Following acquisition, Episerver rebrands as Optimizely

After acquiring Optimizely last fall, content management company Episerver is adopting the Optimizely name for the entire organization. CEO Alex Atzberger told me that the company will be rolling out new branding in the next coming months, as well as renaming its entire product suite to reflect the Optimizely brand. “We believe it’s no longer just about personalizing the experience or driving recommendations,” Atzberger said. “The brand and word Optimizely really signifies optimal performance. C...
Tags: Startups, Enterprise, Advertising Tech, Marketing, Customer Experience, Content Management, Optimizely, Episerver, Alex Atzberger, Atzberger, Episerver Optimizely

Zuckerberg promises Facebook will show less political content from now on

During Facebook‘s quarterly earnings call today, Mark Zuckerberg highlighted some major changes coming to Facebook. After years of being the primary news source for many people, Facebook has decided it wants to show less political content. According to Zuckerberg, “there has been a trend across society that a lot of things have become politicized and politics have had a way of creeping into everything.” He noted “one of the top pieces of feedback” that Facebook is hearing is that “people don’t w...
Tags: Startups, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Social Media, Zuckerberg, Plugged

5 Ways To Get Involved In The Real Estate Industry

The following paths in the real estate industry typically involve a low barrier of entry and can lead you on the path of a fulfilling career. The post 5 Ways To Get Involved In The Real Estate Industry appeared first on Young Upstarts.
Tags: Startups, Real Estate, Career Advice, Others, Real Estate Industry

Scientists say dropping acid can help with social anxiety and alcoholism

What happens when the pandemic finally ends and hundreds of millions of people who’ve spent an inordinate amount of time secluded are suddenly launched back into the rat race? Things will likely never go back to normal, but eventually we’ll find a way to occupy space together again and that could be difficult for people who’ve developed social anxiety or had setbacks in their treatment due to the unique nature of pandemic isolation. We couldn’t find any actual rats to ask how they’re coping with...
Tags: Startups, Insights, Tech

Squarespace files privately to go public

Squarespace announced this afternoon that it is going public. The online website creation and hosting service is a venture-backed entity, having raised Series A and B rounds in 2010 and 2014, respectively. Those deals were worth a combined $78.5 million, according to Crunchbase data. But Squarespace is perhaps best known for its epic 2017-era $200 million secondary round that General Atlantic financed. A secondary round is a transaction in which an external party buys share from existing shareho...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Tech, Atlantic, SEC, Robinhood, IPO market, Coinbase, Squarespace, Securities And Exchange Commission, Doordash, Squarespace Inc

How trading apps are responding to the GameStop fustercluck

The furor surrounding GameStop and its stock price has consumed social media, business television, and the hopes and dreams of many retail investors. It has even convinced some folks that causing short-term economic damage to a few hedge funds is similar to shaking up the global financial market. It isn’t, but a lot of folks are doing some downright risky things with their personal capital all the same. And some of them are making those investments — bets, let’s be honest — on platforms that hav...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Tech, Public, Robinhood, Fintech, Cnbc, Gamestop, Vlad Tenev, Midwest, Barnes, Brian Barnes, AMC Entertainment, Freetrade, M1 Finance

SAP is buying Berlin business process automation startup Signavio

Rumors have been flying this week that SAP was going to buy Berlin business process automation startup Signavio, and sure enough the company made it official today. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the deal could be worth $1.2 billion. With Signavio SAP gets a cloud-native business process management tool. SAP CFO Luka Mucic sees a world where understanding and automating businesses processes has become a key part of a company’s digit...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Cloud, Enterprise, Berlin, Tech, Bloomberg, SaaS, M&a, Mergers and Acquisitions, Sap, Exit, BPA, RPA, Signavio

New MIT brain research shows how AI could help us understand consciousness

A team of researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital recently published a study linking social awareness to individual neuronal activity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time evidence for the ‘theory of mind‘ has been identified at this scale. Measuring large groups of neurons is the bread-and-butter of neurology. Even a simple MRI can highlight specific regions of the brain and give scientists an indication of what they’re used for and, in many cases, what kind of t...
Tags: Startups, Science, Tech, Mit, Artificial Intelligence, Massachusetts General Hospital, Neural

Increase streams to your podcast with this SEO optimized website builder

TLDR: The Podsite Podcast Website Builder builds an entire website around your podcast and even keeps everything automatically updated. So, you’ve decided to follow the Joe Rogan-Marc Maron path and become a podcast tycoon. Great! Welcome aboard. So once you’ve recorded the whole thing, edited it, then posted it to your podcast feed on iTunes or Spotify, you’re all done, right? Not exactly. Just like everything else on the web, a podcast needs a dedicated website. There needs to be a place to sh...
Tags: Startups, Offers, Joe Rogan Marc Maron

What Good Is It To Be Engaged With Your Team If You Can’t Be Productive?

