BJ Jenkins Contributor It used to be a heavily traveled two-way street in corporate America: CEOs joined other companies’ boards to broaden their experiences, expand their influence, or simply because it felt good. Boards sought out CEOs because of the knowledge they bring and their unique ability to interact with the company CEO as an […]
Monthly Archives: June 2021
Bessemer replaces board member at Hinge Health following competitive tensions
Board tensions at Hinge Health, a San Francisco-based digital health unicorn, have caused Bessemer Venture Partners to switch up its board director seat, replacing the original investor at the chair with a different one. Hinge Health co-founder and CEO Daniel Perez says BVP’s original board seat went to the partner who led the his company’s […]
Microsoft says a third of its government data requests have secrecy orders
Microsoft’s customer security chief says as many as one-third of all government demands that the company receives for customer data are issued with secrecy clauses that prevents it from disclosing the search to the subject of the warrant. The figure was disclosed in testimony by Microsoft’s Tom Burt ahead of a House Judiciary Committee on […]
Twitter is making NFTs now, apparently
No, it’s not April Fool’s Day. But Twitter’s entire account has been taken over by NFTs. As its new header reads: “I’ve stopped moisturizing because tweeting about NFTs is keeping me young now.” If that’s true, the Twitter bird is going to look like a little baby duckling by the end of the day. This […]
Facebook and Matterport collaborate on realistic virtual training environments for AI
To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of […]
Slack’s new video and voice tools are nod to changing face of work
Slack started talking about a new set of communications tools to enhance the text-based channels at the end of last year. Today the company released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles and gave more details on a couple of other new tools including the ability to leave a video message and an enhanced employee […]
Zipline raises $250M at $2.75B valuation to build out its instant logistics service
Drone delivery startup Zipline, a company that got its start delivering medical supplies across Africa, has raised $250 million in new funding. This latest round has vaulted the company’s valuation to $2.75 billion and will fuel further expansion of its logistics networks in Africa and the United States. Zipline made a name for itself first […]
Gusto is now offering pieces of its service to other companies via API
This morning Gusto, a unicorn that sells payroll and benefits management software, announced that it will now offer part of its service via an API to external platforms. The new product, dubbed Gusto Embedded Payroll, will allow vertical SaaS companies to provide payroll support to their own customers. The move to provide elements of its […]
Dear economy, creators aren’t fragile plants
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha brought on Alexis Gay, a former operator at Patreon who now makes her living as comedian and podcast host, to talk about the creator economy — including our disdain for that horrid phrasing. You […]
ServiceTitan acquires Aspire to move into landscaping, raises $200M at a $9.5B valuation
With a lot of us spending more time at home these days, home improvement has continued to be a booming market. Now, one of the big players in that space — ServiceTitan, which builds software that today is used by over 100,000 contractors to manage their work — is getting a little bigger. The company […]