uBeam Banks $10M For Ultrasound Wireless Power, Adds Mature COO And CFO
uBeam’s getting ready to ship its wireless phone chargers, so its 26-year old CEO Meredith Perry has hired some hardware industry veterans to whip the business into shape. Former Apple and Palm finance leader Monica Hushen will be Ubeam‘s new CFO, and Cisco, Palm, and Nokia VP Jeff Devine is joining as COO. The firepower for the hires comes from a new raise. In April I reported… Read MoreTriplebyte, The Technical Recruiting Platform From Former YC Partner Harj Taggar, Raises $3M
Triplebyte, a technical recruiting platform started by former YC partner Harj Taggar and two SocialCam alums Ammon Bartram and Guillaume Luccisano, just raised $3 million from a long list of investors in the YC family. Those backers include Initialized Capital (a fund originally started by Taggar, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian), Ray Tonsing’s Caffeinated Capital, SV… Read MoreGetaround’s Revenue Has Doubled To “Tens Of Millions” In The Last Six Months
Getaround, the peer-to-peer car rental startup that launched on the Disrupt NY stage in 2011, recently hit revenues in the tens of millions of dollars, Jessica Scorpio told TechCrunch. And in the last six months, Getaround’s revenue has doubled. What’s helping drive this growth, Scorpio said, is the fact that Getaround is adding six times the number of new cars per week… Read MoreFloored Launches Protofit, A Space Layout Service That Makes Test Fits Suck Less
Floored launched two and half years ago at Disrupt NY 2013 as a great way to generate 3D models for real estate purposes. Now, it is tackling another aspect of the real estate industry — test fits. Read MorePitch Your Startup In TC Radio Pitch-Off On Sirius XM
Pitching your startup, with all its nuance and potential, can be a difficult task. So, as lovers of the new new entrepreneur, John and I have decided to make it more difficult. Enter, the TC Radio Pitch-Off. Each week, John and I go live from the Sirius XM Studios on Insight 121 to discuss the latest in tech news. And then we head straight into our TC Radio Pitch-Off, where five… Read MoreAsana Picks Up Google Exec Chris Farinacci To Run Its Business Ops
Asana, a company that provides tools to help teams collaborate, has hired Chris Farinacci, now formerly of Google, to run its business operations. At Google, Farinacci worked for nearly a half decade on the Google for Work team. That stint came after time in marketing at Oracle, and Agile Software for the technology worker. Given that pedigree, it isn’t hard to see why Asana would… Read MoreWalker & Company Brands Raises $24M Series B, Inks Bevel Deal With Target
Building a lifestyle brand is nothing like building, say, an app. Higher degree of difficulty for sure. That’s not stopping Tristan Walker, though. Today, his company Walker & Company Brands has announced a $24 million Series B round of funding. That brings its total funding to $33.3 million. The company is known for its health and beauty products for people of color, including… Read MoreOmetria Raises Further $2.5M To Let Online Retailers Automate Marketing Campaigns
Ometria launched in 2013 with a mission to help online retailers make better use of data, and, in turn, compete harder with the likes of Amazon and more data-driven players in the market. But more data insights alone don’t equate to more effective marketing if you don’t take the appropriate action on a per-customer basis. That proved a stumbling block for some of… Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
How We Bootstrapped A SaaS Company To 4 Million Users — And Why Google Owes Us €400,000
At 7 PM on February 7, 2007, MindMeister went live in private beta. Today, we have almost 4 million users worldwide, and have become the market leader in online mind mapping. It’s a story we haven’t told often (too busy working, I guess), but we think it has a few valuable lessons for SaaS founders, especially the ones interested in bootstrapping a profitable business. Read More
Coding In The Cloud Era Demands A Structural Rethink To Bake In Security And Privacy
Protecting privacy in an age of big data, cloud processing and increasingly interconnected digital services demands a structural shift in how software is developed. Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
Augmented Reality Has An Image Problem
To date, Augmented Reality has been referred to as “the biggest technological advancement of our lifetime,” a mere “gimmick” or, worst yet, the next iteration of the QR code. The divisive term was introduced more than 25 years ago, but if there’s one thing AR proponents and its naysayers can agree on, it’s the simple fact that AR, as we know it today, has… Read More Turntable.fm Clone Plug.dj May Shut Down By The End Of The Month
Remember the hotness that was Turntable.fm? It was a one of my favorite apps of a few years ago (2011 to be specific), since it was social and focused on music. For those who aren’t familiar with it, you’d have a little avatar that entered themed rooms where you could chat and you’d take turns being the DJ…playing your favorite music. Unfortunately, it shut down… Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
A Closer Look At European Investing
We’re bullish on Europe, and that strikes some folks in the U.S. as a bit strange. It’s not that Europe is all we know — we’re an investor in early venture stage funds (an “LP”) in the US, Europe and Israel. Our portfolio skews towards the U.S.; and within the U.S., to the Bay Area. Over the last 18 months or so, we’ve been crossing and re-crossing… Read More Lyft Moves Customer Support Team To Nashville To Combat High-Priced SF Market
Peer-to-peer ride-sharing startup Lyft informed 20 members of its San Francisco-based customer support team this week it will be relocating them to Nashville, Tennessee. Lyft is building out its new customer service headquarters in Nashville, where overhead such as rent and salaries are cheaper. It will also help Lyft’s east coast support. The ride-sharing startup is asking customer… Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
It’s Time To Embrace, Not Fear, Shadow IT
At this very moment, the IT department at a typical enterprise is staring at a mind-numbing list of IT project requests from employees and business units — ranging from building a custom mobile app for warehouse operations to integrating Salesforce.com with back-end office systems. To manage this endless to-do list, the IT department logically arranges requests by how significantly… Read More - CRUNCH NETWORK
The Worst Possible Name For Your Brand And Three Things You Can Learn From It
Let’s say you want to come up with a great brand name for a new beverage brand you’re launching. You know what consumers are looking for, and you’re the creative type. What’s the biggest naming mistake you could make? How about a name like “Sweat” or “Pschitt?” Or something difficult to spell and pronounce? Those missteps would certainly be… Read More Oakland To Tech: Please Don’t Screw This Up Like Last Time
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with Darrell Jones III, who heads up business development at Clef, at the southern restaurant Pican a few blocks away from the Oakland building that 3,000 Uber workers are slated to move into by 2017. Jones, who is half-black and half-Filipino and grew up partly on the North Side of Chicago, makes a point of being a patron at mostly black-owned businesses in… Read MoreMeet Jukin Media, The Company That Now Owns Pizza Rat
PizzaRat, the lovable scampering rodent that took the Internet by storm last week, now has representation in Hollywood. An entertainment company called Jukin Media bought the rights to the 15-second video that reached over 5 million views on YouTube, a move that surprised many of the rat’s fans who retweeted gifs of the rodent in action. The guy who recorded PizzaRat, comedian Matt… Read MoreAmino Raises $6.5M To Build Mobile Communities
Amino, a startup that’s built 41 different mobile community apps (so far), is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding. I first wrote about the company a little more than a year ago, when it raised a $1.65 million seed round. Co-founder and CEO Ben Anderson told me that the idea was to reinvent the traditional online forum with a smartphone-optimized experience… Read More- CRUNCH NETWORK
The Magic Numbers For Startup Health
In this new age of so-called tech “unicorns” and their eye-popping valuations, it’s important to remember that not all revenue is created equal. Indeed, recent volatility in the stock market has lots of industry watchers cautioning startups to concern themselves less with achieving unicorn status and more on building customer and employee satisfaction. Read More
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