StartUp

GoDaddy has reached an agreement to acquire Over, the startup behind an app that helps businesses create the photos and videos they need for social media.

Justin Tsai, GoDaddy’s vice president of growth and product, said this acquisition is about acknowledging “a world of entrepreneurs who may never have a website.”

He told me, “Over’s capabilities

Labor markets, particularly those in the tech industry, are incredibly lopsided against employees. Companies screen, interview, and negotiate with thousands of candidates per year, while employees may only go through recruiting a handful of times in their lives. Inevitably, they can select the wrong positions, pick the wrong managers to work with,

At the FAA’s 23rd Annual Commercial Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, DC on Wednesday, a panel dedicated to the topic of trends in VC around space startups touched on public vs. private funding, the right kinds of space companies that should even be considering venture funding, and, perhaps most notably, the big L: L

Less than six months after it announced $40 million in funding, Attentive has raised another $70 million — this time in Series C funding.

The new round was led by Sequoia and IVP, two firms that were part of the Series B. Previous investors Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures also participated.

CEO Brian Long (who, along with his Attentive co-found

If parties came with an alert system, this post would qualify as Def Con 4. Now hear this — we just released the final batch of tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize, which heats up on February 7 in San Francisco. If you want to be there with more than 1,000 of Silicon Valley’s finest, act now with all due haste. Buy your ticket

Drone delivery may not make a lot of sense for food or parcel delivery yet, but for hospitals it could be a lifesaver. A new test program is being inaugurated at UC San Diego’s Jacobs Medical Center, where Matternet drones operated by UPS will fly blood samples and other items to and from other nearby facilities.

The new program will be the third

As we spend more and more time on our phones, working busier and busier jobs, and leading more and more overwhelming lives, personal connection with others is harder and harder to come by. HeyMama wants to change that.

The premium social network is aimed squarely at working mothers, looking to give them a space to connect, communicate and learn

Securiti.ai, a San Jose startup, is working to bring a modern twist to data governance and security. Today the company announced a $50 million Series B led by General Catalyst, with participation from Mayfield.

The company, which only launched in 2019, reports it has already raised $81 million. What is attracting all of this investment in such a

Fifty iPads were stolen from Verkada co-founder Hans Robertson’s old company. Only when they checked the security system did they realize the video cameras hadn’t been working for months. He was pissed. “The market lagged behind the progress seen in the consumer space, where someone could buy high-end cameras with cloud-based software to protect t

Y Combinator graduate OpenPhone is raising a $2 million funding round led by Slow Ventures. The company is working on an app that lets you seamlessly get a business phone number without a second phone or a second SIM card.

Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Garage Capital, 122WEST Ventures and others are also participating in today’s funding round.

Comp

We’re counting the days (35 to be precise) until TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place on March 3 in Berkeley, Calif. But we’re also counting the days that you can save on the price of admission. The early-bird pricing ends in just three days, on January 31. Buy your ticket right here before that bird flies south, and you’ll save $150.

This

“We’re trying to shift cryptocurrency from this speculative asset class to driving real-world utility,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tells me. How? Through commerce and micropayments. But now Coinbase has the who to build it. Today the startup announced it has hired away former head of Product for Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart and Google

French startup Bankin’ has introduced Bridge Pay this week, an API that lets you initiate payments using bank transfers from your app. Think about it as a sort of Stripe, but for bank transfers. The API currently covers 12 major French banks, which represent around 90% of retail bank accounts in France.

Bankin’ is both a B2B and B2C startup. It o

Satellite communications startup Kepler will manufacture its small satellites going forward at a new 5,000-square-foot facility in Toronto, Ontario, Canada . The company is working with partners, including the Canadian Space Agency and the University of Toronto, on the new facility, which will also incorporate design and development of its

Just two days stand between you and serious savings on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020. This annual day-long event draws the most innovative and visionary technologists, researchers and investors from two game-changing industries — last year we hosted 1,500 attendees. Make a smart investment. Buy an early-bird ticket before prices go up

Perdoo, a Berlin-based OKR-focused software startup, has decided to make its basic service free, potentially shaking up its growing, and somewhat crowded, market. “Objectives and Key Results,” a planning and management technique usually shortened to “OKRs,” is a hot space for software startups, with several raising in recent months.

