Revolut lets you purchase gold

Fintech startup Revolut has introduced a new trading feature for premium users. Starting today, Premium and Metal users can access gold exposure from the app.

Revolut works with a gold services partner (London Bullion Market Association) so that money you spend on gold exposure is backed by real gold held by this partner. In other words, you’re n

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Superpeer raises $2M to help influencers and experts make money with one-on-one video calls

Superpeer is giving YouTube creators and other experts a new way to make money.

The startup announced today that it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from angel investors including Steven Schlafman, Ankur Nagpal, Julia Lipton, Patrick Finnegan, Justin De Guzman, Chris Lu, Paul Yacoubian and Cheryl

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Monograph, developer of project and cost management software for architects, raises $1.9 million

Monograph, a startup working on cloud-based software that makes project and cost management easier for architects, announced today that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding. The round was led by Homebrew Ventures and Parade Ventures, with participation from Designer Fund, Hustle Fund VC and angel investors.

The San Francisco-based startup was

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The 7 deadly sins of startups

Pride. Greed. Lust. Env

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Blockchain (the company) lets you borrow USD PAX against collateral

What do you do when you’re rich in cryptocurrencies but you don’t want to sell your positions? The company named Blockchain thinks it has found a solution. It lets you borrow money against cryptocurrencies held in your Blockchain wallet.

As soon as you lock cryptocurrencies in your wallet, you receive USD PAX, a stablecoin that is pegged against

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Augmented reality technology did not, it turns out, light the touch paper on a booming new industry. What we got instead were a few cute applications on smartphones and devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens, which has seen pretty limited success.

Where AR has proved that it may have a future is in industry, allowing workers to look at plans whilst

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YC-backed Giveaway is a peer-to-peer marketplace that uses virtual currency

YC-backed Giveaway lets folks give away their unused or unnecessary items in a marketplace. Unlike other buy and sell or donation platforms, Giveaway uses a virtual currency on the platform to reward people for listing their products for free on the app.

Users earn Karma coins each time they list an item on the website. Folks can then use that

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Alma is a Klarna-like payment startup that lets you buy now and pay later

Meet Alma, a French startup that helps you offer a new payment option for your expensive goods. Like Klarna, clients can choose to pay over three or four installments. But the comparison stops here, as Klarna isn’t available in France. Alma just raised a $14.1 million (€12.5 million) funding round.

Idinvest, ISAI and Picus Capital are investing

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Insurance AI startup Synthesized raises $2.8M from IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures

The insurance industry depends on data to support a number of functions the average person in the street is usually completely unaware of, such as “informed risk selection,” underwriting and claims management. Like many industries, it would like to automate much of this, but it’s just not that simple.

Synthesized is a U.K. startup that tries to

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Amazon and others have raised awareness of how the in-store shopping experience can be sped up (and into the future) using computer vision to let a person pay for and take away items without ever interacting with a cashier, human or otherwise. Today, a startup is announcing funding for its own take on how to use AI-based video detection get more

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“Smart” cameras are to be found in millions of homes, but the truth is they’re not all that smart. Facial recognition and motion detection are their main tricks… but what if you want to know if the dog jumped on the couch, or if your toddler is playing with the stove? Visual One equips cameras with the intellect to understand a bit more of the

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The apartment rental market in the US will be worth $174.1 billion this year, and today a startup that’s built a platform to help it along by connecting renters with rentals is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth. Zumper, which provides listings of available rental properties and services (such as rent payments) to help manage

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Uber and Lyft plunge, erasing recent gains after promising profits

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

A few weeks ago, Uber and Lyft, kicking bags of the 2019 stock market and regularly cited as examples of venture-backed excess, were back to fighting form.

After encouraging Q3 2019 reports from both ride-hailing giants that include

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CRM software accounts for one-quarter of all enterprise IT spend. But ironically, while a lot of money is spent on platforms like Salesforce or SAP to manage incoming calls and outgoing marketing and sales activity, not a lot of attention is given to the issue of how to help the teams using all that software work better.

What are the peak times for

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No-code tools are on the rise, and a YC-backed company called Snapboard is looking to join the fight.

Snapboard, led by solo founder Calum Moore, started when Moore decided to build one product a week for a year as a personal challenge. In the second week, he realized just how many apps and services it took not only to build the product, but to

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Legionfarm, a YC-backed company, is looking to bring coaches to the competitive gaming world. Esports teams at the very top often have coaches, but the rest of the massive competitive gaming scene has to find a way to improve on their own, either via sheer time played or with creative new training platforms.

