Year: 2018

In March, the female-led media company and newsletter provider TheSkimm reported it was raising a $12 million Series C from Google Ventures and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, along with several existing investors. Today, the company is confirming its Series C round has closed with a number of new, mostly female investors joining – including big names like Shonda Rhimes and Tyra Banks.

Variety was the first to report the news of the new investors.

The Series C’s additional investors include former TV journalist Willow Bay, now dean at the USC Anneberg School for Communication and Journalism; Jesse Draper of Halogen Ventures; Shonda Rhimes; CEO of GingerBread Capital, Linnea Roberts; CEO of GingerBread Capital, Hope Taitz; as well as the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.; and Michael Karsch of Juice Press.

Earlier Series C investors included GV (formerly Google Ventures); Spanx founder Sara Blakely; plus former lead investors 21st Century Fox, RRE Ventures and Homebrew Ventures.

TheSkimm began its life as an email newsletter, founded by former TV news producers Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg. The newsletter targets millennial women who want an easy way to keep up with the key news of the today. What makes the product so appealing is how it’s written in a conversational tone, making it accessible to a wide audience who often finds reading the news a dreary but necessary chore. Mixed in with its highlights from key U.S., political, and international news, are samplings of stories from pop culture and the entertainment industry, which gives the newsletter a bit of a palate cleanser – something that’s much appreciated these days.

That newsletter has now grown to around 7 million subscribers, the company says. (This is the same number it reported in March.)

The company has also expanded to other products since its launch, including a $2.99 per month subscription-based app for keeping up with upcoming news and televised events, a podcast, as well as original videos for YouTube and Facebook Watch via its production arm, Skimm Studios.

Its video offerings include Skimm’d with…” and “Get Off the Couch” for Facebook, and digital series “Sip n’ Skimm” which landed an interview with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, followed by a discussion with Speak Paul Ryan assessing the proposed GOP tax plan.

Meanwhile, TheSkimm’s podcast, “Skimm’d from The Couch,” reached #1 on Apple Podcasts hours after its launch.

The company generates revenue from a variety of sources, including its app subscriptions, native ads, affiliate, content licensing and distribution, TheSkimm notes in an announcement. The company is not offering revenue details, however.

“As a female led and founded company, we are excited to have the opportunity to bring such an impressive and dynamic group of female investors into theSkimm fold,” co-founders and co-CEOs Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, said in a statement. “With a majority of our audience being female, it’s vital to the success of our business to involve women at every single level, and that includes our investors. With their added perspective and resources, we look forward to this next chapter in our company’s history.”

Banks added she had a personal appreciate for the product, in addition to her desire to support female entrepreneurs.

Going from one business meeting, to the next studio set, and as a new Mama, it’s more difficult than ever to stay up to date on the day’s headlines,” the media mogul said. “theSkimm created a media platform that works seamlessly with on-the-go lifestyles. As a fervent supporter of trailblazing female-led businesses, I am thrilled to be a part of the next phase of theSkimm’s development,” Banks said.

The company didn’t offer many specifics in terms how it planned utilize the additional capital, but told us that it plans to “continue evolving the brand” and grow its product offerings–both premium and free. One of its plans involves expanding its No Excuses political-engagement campaign, reports Variety, which registered 110,000 U.S. voters.

New York-based TheSkimm has 72 full-time employees and has raised $29 million to date.

Because there aren’t enough electric scooters on the roads, Lyft is looking into launching its own fleet of electric scooters in San Francisco, The Information reports. Lyft would join the likes of Spin, Bird and Lime — the three startups that deployed their scooters in San Francisco, without permission, back in March.

Lyft has reportedly been in talks with San Francisco city officials to discuss applying for a permit, and has drafted some prototypes of scooter designs. A Lyft spokesperson declined to comment.

Earlier this month, the city of San Francisco has laid out its requirements for companies seeking to obtain electric scooter permits. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority has yet to actually finalize the application and terms, but a spokesperson told me on Friday the permit applications should be ready as early as this week. The city will issue permits for no more than five companies during the 24-month pilot program. The program would grant up to 500 scooters per company.

Meanwhile, Uber also has its eyes on electric scooters. In April, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told me the company plans to “look at any and all options” that would help move transportation options in ways that are city-friendly. That same month, Uber acquired bike-share startup JUMP for about $200 million.

As it stands right now, there are four companies that have announced electric scooter sharing. Just last week, scooter startup Skip threw its hat in the ring with $6 million in funding.