Cynthia Spraggs, author of "How to Work from Home and Actually Get Sh*t Done" shares some tips on how you can remain productive and produce results in this unprecedented time. The post What Good Is It To Be Engaged With Your Team If You Can’t Be Productive? appeared first on Young Upstarts.
Tags: Startups, Company Culture, Remote Work, Workplace Culture, Workplace Productivity, Professionalisms, Cynthia Spraggs

This AI chess engine aims to help human players rather than defeat them

Artificial intelligence has become so good at chess that its only competition now comes from other computer programs. Indeed, a human hasn’t defeated a machine in a chess tournament in 15 years. It’s an impressive technical achievement, but that dominance has also made top-level chess less imaginative, as players now increasingly follow strategies produced by soulless algorithms.  But a new research paper shows that AI could still make the game better for us puny humans. The study authors develo...
Tags: Startups, Insider, Neural

Stilt, a financial services provider for immigrants, raises $100 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank

Stilt founders Priyank Singh and Rohit Mittal Stilt, a provider of financial services for immigrants in the United States, announced today it has raised a $100 million warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank for lending to its customers. This brings Stilt’s total debt facilities so far to $225 million, and will enable it to reach more than $350 million in annualized loan volume. The company also announced the public launch of its no-fee checking accounts, which have been in private beta s...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Tech, Banking, United States, Social Security, Lending, Financial Services, Immigrants, Fintech, Silicon Valley Bank, Mittal, Stilt, Rohit Mittal, Priyank Singh

Check out the amazing speakers joining us on Extra Crunch Live in February

Last year, we hit you with 44(!) episodes of Extra Crunch Live, a series that gives startups and founders direct insights from the experts who know best. We’re making Extra Crunch Live even better in 2021: we’ll take a look at funding deals through the eyes of the founders and investors who made them happen, and those same tech leaders will go through your pitch decks and give feedback and advice. Every single Wednesday at 12pm PT/3pm ET! Today, I’m thrilled to announce the February slate for Ex...
Tags: Startups, TC, Tech, Venture Capital, EC, Accel, Kevin Busque, Lightspeed, Gupta, Matt Harris, Dutt, Loughlin, Justworks, Grafana, Aydin Senkut, Steve Loughlin

Single Handle Every Task

By focusing clearly on your most valuable task and concentrating single-mindedly until it is 100 percent complete, you actually shape and mold your own character, argues Brian Tracy. The post Single Handle Every Task appeared first on Young Upstarts.
Tags: Startups, Personal Productivity, Brian Tracy, Thinking Aloud

Pinecone lands $10M seed for purpose-built machine learning database

Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came out of stealth with a new product and announced a $10 million seed investment led by Wing Venture Capital. Company co-founder Edo Liberty says that he started the company because of this fundamental bel...
Tags: Google, Amazon, Startups, TC, Cloud, Enterprise, Yahoo, Developer, Funding, Israel, Tech, Artificial Intelligence, Liberty, Data Science, Machine Learning, JSON

Gamestop, memestocks, and the revenge of the retail trader

Gamestop shares are set to rally 70% this morning when trading starts, extending a run that has perplexed market observers, irked hedge funds, and generally made crypto’s recent gains appear soft and weak. Being a retail trader is mostly being a sucker, hoping to best the markets while lacking the infrastructure, access, and information that professionals enjoy. Hell, most professional fund managers that regular folks can invest in fail to beat the market. That’s one reason why index funds and o...
Tags: Startups, TC, Twitter, UK, Money, Finance, Economy, United Kingdom, Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, Stock Market, Stock, Hedge Fund, Cnbc, Gamestop, Founder