WorkBoard and Gt

ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired Passage AI, a startup that helps customers build chatbots in multiple languages, something that should come in handy as ServiceNow continues to modernize its digital service platform. The companies did not share terms of the deal.

With Passage AI, ServiceNow gets a bushel of AI talent, which

Early Stage SF is around the corner, on April 28 in San Francisco, and we are more than excited for this brand new event. The intimate gathering of founders, VCs, operators and tech industry experts is all about giving founders the tools they need to find success, no matter the challenge ahead of them.

Struggling to understand the legal aspects of

Looking for fellow travelers to join in on its mission to transform the beverage business, the Los Angeles-based startup Bev has taken on fresh capital from a slew of strategic investors. 

The company has added Erin and Sara Foster, creative heads of Bumble BFF and Bumble Biz, to their investor and creative talent pool, along with other notable

Chatbots have had a patchy track record in the world of tech, where early efforts not only failed to deliver on the magical idea of a computer producing the exact answers you were looking for in a chat-based Q-A, they even produced surprising (and not in a good way) results instead. Things have moved along, though, and today a startup that’s b

Gabi, a startup built to help consumers save money on home and auto insurance, announced today that it has closed a $27 million Series B.

The company intends to use its new capital to rapidly expand its team and invest in its product. Nearly every startup does something similar after it collects new cash, so what makes Gabi’s round interesting?

Africa’s logistics startup space has gained another multi-million-dollar round with global backing.

Kenyan company Sendy — with an on-demand platform that connects clients to drivers and vehicles for goods delivery — has raised a $20 million Series B led by Atlantica Ventures.

Toyota Tsusho Corporation, a trade and investment arm of Japanese

After a long period of invite-only beta testing, Scroll is officially launching today, offering ad-free access to sites like BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, Salon, Slate and Vox for an introductory price of $2.49 per month.

CEO Tony Haile previously led analytics company Chartbeat, and he said he founded Scroll because of his frustration with

In the streaming era, data on a show’s viewership and popularity is harder to come by. It’s no longer as simple as setting up a Nielsen box to get data on a show being watched across TVs, phones, tablets and the web. One company solving this problem for content owners, broadcasters and streamers alike is Whip Media Group, parent company to the TV a

The team behind Product Hunt is launching a new social network called YourStack, a platform aiming to connect people that are passionate about products and help them discover what things their friends love.

“It’s super simple, you just search through and create a stack of products you love,” Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover tells TechCrunch. “We wa

Using scrap silicon as its feedstock, a New Orleans-based company called Advano has raised $18.5 million to manufacture battery components to enable more powerful, smaller and longer-lasting batteries.

The technology was innovative enough to earn the Louisiana-based startup a place in Y Combinator’s famed accelerator and has now attracted the

Last year, when co-founders Danny Steiner and Krista Berlincourt debuted Kenshō Health, their directory and information service for holistic medicine, Berlincourt called it “the antithesis of Goop.”

While Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand startup serves up a heady mix of unverified pseudo-scientific claims alongside longstanding holistic

Jeff Bezos’ phonewas hacked. And if the richest person in the world is vulnerable, chances are good that your startup could get hacked, too.

The good news is that, as a tiny company, you’re not a big target. But as soon as you hire your first employee, it’s time to think about adopting basic security practices to ensure that you’re less vulnerable.

Cooks Venture, the agtech company looking to revolutionize the chicken industry, has today announced the close of a $4 million funding round led by Golden West Food Group.

Cooks Venture has been working in stealth for many years, but launched onto the scene in 2018 with a plan to reshape agriculture from the ground up. And the key to that