startups News of 10/23/19

LabGenius Raises $10m To Use AI For Protein Drug Discovery

LabGenius , a London-based startup applying AI and “robotic automation” to protein drug discovery, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures, with participation from Felicis ...

Drift CEO Shares Insights From 20+ Years Of Startup Experience

Why do serial entrepreneurs keep jumping back in? What things might you learn the third, fourth, or fifth time around? To find out, Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon spoke to Drift CEO and founder David Cancel at TechCrunch Disrupt San ...

Venture Capital Firm Redpoint Hires A ‘Head Of Founder Experience’

As access to top deals becomes more competitive, venture capital firms are creating new roles to attract top entrepreneurs. Now, in addition to recruiting top dealmakers, firms are bringing in culture experts and allocating roles to individuals who ...

Electric Vehicle Charging Software EV Connect Raises $12 Million

EV Connect , the Los Angeles-based company that sells software to manage electric vehicle charging, has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by investors Mitsui & Co. and Ecosystem Integrity Fund. The company has raised $25 million to ...

Databricks Announces $400m Round On $6.2b Valuation As Analytics Platform Continues To Grow

Databricks is a SaaS business built on top of a bunch of open source tools, and apparently it’s been going pretty well on the business side of things. In fact, the company claims to be one of the fastest growing enterprise cloud companies ...

Squarespace Acquires Social Media Authoring Startup Unfold

Over the past year or two, Squarespace has been expanding beyond website-building with new products like email marketing and its first acquisition  (of an online scheduling tool) . Today, it’s announcing a move into social media content ...

Medium Says It Will Compensate Writers Based On Reading Time, Not Claps

Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content , and the revenue gets split with writers. The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based ...

Figma’S Community Lets Designers Share And Remix Live Files

As designers grow both in sheer numbers and within the hierarchy of organizations, design tool makers are adapting to their evolving needs in different ways. Figma, the web-based collaborative design tool, is taking a note from the engineering ...

Early Stage Privacy Startup DataGrail Gets Boost From Okta Partnership

When Okta launched its $50 million Okta Ventures investment fund in April, one of its investments was in an early stage privacy startup called DataGrail . Today, the companies announced a partnership that they hope will help boost DataGrail, ...

Aurora Insight Emerges From Stealth With $18m And A New Take On Measuring Wireless Spectrum

Aurora Insight , a startup that provides a “dynamic” global map of wireless connectivity that it built and monitors in real time using AI combined with data from sensors on satellites, vehicles, buildings, aircraft and other objects, is ...

Justin Drake From The Ethereum Foundation Is Coming To Disrupt Berlin

The Ethereum community is hard at work on Ethereum 2.0 , the next major upgrade of its blockchain. It is an incredibly challenging task, and the Ethereum Foundation has been completely transparent about its roadmap and progress. That’s why I’m ...

Todoist Releases Major Update To Simplify Task Management

Bootstrapped tech company Doist , the company behind popular task management Todoist , is releasing a major update called Todoist Foundations — the update should be rolled out over the next 24 hours. As the name suggests, it lays foundations for ...

Don’T Miss The Q&A Sessions At Disrupt Berlin 2019

The early-stage startup community knows that the Disrupt Main Stage is the place to hear and learn from iconic founders, technologists and investment leaders. And the speakers you’ll hear at  Disrupt Berlin 2019  on 11-12 December will follow that ...

supermercato24 Acquires Szopi, An On-Demand Grocery Delivery Service In Poland

Supermercato24 , the Italian same-day grocery delivery service, has acquired Szopi.pl, an on-demand grocery delivery service in Poland. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it is a mixture of cash and stock. Szopi had raised ...

Lilium Releases New Flight Footage And Details Factory Plans For 2025 Launch

Lilium , the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has released its latest flight video — this time demonstrating a successful transition from vertical flight (liftoff) to horizontal flight. The company is also ...

Signal AI Taps $25m For Public Data-Based Market Intelligence That Spots Trends And Risks

Media monitoring — where news sources and other public information outlets are scanned regularly for mentions of specific organizations — is a well established service used by companies for market intelligence and to measure sentiment ...

Luge Capital Raises $85m To Invest In Canadian Fintech Startups

There are 831 financial technology startups headquartered in or operating in Canada, according to data collected by Fintech Growth Syndicate, yet only a handful of venture capital funds specializing in the region and sector. Luge Capital , a ...

Former Stitch Fix COO Julie Bornstein Is Rewriting The E-Commerce Playbook

More than two years after Julie Bornstein– Stitch Fix’s former chief operating officer– mysteriously left the subscription-based personal styling service only months before its initial public offering, she’s taking the wraps off her ...

Report: SoftBank Is Taking Control Of WeWork At An ~$8b Valuation

WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, will be worth as little as $7.5 billion on paper as SoftBank takes control of the struggling co-working business, CNBC reports . SoftBank, a long-time WeWork investor, plans to invest between $4 billion and $5 ...

Is There Room For A U.S. Equivalent To China’S #1 News App?

In China, Toutiao is literally big news. Not only has its parent company ByteDance achieved a $75 billion valuation, two of its apps — Toutiao, a news aggregator, and Douyin (Tik Tok in China) — are chipping into WeChat’s user engagement ...