Jamaica’s JamCOVID pulled offline after third security lapse exposed travelers’ data

Jamaica’s JamCOVID app and website were taken offline late on Thursday following a third security lapse, which exposed quarantine orders on more than half a million travelers to the island. JamCOVID was set up last year to help the government process travelers arriving on the island. Quaranti

Atlassian is acquiring Chartio to bring data visualization to the platform

The Atlassian platform is chock full of data about how a company operates and communicates. Atlassian launched a machine learning layer, which relies on data on the platform with the addition of Atlassian Smarts last fall. Today the company announced it was acquiring Chartio to add a new data analy

Relativity Space unveils plans for a new, much larger and fully reusable rocket

Relativity Space has just revealed what comes after Terran 1, the small launch vehicle it hopes to begin flying later this year. It’s next rocket will be Terran R, a much larger orbital rocket with around 20x the cargo capacity of Terran 1, that will also be distinguished from its smaller, di

Newness raises $3.5 million for its ‘Twitch for beauty streamers’

Newness, a startup co-founded by former Twitch employees, has raised $3.5 million in a Sequoia-led seed round for its live-streaming platform aimed at beauty creators and their fan communities. Though today’s creators are not without options when it comes to livestreaming — Twitch, YouT

First Boulevard raises $5M for its digital bank aimed at Black America

The murder of George Floyd last May ignited many things in the United States last year — one of which that was perhaps unexpected: a rise in the number of digital banks targeting the Black community. Some members of the Black community took their belief that big banks are not meeting their ne

Has a startup finally found one of food science’s holy grails with its healthy sugar substitute?

A little less than three years ago at the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, California, the founders of a young company hailing from Cambridge, England addressed a crowd of celebrities, investors and entrepreneurs at Y Combinator’s August Demo Day promising a revolution in food scienc

Brandwatch is acquired by Cision for $450M, creating a PR, marketing and social listening giant

Online consumer intelligence and social media listening platform Brandwatch has been acquired by Cision, best known for its media monitoring and media contact database services, for $450 million, in a combined cash and shares deal. technewss understands Brandwatch's key executive team will be

MyHeritage now lets you animate old family photos using deepfakery

AI-enabled synthetic media is being used as a tool for manipulating real emotions and capturing user data by genealogy service MyHeritage, which has just launched a new feature — called “deep nostalgia” — that lets users upload a photo of a person (or several people) to see

How to land startup funding from real estate giant Brookfield, which manages $600 billion in assets

There are big investment firms, and then there are big investment firms. Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based,122-year-old outfit whose current market cap is $63 billion and that oversees $600 billion in assets, clearly falls into the latter camp. Think real estate, infrastructure, renewa

Singapore-based Raena gets $9M Series A for its pivot to skincare and beauty-focused social commerce

"attachment_2118218" aria-describedby="" style="width: 1024px">Raena’s team, from left to right: chief operating officer Guo Xing Lim, chief executive officer Sreejita Deb and chief commercial officer Widelia Liu. Image Credits: Raena Raena was founded in 2019 to create personal care brands wi

Tim Hortons marks two years in China with Tencent investment

Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee and doughnut giant, has raised a new round of funding for its Chinese venture. The investment is led by Sequoia China with participation from Tencent, its digital partner in China, and Eastern Bell Capital. The round comes two years after Tim Hortons made its foray

Bessemer Venture Partners closes on $3.3 billion across two funds

Another VC firm has closed on some significant funding for investments — underscoring both the long-term confidence investors continue to have for backing startups in the tech sector, and the amount of money swimming around in venture at the moment. Bessemer Venture Partners announced Thursda

Newsela, the replacement for textbooks, raises $100M and becomes a unicorn

Newsela, a SaaS platform for K-12 instructional material backed by the likes of TCV, Kleiner Perkins, Reach Capital and Owl Ventures, announced today that it has raised $100 million in a Series D round. The financing was led by new investor Franklin Templeton, and brings Newsela's valuation to

Daily Crunch: Twitter announces ‘Super Follow’ subscriptions

Twitter reveals its move into paid subscriptions, Australia passes its media bargaining law and Coinbase files its S-1. This is your Daily Crunch for February 25, 2021. The big story: Twitter announces ‘Super Follow’ subscriptions Twitter announced its first paid product