Day: October 24, 2019

Caffeine, the live streaming service founded by former Apple designers Ben Keighran and Sam Roberts, has signed an exclusive streaming deal with Offset. The startup has been relatively quiet since raising nearly $150 million in funding last year, but Keighran (who previously co-founded Chomp and then served as Product Design Lead for Apple TV) told […]

Modern Animal just raised a $13.5 million seed round of funding to fuel its mission of offering pets, humans and veterinarians a better experience. Led by Founders Fund with participation from Upfront Ventures, Susa Ventures and others, the round will enable Modern Animal to open its first location in Los Angeles early next year. Founded […]

The crowded world of subscription businesses offers ongoing opportunities to screw up your relationship with subscribers. At Disrupt San Francisco 2019, I spoke with Forerunner Ventures’ Eurie Kim, Lola CEO Alex Friedman and KiwiCo CEO Sandra Oh Lin about key issues and priorities for scaling a subscription service post-launch. A primary theme: building relationships with […]

Shipwell, the software platform for managing trucking logistics, has raised $35 million and is expanding its suite of services to become a full-service hub for logistics management.  The new round led by Georgian Partners comes as the company has just expanded its suite of tracking and management tools to integrate with FedEx’s parcel shipping services. […]

Spotify recently added a feature that will occasionally pop up a full-screen recommendation of a new album the service thinks you’ll like, based on a combination of your listening taste and human curation. Now, it’s going to allow artists and their teams to pay to target their fans through this same feature, effectively turning the […]

Ahead of the launch of Apple TV+ on November 1, Apple’s Apple TV app has begun to roll out to other platforms beyond Apple’s own streaming media player, Mac computers, and iOS devices. Earlier this month, for example, the app arrived on Roku devices. Today, it’s hitting Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick 4K. Specifically, […]

Mobile banking app Current, which began as a teen debit card controlled by parents, expanded to offer personal checking accounts earlier this year. Now the company says it has grown to host over 500,000 accounts on its service and has closed on $20 million in Series B funding to further its growth. The round included […]

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic wil find out what the public markets think of its ambitious plan to make commercial space tourism a reality on Monday. The company’s shareholders have approved a merger announced earlier this year with Chamath Palihapitiya’s special Social Capital Hedosophia holding company, and that will take effect Friday, followed by a debut […]

If you thought storming into a highly secured government facility with your electronics but without permission was a smart idea, you’d be wrong. But that didn’t stop Rep. Matt Gaetz and close to three-dozen of his Republican colleagues on Wednesday from doing exactly that. Gaetz, a Republican congressman from Florida, proudly announced in his tweets: […]