Buying a second-hand EV? Do these 5 things first

Welcome to SHIFT Basics, a collection of tips, explainers, guides, and advice to keep you up to speed with mobility tech. While owning an electric vehicle is still far from the norm in most of the world, they’ve been around long enough for there to be a decent amount of options now available on the second-hand market.c Buying a used EV isn’t exactly the same as buying a regular used car, and there are some things to be aware of. Assuming you’ve already decided what EV you’re going to buy, here a...
Tags: Startups, Shift, Shift Basics

Literati raises $40M for its book club platform

Literati has raised a $40 million Series B to pursue an unusual startup opportunity — namely, book clubs. Founder and CEO Jessica Ewing (a former product manager at Google) explained that the Austin-based company started out with book clubs for kids, before launching its Luminary brand for adult book clubs last year. And the Luminary clubs live up to the name — they’re curated by notable figures such as activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, NBA star Stephen Curry, entrepreneur and philan...
Tags: Google, Amazon, Startups, TC, Dick Costolo, Austin, Nba, Richard Branson, Malala Yousafzai, Book Club, Oprah, General Catalyst, Curry, Felicis Ventures, Adam Bain, Shasta Ventures

Amnesty International calls for ban on facial recognition

As advocates for facial recognition tout the tech’s potential to track down the US Capitol rioters, a new Amnesty International campaign has provided a timely reminder of the software’s dangers. The NGO has shared a stream of examples of how the software amplifies racist policing and threatens the right to protest — and called for a global ban on the tech. The Ban the Scan campaign was launched on Tuesday in New York City, where facial recognition has been used 22,000 since 2017. Amnesty notes t...
Tags: Startups, New York City, Amnesty International, NGO, US Capitol, Neural

Lynk, a “knowledge-as-a-service” platform with more than 840,000 experts, raises $24 million

Lynk co-founder and chief executive officer Peggy Choi Lynk, a “knowledge-as-a-service” platform that connects clients with over 840,000 experts in a wide range of fields, announced today it has raised $24 million led by Brewer Lane Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund. The company uses machine learning algorithms to match users, who include investment firms, Fortune 100 companies and government entities, with experts on its platform, helping co...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Asia, Hong Kong, London, China, Southeast Asia, San Francisco, Research, Consulting, North America, Silver Lake, Smedvig Capital, Manila, MassMutual Ventures

LottieFiles, a platform for the animation format, lands $9 million Series A led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund

LottieFiles, a platform for JSON-based Lottie animations, has raised a Series A of $9 million. The round was led by M12, Microsoft’s venture capital arm, with participation from returning investor 500 Startups. Based in San Francisco and Kuala Lumpur, LottieFiles was founded in 2018. The platform includes Lottie creation, editing and testing tools, and a marketplace for animations. It now claims about one million users from 65,000 companies, including Airbnb, Google, TikTok, Disney and Netflix, ...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Asia, Design, Microsoft, Southeast Asia, San Francisco, Developers, Netflix, Malaysia, Animation, Airbnb, Lottie, PNG, JSON

Starship Technologies raises $17M to roll out more delivery bots

A year ago, Starship Technologies had a couple hundred autonomous bots delivering burritos and pizzas to  students on college campuses and residents in a few neighborhoods. The company — with $17 million of new capital in its coffers — has expanded its fleet five-fold since COVID-19 swept through the European and North American markets that it operates in. While COVID-19 delivered pain and chaos, including to Starship Technologies, the company has also experienced an uptick in demand as restaura...
Tags: Startups, Transportation, UK, California, Massachusetts, Mountain View, Skype, Ucla, Starship Technologies, Janus Friis, Ahti Heinla, Starship, Bridgewater State University, Milton Keyes, TDK Ventures, COVID

Classiq raises $10.5M Series A round for its quantum software development platform

Classiq, a Tel Aviv-based startup that aims to make it easier for computer scientists and developers to create quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised a $10.5 million Series A round led by Team8 Capital and Wing Capital. Entrée Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd and Sumitomo Corporation (through IN Venture) also participated in this round, which follows the company’s recent $4 million seed round led by Entrée Capital. The idea behind Classiq, which currently ...
Tags: Startups, Science, Microsoft, Funding, Tel Aviv, Tech, Ibm, Computer Science, Science and Technology, Quantum, Team8, Ourcrowd, Emerging-technologies, Quantum Computing, Sumitomo Corporation, Entree Capital

