Author: pekandesigns

Six weeks after we broke the news that cannabis startup Eaze was running out of money, laying off more employees and scrambling to pay its bills and stay afloat as it worked on a pivot to selling its own supply rather than just that of third-party providers, the company has finally closed some funding and […]

App Samurai, a platform to market mobile apps, has closed an investment of $2.4 million in Series A funding, led by 212 Ventures and co-invested by Collective Spark, 500 Startups and Degerhan Usluel. It has now raised a total of $4.6 million, which will be used to develop the mobile advertising group’s product portfolio and […]

This is Part 1 of our ongoing series on virtual worlds, introduced in the article A Multiverse, not the Metaverse. Video games are only getting more popular. Roughly 2.5 billion people around the world played games last year, double the number of players in 2013. Gaming is a $149 billion industry, growing 7% year over […]

Following web forums, web platforms and mobile apps, we are entering a new stage of social media — the multiverse era — where the virtual worlds of games expand to become mainstream hubs for social interaction and entertainment. In a seven-part Extra Crunch series, we will explore why that is the case and which challenges […]

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Over the past three months, a number of financial events have occurred in the fintech and finservices world that have caught our eye. Between two rounds at $500 million and two exits in the billions […]

Today Amazon is opening its first grocery store to pilot the use of the retailer’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology that has previously powered 25 Amazon Go convenience stores in a handful of major U.S. metros. Based in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, the new Amazon Go Grocery store allows customers to shop for everyday grocery […]

CoolBitX, a blockchain security startup based in Taiwan, announced today it has raised a $16.75 million Series B led by returning investor SBI Holdings, a Japanese financial group. Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bitsonic, Monex Group, another Japanese financial group and Taiwan’s National Development Fund also participated. Founded in 2014, CoolBitX makes two products. One is CoolWallet […]

Much like private businesses, the United States government is in the process of moving workloads to the cloud, and facing a similar set of challenges. Today, CircleCI, the continuous delivery developer service, announced a partnership with AWS GovCloud to help federal government entities using AWS’s government platform to modernize their applications development workflows. “What this […]

The famous phrase “software eats the world” was originally coined to describe how technology gradually replaces the old industrial norms of production. But few realized that when Uber started to “eat” the taxi industry it would also be among the first harbingers of a new wave of what it meant to be “employed.” As similar […]

The tech industry is built on the venture capital model where hockey stick growth and selling to a larger company or going public are markers of success. But the traditional VC model does not leave much room for startups that might not be the next unicorn but still generate revenue — just not the type […]