Accel announced Tuesday the close of three new funds totaling $3.05 billion, money that it will be using to back early-stage startups, as well as growth rounds for more mature companies. Notably, the 38-year-old Silicon Valley-based venture firm is doubling down on global investing. The announcement underscores both the robust confidence investors continue to have […]
Monthly Archives: June 2021
10club raises $40 million seed funding to build Thrasio of India
10club, a one-year-old Indian startup that is building a Thrasio-like venture, said on Tuesday it has raised $40 million in what is one of the largest seed financing rounds in the South Asian market. The round was co-led by Fireside Ventures (a prominent Indian investor in consumer and hardware tech space) and an unnamed global […]
Can the most exciting new solar material live up to its hype?
While perovskites have the potential to reach high efficiencies (the world record for a perovskite-only cell is just over 25%), most of the best-performing perovskite cells today are tiny—less than an inch wide. Scaling up makes it more difficult to reach the potential efficiency limits. Right now, Saule’s panels, which are a meter wide, reach […]
ShipBob nabs $200M at a $1B+ valuation to help e-commerce companies run logistics like Amazon’s
E-commerce saw a massive surge of activity and growth in 2020; and while we may hear a lot about how big companies like Amazon got even bigger during the Covid-19 pandemic, that rising tide also lifted a lot of smaller boats. And that, in turn, has had a big impact on the wider e-commerce ecosystem. […]
Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan
For Baric, that research started in the late 1990s. Coronaviruses were then considered low risk, but Baric’s studies on the genetics that allowed viruses to enter human cells convinced him that some might be just a few mutations away from jumping the species barrier. That hunch was confirmed in 2002–’03, when SARS broke out in […]
Ghana’s Jetstream lands $3M to build the digital infrastructure for Africa’s trade corridors
The share of exports from Africa to the rest of the world ranged from 80% to 90% between 2000 and 2017. This has created a growing demand for Africa to be less dependent on commodity exports and focus on regional commerce. Not only does this decrease export dependence, but it also forms new markets for […]
Is Facebook a monopoly? Please define, says judge.
Any additional action will be led by the new FTC chair, Lina Khan, a vocal critic of Big Tech who first came to prominence when she argued that antitrust laws focused on pricing were not enough to check the power of Amazon. But while the FTC has another shot at that case, the judge dismissed […]
Harness Wealth raises $15 million to democratize the power of family offices
Family offices have existed since the 1800s, but they’ve never been so manifold as in recent years. According to a 2019 Global Family Office Report by UBS and Campden Wealth, 68% of the 360 family offices surveyed were founded in 2000 or later. Their rise owes to numerous factors, including the tech startups that mint […]
Duolingo filed to go public
Duolingo, a Pittsburgh-based language learning business last valued at $2.4 billion, has officially filed to go public. The 400-person company, which we explored in great detail in our EC-1, was co-founded by Luis von Ahn, the inventor of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, and Severin Hacker. One of the most revealing bits of its story? It’s a […]
Join a tech trade delegation to London – virtually
Peter Griffin, Contributor. 29 June 2021, 10:19 am If the UK is a key export market for the tech products you create, it’s likely been some time since you’ve seen your customers face to face. The Covid-19 pandemic and the myriad changes as a result of Brexit have changed the business landscape in the UK […]