Playvox scores $25M investment and acquires Australian startup Agyle Time

It’s not every day you see a Latin American startup funded by a U.S. venture capital firm based in the midwest. Playvox, a Colombian startup that wants to bring a positive twist to customer service monitoring announced a $25 million investment from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City, MO VC firm. It has now raised $34 million. While it was at it, Playvox also announced something else unusual for an early stage company: an acquisition. The startup bought an Australian company called Agyle Time, a wo...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Cloud, Tech, Customer Service, SaaS, M&a, Argentina, Mergers and Acquisitions, Kansas City, Gorgias, Giraldo, Five Elms Capital, Recent Funding, Agyle Time

Renewable investment wave continues as solar lending company Loanpal raises $800 million

Days after the billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya announced his involvement in the $1.3 billion acquisition of the solar and home improvement lending business Sunlight Financial, a collection of investors announced a nearly $1 billion cash infusion into Loanpal, another renewable energy and home improvement lender. The $800 million commitment to Loanpal arrives alongside a flurry of climate commitments from some of the world’s largest investors. Yesterday, Blackrock chief Larry Fink, rele...
Tags: Energy, Startups, TC, Money, Finance, White House, Renewable Energy, Tesla, Bank Of America, Economy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Private Equity, Solarcity, Blackstone, Officer, Nea

Playvox scores $25M Series A and acquires Australian startup Agyle Time

It’s not every day you see a Latin American startup funded by a U.S. venture capital firm based in the midwest. Playvox, a Colombian startup that wants to bring a positive twist to customer service monitoring announced a $25 million Series A from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City, MO VC firm. It has now raised $34 million. While it was at it, Playvox also announced something else unusual for an early stage company: an acquisition. The startup bought an Australian company called Agyle Time, a work...
Tags: Fundings & Exits, Startups, TC, Cloud, Tech, Customer Service, SaaS, M&a, Argentina, Mergers and Acquisitions, Kansas City, Gorgias, Giraldo, Five Elms Capital, Recent Funding, Agyle Time

The Medium is worth playing, but only if you already have Game Pass

2021 starts off with a little treat for people who enjoy spooky games, as Polish developer Bloober Team is set to release their latest effort, The Medium, later this week. The Medium comes out on the new Xbox consoles and PC. I’ve been playing it for a couple of days and it’s… ok. Bloober Team has been making a name for themselves in the horror genre since they released Layers of Fear back in 2016. Before then, the Polish developer made some smaller titles that didn’t garner a lot of attention, ...
Tags: Startups, Gaming, Bloober Team

Why Microsoft’s self-driving car strategy is quietly brilliant

Self-driving car startup Cruise has received more than $2 billion in a new round of investment from Microsoft, General Motors, Honda, and institutional investors, according to a joint statement by Cruise, its owner GM, and Microsoft on Tuesday. The investment will bring the valuation of Cruise to $30 billion and make Microsoft an official partner. Per Tuesday’s announcement: “To unlock the potential of cloud computing for self-driving vehicles, Cruise will leverage Azure, Microsoft’s cloud and e...
Tags: Startups, Microsoft, Cruise, Gm, Shift, Azure Microsoft, Microsoft General Motors Honda

Digital trends 2021: Every single stat marketers need to know

If you’re looking for the latest digital insights and social media stats, you’ll find them all in our new Digital 2021 reports series. Published in partnership between We Are Social and Hootsuite, this year’s reports reveal that connected tech became an even more essential part of people’s lives over the past year, with social media, ecommerce, streaming content, and video games all seeing significant growth in the past 12 months. Some of the key themes to look for in this year’s reports include...
Tags: Startups, Hootsuite, Podium, Growth Quarters

Prime Movers Lab raises $245 million for second fund to invest in early stage science startups

After revealing its first fund just last year, a $100 million pool of investment capital dedicated to early stage startups focusing on sustainable food development, clean energy, health innovation and new space technologies, Prime Movers Lab is back with a second fund. Prime Movers Lab Fund II is larger, with $245 million committed, but it will pursue the same investment strategy, albeit with a plan to place more bets on more companies, with an expanded investment team to help manage the funds a...
Tags: Startups, TC, Money, California, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Stanford, Funding, Oil, Articles, Neuroscience, Tech, Ceo, International Space Station, Venture Capital, Clean Energy