Espresa wants to help companies pamper their employees
The range of benefits that Silicon Valley companies offer employees may vary from dental, vision and 401(k) all the way to yoga massages, car washes and beauty services. With tech giants like Facebook and Google making a big deal about the benefits they offer, delivering and managing perks is a key part of any company’s strategy to attract talent now — and this is… Read MoreDexter, the betaworks-backed platform for building bots, raises $2.3 million in seed
Dexter, the betaworks-backed company that helps people build integration-based apps, has today announced the close of a $2.3 million seed round. The funding round was led by Rakuten Ventures, with participation from Social Starts and betaworks. Dexter lets developers build integration-based apps without all the messy work of building the actual infrastructure. Using plug-and-play blocks… Read MoreWhyd announces its voice-controlled connected speaker for $299
French startup Whyd started off as a social network for music lovers but recently announced that it would switch its focus for a hardware project. The company just unveiled this secret hardware project — it’s a high-fidelity connected speaker that combines voice recognition with all music streaming services out there. The company isn’t doing a Kickstarter. Instead, Whyd… Read MoreJohn Maeda leaves KPCB, joins Automattic as design head
John Maeda is leaving VC firm KPCB where he was a design partner to join Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and a bunch of other things. Maeda will have a long, elaborate title at Automattic — he’s the company’s new Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion. Before KPCB, Maeda was a research faculty member at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s. “I wanted to… Read MoreMapbox is acquiring passive fitness tracking app Human
Human’s team will join Mapbox and work on Mapbox’s mobile SDK and real-time maps. I’ve covered Human quite a few times over the years. It’s a well-designed fitness app that was ahead of the current trends in fitness tracking. Human turned the simple habit of moving around the city into human-readable data for yourself and your friends. Over time, Human started using… Read MoreUber acquires Otto to lead Uber’s self-driving car effort
Uber is making yet another big push in the self-driving car space. In addition to launching self-driving rides in Pittsburgh with the help of Volvo, the company is acquiring Otto and its all-star team according to a new report from Bloomberg. Otto has been focusing on self-driving technology that could be fitted into trucks that are already on the road now. In other words, Otto didn’t… Read More
NextHealth raises $8.5M from Norwest to drive down medical costs
One of the few remaining universal truths is that healthcare costs are too high. Insurance companies are bucking under the pressure from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and they are willing to try almost anything if it means reducing costs. With a shiny $8.5 million Series A from Norwest Venture Partners, NextHealth will be making that exact promise of reducing healthcare costs to U.S. Read MoreCoursera’s co-founder Daphne Koller set to start anew at Calico
In a blog post, Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller announced she is leaving the company to join Alphabet subsidiary Calico. Koller founded Coursera with Andrew Ng back in 2012 after working together on artificial intelligence research at Stanford. The two supported the company’s growth until Ng left to become chief scientist at Baidu’s research arm. Today Coursera has grown… Read MoreSocial investing site Instavest raises $1.7M in seed funding
Part of YC’s Winter 2015 class, Instavest is a startup trying to turn investing — an activity most of us are used to doing privately — into a social activity. The site launched about a year and a half ago with the goal of helping average retail investors learn from others who have more experience in investing and the stock market. Today the startup announced they closed a… Read MoreBlockai’s new tool combines tweeting and claiming copyright
Blockai is supposed to help photographers and artists defend their intellectual property. Now it’s launching a new feature to make that process easier — or at least better-integrated with Twitter. Previously, Blockai users would go to the startup’s website to upload their work, creating a record in a public database (namely, the blockchain) stating that they’re the… Read MoreNetlify, a service for quickly rolling out static websites, raises $2.1M
Mathias Biilmann — a former CTO of a firm that built websites for small businesses — says developers have gotten so used to using Github as a central workflow, they expect the entire rest of the developer experience to work the same way. “The way that a front-end developer would work would be to go into a server and change how things were structured, but then Git came in… Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
Why startups need a defensive IP strategy
One of the things I really love about working with startup founders is that they are by nature an optimistic crowd: They set out to build amazing things, change the world and fundamentally shift the way people view things. What they often don’t realize, though, is that in the midst of brutal competition, the path to scale and success is often lined with unexpected co-travelers and events. Read More ZeroCater raises $4.1 million to keep office workers well-fed in the U.S.
While it seems like a new food delivery business launches or gets funded every season in the U.S., several have scaled back, like Sprig, or shut down entirely like Spoonrocket. Among those that have survived, however, are smart sites and apps serving the office-catering corner of the industry, a $20 billion market in the U.S. alone according to research from Technomic. Now, one of the… Read MoreWheelys raises $350K from the crowd to bring coffee-bikes to the world
Wheelys Café just raised a large chunk of equity funding on Swedish crowdfunding platform FundedByMe to expand to more countries and pour gas on its already explosive growth around the world. The young company has had an illustrious history already, with a stint in Y Combinator, a successful Indiegogo campaign and now a vastly overfunded equity crowdfunding campaign. Read MoreCasper makes dog beds now
110 protoypes, 460 hours of lab testing and 11 months of sleep studies later, Casper is ready to starting shipping out dog beds. The mail order mattress startup that is almost single-handedly propping up the world’s podcasters now offers its service to canine companions for $125 a pop. The Casper Dog Mattress model is remarkably similar to the company’s human offering, with… Read MoreWomen 2.0 has new leadership, and is launching a tech recruiting service
Women 2.0, a for-profit for-good media business that works to bring women into the tech industry and help them succeed there, has appointed Kate Brodock as President and Elisa Miller-Out as COO, according to founder Shaherose Charania. Charania will maintain a board seat, she said. The changing of the guard comes for Women 2.0 after a phase of scaling back. Founded in April 2006… Read More
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