Founders Factory Africa and South African healthcare company Netcare will select 35 African health-tech startups for an acceleration and incubation program. The partnership includes an investment (of an undisclosed amount) by Netcare in Founder’s Factory Africa, or FFA. The Johannesburg located organization was formed in 2018 as an extension of Founders Factory in London—an accelerator […]

Talis Capital – an early investor in Darktrace, Pirate Studios, Luminance and iwoca – announces today that it’s raised $100m for 2019, a record for the firm to date as it passes it’s 10th year of operation. In those ten years it’s done $600m in transactions as it seeks to invest in the fast-growing tech […]

India may have plans to follow France’s footsteps in building a chat app and requiring government employees to use it for official communications. The New Delhi government is said to be pondering about the need to have homegrown email and chat apps, local news outlet Economic Times reported on Thursday. The rationale behind the move […]

Warburg Pincus, the private equity fund with over $60 billion under management, is doubling down on Asia after it announced a $4.25 billion fund dedicated to China and Southeast Asia. The firm has been present in China for 25 years, and it has invested over $11 billion in a portfolio of over 120 startups that […]

Alibaba and JD.com have been in a war over the Chinese e-commerce space for a decade or so, but a third player called Pinduoduo has managed to shake up the duopoly in recent times. The startup, which was founded in 2015 by an ex-Googler and went public on the Nasdaq last July, has further flexed […]

If you’re an Instagram user, chances are you’ve encountered a ton of ads for companies trying to sell products directly to consumers, using social networks as storefronts paired with online stores. French startup Taster is doing the same thing with restaurants built specifically for food delivery startups. The startup raised an $8 million funding round […]

NTWRK, is a fascinating experiment in live video shopping for the iPhone set. It’s been described as a blend of QVC and Twitter and Twitch and they just got a new slice of money from investors like Drake and Live Nation to expand into physical events. There’s been a bunch of attempts at this kind […]

Soundtrap, the music and podcast software maker that Spotify acquired in 2017, is improving its free tier by adding unlimited storage. Previously, Soundtrap’s free users were limited to storing five projects at a time. In addition to introducing unlimited storage, the company is also more-than-doubling the amount of music available to free users, who now […]

AUrate, a startup selling gold jewelry directly to consumers, announced today that it has raised $13 million in Series A funding. The company’s co-founders Bouchra Ezzahraoui and Sophie Kahn said that AUrate’s prices range from $50 to $3,000, but they’re really aiming for what Ezzahraoui called “this new market sweet spot” of $300 to $500. […]

Skubana, a startup promising to help e-commerce business manage what can be a dizzying array of logistical challenges, is announcing that it has raised $5.4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Defy Partners, with participation from Advancit Capital and FJ Labs. Early Skubana backer Brian Lee — who co-founded The Honest […]

Apple has clearly spent the last several years dreaming of a world where it didn’t have to rely on third-parties to create its components. The hardware giant has already taken a number of steps in that direction with its own in-house chips, and a recent hire points at an even bigger push. Per his LinkedIn […]

The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market networks B2B service marketplaces (think translation as a service) are an extraordinarily lucrative startup category. But despite the incredible potential of these platforms to generate outsized returns, many fail. Why? Ivan Smolnikov, the CEO and founder of translation service startup Smartcat, investigates why certain marketplaces seem to grow […]

New efforts could automate the role of an analyst.

Google has always argued that the data it collects does more than provide power for its targeted ad empire — it also makes its services more useful. But not everyone thinks that Google should be able to suck up a never-ending stockpile of personal data on its users. Today, Google is taking a step towards […]