Decade in review: Trends in seed- and early-stage funding

We’ve decided to step back from the breaking news for a minute to conduct a review of seed and early-stage funding trends over the last decade for U.S.-based companies. I’m fairly certain we can all agree that the environment for startups has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, specifically in two major ways: The development of seed funding as its own class and; The expansion of growth stage investing. What we’ve also seen are recent concerns raised about the decline in seed stage funding by Mark Suster, a partner at UpFront...

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Pre- and Post-Money SAFEs: Choosing the right one for your startup

Jared Verzello Contributor Jared Verzello is a startup and venture capital lawyer and GM of Atrium Seed where he guides companies through formation, fundraising, hiring, and managing board meetings. With Y Combinator’s Demo Day taking place at Pier 48 in San Francisco next week, its largest batch of companies ever is getting ready to present to an audience of select investors. Having taken Atrium through Demo Day myself, I have first-hand knowledge of the process. When the founders have finished their pitches, the time to talk numbers will...

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Startups Weekly: Uber’s headline-grabbing week and sextech at SXSW

I spent the week at SXSW, Austin’s really, really huge technology, music, comedy and film festival. It’s my first year making the trek down here for the event, which I did to interview sextech entrepreneur Lora DiCarlo founder Lora Haddock, whose robotics innovation reward was infamously revoked at this year’s CES. “I brush my teeth and I masturbate. It’s all normal,” she said, addressing the stigma surrounding female-focused pleasure tech. Haddock, during our chat, also announced the first-ever government grant for a sextech startup, a $99,637...

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U.S. federal court jury finds Apple infringed three Qualcomm patents

{rss:content:encoded} U.S. federal court jury finds Apple infringed three Qualcomm patents https://ift.tt/2ujgdpP https://ift.tt/2HnJjfZ March 16, 2019 at 12:24PM Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has chalked up another small legal victory against Apple in another patent litigation suit. A jury in a U.S. federal court in San Diego found Friday that Apple owes Qualcomm about $31M for infringing three patents, per Reuters. Qualcomm has filed a number of patent suits against the iPhone maker in the U.S., Europe and Asia in recent years. The suits are skirmishes...

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After Christchurch, Reddit bans communities infamous for sharing graphic videos of death

In the aftermath of the tragic mosque massacre that claimed 49 lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, tech companies scrambled to purge their platforms of promotional materials that the shooter left behind. As most of the internet is now unfortunately aware, the event was broadcast live on Facebook, making it one of the most horrific incidents of violence to spread through online communities in realtime. As Twitter users cautioned others from sharing the extraordinarily graphic video, some Reddit users actively sought the video and knew exactly where...

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What to watch for in a VC term sheet

Mital Makadia Contributor Mital is a partner at Grellas Shah, focusing on representing tech startups and startup founders. She provides counsel on a variety of corporate and transactional matters and negotiates and structures equity financings, M&A transactions, and commercial and intellectual property transactions for her clients. When startup founders review a VC term sheet, they are mostly only interested in the pre-money valuation and the board composition. They assume the rest of the language is “standard” and they don’t want to ruffle...

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Zeus raises $24M to make you a living-as-a-service landlord

Cookie-cutter corporate housing turns people into worker drones. When an employee needs to move to a new city for a few months, they’re either stuck in bland, giant apartment complexes or Airbnbs meant for shorter stays. But Zeus lets any homeowner get paid to host white-collar transient labor. Through its managed ownership model, Zeus takes on all the furnishing, upkeep, and risk of filling the home while its landlords sit back earning cash. Zeus has quietly risen to a $40 million revenue run rate from its target 30 percent margin on renting out...

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Twitter confirms a new ‘Subscribe to Conversation’ feature for following tweets of interest

In addition to testing out a new format for conversations within a prototype app called twttr and other features like a “Hide Tweet” button, Twitter today confirmed it’s also developing a feature that would allow users to subscribe to individual conversations taking place on its platform. The new option was first spotted by Jane Wong, a reverse engineer who often peeks inside popular apps to discover their yet-to-be-launched features and changes. Twitter is testing "Subscribe to conversation" so you can get notified over a conversation without...

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coParenter helps divorced parents settle disputes using A.I. and human mediation

{rss:content:encoded} coParenter helps divorced parents settle disputes using A.I. and human mediation https://ift.tt/2ubFou6 https://ift.tt/2JeYdXD March 15, 2019 at 07:06PM A former judge and family law educator has teamed up with tech entrepreneurs to launch an app they hope will help divorced parents better manage their co-parenting disputes, communications, shared calendar, and other decisions within a single platform. The app, called coParenter, aims to be more comprehensive than its competitors, while also leveraging a combination of A.I....

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coParenter helps divorced parents settle disputes using A.I. and human mediation

A former judge and family law educator has teamed up with tech entrepreneurs to launch an app they hope will help divorced parents better manage their co-parenting disputes, communications, shared calendar, and other decisions within a single platform. The app, called coParenter, aims to be more comprehensive than its competitors, while also leveraging a combination of A.I. technology and on-demand human interaction to help co-parents navigate high-conflict situations. The idea for coParenter emerged from co-founder Hon. Sherrill A. Ellsworth’s...

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Big data AI startup Noble.AI raises a second seed round from a chemical giant

Noble.AI, an SF/French AI company that claims to accelerate decision making in R&D, has raised a new round of funding from Solvay Ventures, the VC arm of a large chemical company, Solvay SA. Although the round was undisclosed, TechCrunch understands it to be a second seed round, and we know the company has closed a total of $8.6 million to date. Solvay was previously an early customer of the platform, prior to this investment. The joint announcement was made at the Hello Tomorrow conference in Paris this week. As a chemical company, Solvay’s...

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Facebook says its new A.I. technology can detect ‘revenge porn’

Facebook on Friday announced a new artificial intelligence powered tool that it says will help the social network detect revenge porn – the nonconsensually shared intimate images that, when posted online, can have devastating consequences for those who appear in the photos. The technology will leverage both A.I. and machine learning techniques to proactively detect near nude images or videos that are shared without permission across Facebook and Instagram. The announcement follows on Facebook’s earlier pilot of a photo-matching technology, which...

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YC-backed Aura Vision analyzes video footage to provide new data to retailers

Aura Vision, which is part of the current batch of startups at Y Combinator, helps retailers understand who’s visiting their stores and what they’re doing there. In other words, if you want to see the demographics of who’s visiting the store, or which displays and products are actually prompting customers to linger, or how long customers have to wait in line, Aura Vision can use existing security camera footage to tell you. “We are focused on specialty retail — everyone on the retail market that isn’t grocery,” CEO Daniel Martinho-Corbishley told...

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Passbase is building a full stack identity engine with privacy baked in

Digital identity startup Passbase has bagged $600k in pre-seed funding led by a group of business angel investors from Alphabet, Stanford, Kleiner Perkins, EY; as well as seed fund investment from Chicago-based Upheaval Investments and Seedcamp. The 2018-founded Silicon Valley-based startup — whose co-founder we chatted to briefly on camera at Disrupt Berlin — is building what it dubs an “identity engine” to simplify identity verification online. Passbase offers a set of SDKs to developers to integrate facial recognition, liveness detection, ID...

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