The Latest
Twitter now lets you pin up to 6 DM conversations
Twitter is slowly continuing to enhance its direct messaging interface amid a tidal wave of product updates over the last year. The company announced today that it will now enable users to pin six ...
Super Bowl ads boosted crypto app downloads by 279%, led by Coinbase
Those Super Bowl ad spots paid off for a number of tech companies not just in terms of exposure, but also app installs, a new report indicates. But Coinbase’s viral ad — which just boun...
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Vertical integration
No South by Southwest for me this year. No drinking weird promotional energy drinks while watchin...
Spotify must be more transparent about its rules of the road
Companies once believed they could rely on algorithms to catch inappropriate content and intervene with public relations in high-profile cases. Today, the challenges are bigger and more complicated...
One day soon, a robot will make you a salad
Hyphen grabbed a quick mention in my newsletter (it’s good, you should susbscribe) when it came out of stealth, back in August. Automated food prep is going to be a big thing, going forward. ...
Peloton adds gaming-inspired ‘Lanebreak,’ which looks like ‘Beatsaber’ on a bike
Why stop at just gamifying fitness with a leaderboard? Peloton is literally adding games to its repertoire today as it launches Lanebreak, which the company calls its “first gaming-inspired e...
Unit’s Itai Damti explains how the company fundraises using culture and value
Unit CEO and co-founder Itai Damti broke down the company’s pitch deck with investor Emmalyn Shaw.
Elon Musk accuses SEC of conducting a ‘harassment campaign’
If you thought Elon Musk was upset about frequent attention from the SEC… you guessed correctly. Musk and Tesla have written to a court accusing the SEC of conducting a “harassment camp...
Actual, which renders company ESG data in a SimCity-like platform, raises $5M Seed
Trying to deal with the huge amount of data associated with how companies are going to transition to a ‘net zero’ economy is an uphill task. The interface of numbers would tax even the geekiest of ...
Metriport helps you take your quantified self to the next increment
Along comes Metriport, which aggregates all of your quantified-self data in one place, and adds clever features like mood tracking, medicine tracking and journaling. All your data lives locally on ...
Voltron Data grabs $110M to build startup based on Apache Arrow project
Voltron Data was launched last year by former employees from NVidia, Ursa Computing, BlazingSQL and the co-founder of Apache Arrow. The group came together to build a company on top of Arrow to hel...
Where we’ll be next
Backed by Accel, Minoan Experience is creating a new category of e-commerce called ‘native retail’
Imagine staying at an Airbnb and becoming so attached to a particular chair or tea set that you want to buy it. Instead of asking the property owner where it’s from and tracking it down, Minoan Exp...
Beem, an app that lets you livestream yourself in AR, raises $4 million
What’s the next step beyond Zoom calls and FaceTime? How about beaming yourself from one device to another in real time using augmented reality? That’s the premise behind a startup call...
Ford, Volvo join Redwood Materials to launch free EV battery recycling program in California
Redwood Materials, the startup founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, is launching an electric vehicle battery recycling program in California with Ford and Volvo as inaugural partners as pressur...
TechCrunch
Why you shouldn’t ignore Europe’s deep tech boom
We’re curious if Europe can form a third, independent center or group of hubs for deep tech inves...
Snapchat will let you change your username starting February 23
Snapchat users will be able to change their usernames later this month, the company announced on Thursday. The username change won’t impact aspects of users’ accounts, such as their fri...
Via competitor RideCo raises $16M to expand on-demand transit software
RideCo, a Canadian company offering cities on-demand transit tech, closed a $15.8 million (CAD $20 million) Series A round. The fresh capital will be put toward further development of its product, ...
Remote hiring startup Deel’s new feature gives businesses the option to fund payroll in crypto
In 2019, Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang founded Deel, a startup that aims to help companies compliantly hire and pay talent remotely all around the world. The pair’s mission was earnest and their visio...
Coast lands $27.5M from VC firms, slew of founders to provide expense management to fleet operators
Coast, which aims to help companies control fuel and fleet spending with its expense management software, has raised $27.5 million in a Series A financing co-led by Accel and Insight Partners. The...
Circle to double in value to $9 billion with revamped SPAC deal
Cryptocurrency company Circle has announced that it has terminated its previous agreement with Concord Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded blank-check company — a SPAC. At the same time, it has re...