Facebook’s been talking Terragraph since way back during its 2016 F8 keynote. The social media giant’s ambitious plan to bring fast Wifi to cities is taking another key step toward real world trials with the addition of Qualcomm. The chipmaking giant announced today that it will add the 60Ghz tech to its future chipsets, with plans to start trials in the middle of next year.

“It is based on the pre-802.11ay standard with enhancements provided by the Qualcomm Technologies’ chipset and the integrated software between Facebook and Qualcomm Technologies to support efficient outdoor operation and avoid interference in dense environments,” Qualcomm writes in the announcement.

San Jose has already been floated as a potential testing ground for the technology. It’s not the biggest U.S. city, but the Silicon Valley hub should prove a solid testing ground with its tech savvy population. The companies say the tech will be useful in lowering the cost of high-speed wireless and helping deliver connectivity to populated areas with significant obstacles, including those densely packed with buildings.

The latter, naturally, makes Terragraph a natural for urban environments, where digging up the ground for fiber is a nuisance, to say the least. Facebook is also looking to service more rural spots with its Antenna Radio Integration for Efficiency in Spectrum (ARIES) system, a technology that was unveiled at the same F8 event.  

There are few open source projects as complex as OpenStack, which essentially provides large companies with all the tools to run the equivalent of the core AWS services in their own data centers. To build OpenStack’s various systems the team also had to develop some of its own devops tools, and in 2012, that meant developing Zuul, an open source continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform. Now, with the release of Zuul v3, the team has decided to decouple Zuul from OpenStack and to run it as an independent project. It’s not quite leaving the OpenStack ecosystem, though, since it will still be hosted by the OpenStack Foundation.

Now all of that may seem a bit complicated, but at this point, the OpenStack Foundation is simply the home of OpenStack and other related infrastructure projects. The first one of those was obviously OpenStack itself, followed by the Kata Containers project late last year. Zuul is simply the third of these projects.

The general concept behind Zuul is to provide developers with a system for automatically merging, building and testing new changes to a project. It’s extensible and supports a number of different development platforms, including GitHub and the Gerrit code review and project management tool.

Current contributors include BMW, GitHub, GoDaddy, Huawei, Red Hat and SUSE. “The wide adoption of CI/CD in our software projects is the foundation to deliver high-quality software in time by automating every integral part of the development cycle from simple commit checks to full release processes,” said BMW software engineer Tobias Henkel. “Our CI/CD development team at BMW is proud to be part of the Zuul community and will continue to be active contributors of the Zuul OSS project.”

The spin-off of Zuul comes at an interesting time in the CI/CD community, which is currently spoiled for choice. With Spinnaker, Google and Netflix are betting on an open source CD platform that solves some of the same problems as Zuul, for example, while Jenkins and similar projects continue to go strong, too. The Zuul project notes that its focus is more strongly on multi-repo gating, which makes it ideal handling very large and complex projects. A number of representatives of all of these open source projects are actually meeting at the OpenDev conference in Vancouver, Canada that’s running in parallel with the semi-annual OpenStack Summit there and my guess is that we’ll hear quite a bit more about all of these projects in the coming days and weeks.

Fueled by last year’s greed-inducing visions of a crypto-currency boom and a stock market largely untethered from classical economics, TradingView, a developer of social networking and data analysis tools for financial markets, has raised millions in new venture funding.

The New York-based company just scored $37 million in funding led by the growth stage investment firm Insight Venture Partners .

TradingView has developed a proprietary, JavaScript-based programming language called PineScript, which lets anyone develop their own customized financial analysis tools. The company “freemium” software as a service model let’s most users connect and exchange trading tips and tricks for free, but begins charging when customers want access to more charts, data and real-time server-side alerts.

There are three payment plans beginning at $15, with a mid-tier at $30 and a high-end $60 per-month premium option.

The company had previously boosted its growth by offering its charting software for free to partner websites like SeekingAlpha, Bitfinex, and the Nasdaq. That strategy helped it grow to 8 million monthly active users with around 61 percent coming from direct traffic as of March of this year.

These days the company derives nearly 75 percent of its revenue from those monthly subscription plans to individual traders. TradingView’s executives think the company still has an opportunity to expand its footprint among those retail investors, but it’s also planning to make a push to serve more institutional clients with its toolkit.

For the past seven years the company has enjoyed consistent growth, according to TradingView co-founder and chief operations officer, Stan Bokov.

