Browsing Category: Startups

  • Venture-backed Celularity receives FDA approval for early trials of a new cell therapy for COVID-19

    Celularity, the venture-backed developer of novel cell therapies for cancer treatments, has received an initial clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to begin early-stage clinical trials on a potential treatment for COVID-19. The company, which has raised at least $290 million to date (according to Crunchbase), uses “Natural Killer” (NK) cell therapies to boost …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • Jim Fruchterman raises $1.7M for Tech Matters, a new effort to help nonprofits do tech better

    Social entrepreneurship pioneer Jim Fruchterman has launched a new nonprofit, Tech Matters, with $1.7 million in backing from corporate and foundation sources, including Twilio, Okta, Working Capital, Facebook and Schmidt Futures. Tech Matters is Fruchterman’s new vehicle to address what he sees as a crippling weakness in the social good sector: the failure to use …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • A bug bounty alone won’t save your startup — here’s why

    In this world, there is no such thing as perfect security. Every app or service you use — even the websites you visit — have security bugs. Companies go through repeated rounds of testing, code reviews and audits — sometimes even bringing in third-parties. Bugs get missed — that’s life, and it happens — but …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • SaaS growth appears to slow as churn concerns rise

    Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Yesterday we explored what the SaaS world thinks about churn. A cohort of SaaS executives surveyed by Gainsight are expecting medium-bad churn (our take on their reported forecasts); select software companies will see booming demand; …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • How 6 top VCs are adapting to the new uncertainty

    As the global economy grinds to a halt, every business sector has been impacted, including the linked worlds of startups and venture capital. But how much has really changed? If you read VC Twitter, you might think that nothing has changed at all. It’s not hard to find investors who say they are still cutting …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • CIOs are dead tired of dumb tech. Pulse has $6.5M to help them help each other

    The technology that runs our companies these days is staggering in its complexity. We have moved from a monolith to a microservices world, from boxes to SaaS, and while that has added agility to the enterprise, it has come at the cost of a metric f-ton of services and software platforms required by every team …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • Collibra nabs another $112.5M at a $2.3B valuation for its big data management platform

    GDPR and other data protection and privacy regulations — as well as a significant (and growing) number of data breaches and exposées of companies’ privacy policies — have put a spotlight on not just the vast troves of data that businesses and other organizations hold on us, but also how they handle it. Today, one …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • Scoutbee launches free tool to help organisations search for COVID-19 support-related supplies

    Scoutbee, the supplier discovery platform, has rolled out a new free tool for organisations helping to fight the coronavirus pandemic and who are in need of critical supplies. Targeting NGOs, public bodies, local and national governments and healthcare providers, the platform does real-time analysis of terabytes of global supply chain data to significantly speed up …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel

  • Ikea acquires AI imaging startup Geomagical Labs to supercharge room visualisations

    Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings and decor giant, has been one of the leaders among retailers when it comes to adapting to tech innovations that impact its business, being one of the first to launch augmented reality applications, partnering with others to develop smart home devices and launching a business unit to build that out …

    April 2, 2020 | by Raheel