Browsing Tag: Startups

 When you open a Google doc or a spreadsheet, you get a blank spreadsheet and some documentation as to what you can do with it — and that’s pretty much where we’ve been for quite some time. But two MIT graduates, coming in from Microsoft and Google, have built up a team that for the past three years has quietly been trying to rethink how we approach documents. CEO Shishir… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Two Google alums just raised M to rethink documents

 Banks face an increasingly crowded battlefield in the fight for millennial customers. Not only do they have to compete with services like Venmo, but many messaging apps are adding their own peer-to-peer payment services. Tel Aviv-based startup PayKey thinks it has the solution with a smartphone keyboard that lets bank customers access financial services without having to log onto a banking app. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | PayKey raises M for its millennial-targeted “social banking” smartphone keyboard

 In what could amount to a sea change in the way we transmit data over fiber optics, researchers at University College London have found a new way speed things up by changing the color of the transmitted light. “To maximise the capacity of optical fibre links, data is transmitted using different wavelengths, or colours, of light. Ideally, we’d dedicate a wavelength to each subscriber… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Feeling blue might lead to faster broadband

 Snaps has raised $6 million in Series A funding for what it calls its Conversational Marketing Cloud.
By that, it’s referring to a suite of tools that allows businesses to promote themselves through messaging. CEO Christian Brucculeri said Snaps is differentiated by its “write once and deploy everywhere approach,” allowing marketers to build things like chatbots and emoji… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Snaps raises M to expand its marketing platform for messaging apps

 I’ve seen startups come and go over the years and I was particularly interested to see what happened to August Home today. The company originally tapped Yves Behar to make a better smart lock, one that would meld with the sensitivities of a certain kind of smart home stylist with the high-concept, high-tech design of the Nest thermostat. The products, while beautiful, were unusable in… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The canaries in a coal mine

 The furniture rental industry is stuck in the last. Current options involve old-school companies like CORT where most of the inventory will make your apartment look like a dorm room, or a place like Rent-A-Center where you’ll almost certainly pay many times what the item is actually worth. Enter Feather, a company trying to breathe some life into the aging industry by letting… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Feather raises .5M to rent furniture to millennials

 Jinn, the London-based startup that offers a same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app that operates quite similarly to Postmates in the U.S., has shut down, with the company in the process of going into administration. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | London-based on-demand delivery startup Jinn shutters

 Movinga, the European platform for house removals that was seemingly written off last year, continues to perform what appears to be an impressive turn around. The Berlin-headquartered startup has closed a new funding round of up to €22 million led by Santo Venture Capital, the venture arm of the Strüngmann family office, with participation from existing backers Earlybird Venture Capital… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | European house removals platform Movinga raises up to another €22M

 MongoDB has finished up what is essentially the final step in going public, pricing its IPO at $24 and raising $192 million in the process. The company will debut on the public markets tomorrow and will once again test the waters for companies that are looking to build full-fledged businesses on the back of open-sourced software. MongoDB provides open-sourced database software that can be… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | MongoDB prices its IPO at per share

 Atlas Informatics, whose Atlas Recall promised an intuitive and powerful way to index all your information across many services, is shutting down less than a year after launch. There will be no long sunset period: all user data will be deleted next Friday, the 27th. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Atlas Informatics calls it quits after less than a year