways to interact with each other, the startup has quietly amassed more than 4 million users,

Sports trading card platform Alt launches with $31 million in funding and plenty of market hype

The alternative asset market showed promise pre-pandemic but amid a broader rally among traditional asset classes, the number of investors searching for and promoting value in the space has exploded. That has, in turn, promoted a pretty major influx of VC dollars into startups building platforms th

Pakistan bans TikTok again over ‘immoral and objectionable’ videos

Pakistan has banned TikTok again in the country after reviewing a complaint that said the popular video app hosted immoral and objectionable content. A high court in the city of Peshawar on Thursday ordered the nation's telecom authority — Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) — to ban T