There is a huge demand for skilled

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PandaDoc introduces new template-driven editor to ease sales doc production

PandaDoc, a sales-focused document automation startup, announced a new web-based document production editor today that allows sales teams to quickly generate proposals and contracts from design templates.

The templates give a consistent and professional look to these documents, which might otherwise be produced in a word processor like Word or

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Everlaw announces $62M Series C to continue modernizing legal discovery

Everlaw is bringing modern data management, visualization and machine learning to eDiscovery, the process in which legal entities review large amounts of evidence to build a case. Today, the company announced a $62 million Series C investment.

CapitalG (Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund) and Menlo Ventures led the round. Existing investors A

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Menat-home health startup Vault takes in $30 million from Tiger Capital

Vault, an at-home healthcare practice specializing in men’s medicine has announced the raise of $30 million in funding from Tiger Capital Group, Declaration Capital and Redesign Health to reach more potential patients and expand to more areas beyond New York, Florida, Tennessee and Texas, where it currently offers treatments.

Founder and CEO Jason

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Ad2iction's team

Ad2iction’s team

TNL Media Group, the Taipei-based media and journalism company, announced it has acquired mobile ad technology startup Ad2iction. In addition to digital advertising and data analytics, Ad2iction also operates verticals like Agent Movie, a film site, and its brands will remain independently run after joining TNL Media Group.

Ad2iction

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Electric, the platform that delivers IT services to small and medium businesses, has today announced that it has raised an additional $14.5 million on its Series B from 01 Advisors, the fund led by Twitter alums Dick Costolo and Adam Bain.

Though the funding is a part of the company’s Series B financing, founder Ryan Denehy explained that the deal w

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Cloud gaming platform Shadow brings its new plans to the US

Blade, the French startup behind Shadow, announced plans to overhaul its subscription tiers back in October. The company is now bringing the new plans to the U.S. with a new entry tier at $11.99 per month as well as more powerful options in the coming months.

Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For a monthly subscription fee, you can

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Fitness, wallpaper, and lost item-finding startups could have a big new competitor baked into everyone’s iPhones. Leaks of the code from iOS 14 that Apple is expected to reveal in June signal several new features and devices are on the way. Startups could be at risk due to Apple’s ability to integrate these additions at the iOS level, instantly g

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MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and Europe’s Atomico, is unveiling another new product today, this time taking aim at the $350 billion customer service market.

Dubbed Inbox.ai and positioned as “Slack for external communications,” the new product — which is to be offered largely for

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Unitary, an EF alumnus, raises £1.3M seed for its content moderation AI

Unitary, a startup that’s developing AI to automate content moderation for “harmful content” so that humans don’t have to, has picked up £1.35 million in funding. The company is still in development mode but launched a trial of its technology in September.

Led by Rocket Internet’s GFC, the seed round also includes backing from Jane VC (the cold

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Startups have welcomed proposals from the European Commission aimed at cutting red tape and shrinking cross-border barriers for small businesses as part of a new EU industrial strategy plan with a twin focus on digital and green transitions unveiled today.

Among the package of measures being proposed by the European Union’s executive body are for M

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YC-backed Cleanly merges with NextCleaners to vertically integrate

Cleanly, the YC-backed company that looked to bring tech to the laundry industry, has today announced a merger with NextCleaners. The New York-based companies signed an all-stock deal after more than a year of negotiations, with Cleanly founder and CEO Tom Harari serving as Chairman of the Board and Next CEO Kam Saifi will stay in the Chief

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Desperate to exit, a $10B price tag for Magic Leap is crazy

Augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap has struggled with the laws of physics and failed to get to market. Now it’s seeking an acquirer, but talks with Facebook and medical goods giant Johnson - Johnson led nowhere according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Ed Hammond.

After raising over $2 billion and being valued between $6 billion and

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Quibi and Eko are in a legal battle over video tech

Two video startups are making dueling legal claims against the other.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that interactive video company Eko is accusing Quibi of infringing on its patented technology.

At around the same time, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Quibi (which is launching its short-form mobile video service next month) has

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BackboneAI scores $4.7M seed to bring order to intercompany data sharing

BackboneAI, an early-stage startup that wants to help companies dealing with lots of data, particularly coming from a variety of external sources, announced a $4.7 million seed investment today.

The round was led by Fika Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Dynamo Ventures, GGV Capital, MetaProp, Spider VC and several other unnamed

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