Author: pekandesigns

Fueled by its $300 million Series D round led by Softbank last August, Getaround is making its second-ever acquisition this year with a $12 million purchase of Norwegian car rental startup Nabobil. This acquisition brings Getaround into seven European countries. In April, Getaround made its first acquisition when it bought European car rental startup Drivy […]

Tundra, a new zero-commission wholesale marketplace, has today announced the close of $12 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Redpoint’s Annie Kadavy, with participation from investors such as Initialized Capital, Peterson Ventures, FJ Labs, Switch Ventures and Background Capital. Tundra was founded by married couple Arnold and Katie Engel who previously […]

Early-stage startup founders it’s now or never, it’s do-or-die, it’s [insert your preferred time-crunch cliché here. The application deadline for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 expires in just 24 hours. If you’re ready to go up against a cadre of approximately 15-30 outstanding startups on the Disrupt Main stage, then apply to compete in […]

Argo AI will invest $15 million over five years to create a center for autonomous vehicle research at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the latest efforts by the Ford-backed company to accelerate the development of self-driving cars. The center, Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research, will focus on advanced perception and […]

There might be no better microcosm of 2019 Apple than Catalina. The latest version of macOS arrives during a transitional time for the company. The desktop is a showcase for increased focus on content, a continued push toward cross-platform compatibility and a renewed push to court creative professionals. For a few years now, the desktop […]

Google bought Kaggle in 2017 to provide a data science community for its big data processing tools on Google Cloud. Today, the company announced a new direct integration between Kaggle and BigQuery, Google’s cloud data warehouse. More specifically, data scientists can build a model in a Kaggle Jupyter Notebook, known as Kaggle Kernels in the […]

It’s stunning how fast emerging new technologies can coalesce around a simple human need and suddenly change everything, not to mention spur billions in investment. That’s what has happened in the past five years to the basics of humans getting around town, or “mobility” in the shorthand of Silicon Valley. And that’s the first of […]

Ivan Smolnikov Contributor Ivan Smolnikov is the CEO and founder of Smartcat, the market network platform for the translation industry. The last few decades have produced many successful marketplaces. We went from goods marketplace pioneers such as eBay and Amazon to simple service marketplaces such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Upwork, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr. But […]

Trash is a new startup promising to make it easier for anyone to create well-edited videos. Social video is an area that CEO Hannah Donovan knows well, having previously served as general manager at Vine (the video app that Twitter acquired and eventually shut down). She said that in user research, even though people had […]

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a new method for delivering key nutrients to plant roots – without having to ensure they’re present in the soil where the plants are growing. The landmark study greatly increases the efficiency of surface delivery of nutrients and pesticides to plants. Currently, when crops are sprayed with stuff […]