Day: July 17, 2019

Fifth Wall Ventures, an investor in Clutter, b8ta, ClassPass, Lime and others, has raised $503 million for its sophomore venture capital fund. The firm, which closed on $212 million for its debut fund in May 2017, prefers to invest in the burgeoning real estate industry, but has made opportunistic investments in other sectors. The Los […]

FaceApp, the AI-powered selfie-editing app that’s been having another viral moment of late, has now responded to a privacy controversy that we covered earlier here. We’ve pasted the company’s full statement at the bottom of this post. The tl;dr here is that concerns had been raised that FaceApp, a Russian startup, uploads users’ photos to […]

The need-to-know takeaways from VidCon 2019 Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham took part in all the craziness that has become VidCon this past week, where 75,000 influencers, YouTubers, advertisers, and more congregate in one place to see how many likes they all can generate (and I guess to discuss business strategy). This year, there […]

Amid worker protests and antitrust investigations, Amazon’s Prime Day sales event carried on as usual — and that means it again set new records for the online retailer. This time, Amazon says Prime Day 2019 was bigger than both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, as Prime members purchased more than 175 million items during […]

10x Ascend is a new firm that helps software development, cybersecurity and data science professionals negotiate for better deals. Founders Michael Solomon and Rishon Blumberg started out in talent management for the music industry (their clients still include musicians like Vanessa Carlton), then moved into representing tech freelancers with their firm 10x Management. More recently, […]

ClassPass has set up yet another revenue stream, signing to a corporate wellness program partners like Facebook, Glossier, Google, Morgan Stanley, Under Armour, Etsy, Southwest Airlines and Gatorade. The program will give employees at these companies access to the ClassPass network of more than 22,000 studio partners across 2,500 cities around the world, which includes […]

Car-sharing startup Turo has raised $250 million in a Series E round of funding from IAC, the internet media company that owned and spun out Match.com and OkCupid. This round pushes Turo into unicorn territory, with its valuation now “past the billion-dollar” mark according to Turo CEO Andre Haddad. This late round of funding brings […]

The idea behind Dust Identity was originally born in an MIT lab where the founders developed the base technology for uniquely identifying objects using diamond dust. Since then, the startup has been working to create a commercial application for the advanced technology, and today it announced a $10 million Series A round led by Kleiner […]

Uber is launching a new shopping app with commerce partner Cargo, a startup with which it signed an exclusive global partnership last year. The app will feature items curated by Uber, including products like Nintendo Switch, Apple hardware, Away luggage, Glossier cosmetics and more, and will be available to download for Uber riders making trips […]