For Paul Szurek, a vice-president at Insight Venture Partners, the investment in TradingView is building off of broad consumer interest in amateur speculative trading. Looking at RobinHood, Bux, and eToro as gateways for new investors who eventually move on to more sophisticated tools, Szurek said that TradingView was often their next step into market investing.

“The rise of cryptocurrencies… and trading those assets… has flywheeled into a broader interest in investing across asset classes,” Szurek said.

While TradingView was never crypto-focused, according to Bokov, the company was supportive from the beginning and it’s been a boon to the broader business. “They came for crypto. They stayed for the other stuff,” Bokov said.

And crypto might just be the gateway drug for younger speculative traders to start investing in financial markets more broadly, according to Szurek. “October to January, during the real core of the crypto boom here, there were a lot of users coming in starting out researching that asset class broadly. 80 percent move on to research other asset classes,” he said. “As TradingView kind of pushed through the [first quarter], trends in growth really diverged from what we were seeing in purely crypto-focused business and that’s a testament to users leveraging this one-stop-shop component of the platform.”

Additional investors in the new TradingView include DRW Venture Capital and Jump Capital. The company was a graduate of the 2013 TechStars Chicago batch and was seeded by Irish Angels, TechStars, iTech Capital and undisclosed angel investors.

“TradingView was built for non-professional traders, but its accessible trading tools and powerful-yet-intuitive charting capabilities have attracted the attention of institutional investors,” said Kimberly Trautmann, head of DRW Venture Capital, in a statement. “As an investor, we are excited about the diverse cross section of the industry that TradingView has reached and its rapid growth. As a proprietary trading firm on an institutional level, we’re looking forward to leveraging the platform and contributing to its further development.”

Alibaba is teaming up with SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI startup, to launch a not-for-profit artificial intelligence lab in Hong Kong in a bid to make the city a global hub for artificial intelligence.

Alibaba, which is SenseTime’s largest single investor thanks to a recent $600 million round at a valuation of $4.5 billion, is providing financing for the “HKAI Lab” through its Hong Kong entrepreneurship fund. SenseTime said it will contribute too, although the total amount of capital backing the initiative hasn’t been revealed.

The partners of the project — which also includes the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) — said the aim is to “advance the frontiers of AI,” which includes helping startups commercialize their technology, develop ideas and promote knowledge sharing in the AI field.

That’s all fairly general — Alibaba has a track record of politicking through technology investment schemes in Greater China and Southeast Asia — but one tangible project is a six-month accelerator program planned for September which will welcome AI startups to the HKAI Lab. Alibaba’s Cloud business and HKSTP are among the backers that will help the program offer early-stage funding to successful applicants, while Alibaba and SenseTime will help with mentoring and development during the program.

“Alibaba sees AI as a fundamental technology that will make a difference to society,” Alibaba executive vice chairman Joe Tsai said in a statement. “We envision the Hong Kong AI Lab to be an open platform where researchers, startups and industry participants can collaborate and build a culture of innovation.”

China and the U.S. are the two biggest players in the global AI battle; this project alone won’t divert that, but it could stir up potential in Hong Kong.

Alibaba maintains tight relationships in Hong Kong, particularly through the fund which is around $130 million in size. While the program is ostensibly aimed at promoting startups in Hong Kong, particularly around AI, it is also sure to galvanize Alibaba’s ties to Hong Kong’s establishment and tech community. Hong Kong is growing as a destination for startups, as a number of the city-state’s key players discussed at a TechCrunch China event last year, but still the issue of talent is a key one and this initiative could benefit Hong Kong in that respect.

HMD Global has been one of the mobile world’s biggest surprise hits in recent years. Founded by former Nokia execs, the Finnish company has made a name for itself reviving the dearly departed brand on Android smartphones to great effect. And it just managed to raise another $100 million, led by Ginko Ventures’ Alpha Ginko VC branch.

The new round puts the company’s valuation at over $1 billion, according to a HMD. It’s set to use this latest round to push even more “aggressively” into the mobile category with its branded devices, “doubl[ing] down on expanding channel reach in strategic markets while continuing to deliver innovation where it matters most to consumers.”

Not that the company’s been cautious in its push thus far, of course. HMD already has A LOT of options out there for a business that’s essentially been in existence for a year and a half. At MWC back in February, it announced five new phones sporting the legacy brand, including a reboot of the 8110. The company has also been positioning itself in developing markets, where the Nokia name still has a fair amount of cache, by wholeheartedly adopting Google’s Android One program.

It’s a tricky line to walk, between an embrace of retro appreciation and an attempt to offer innovation. Continuing its successful run is going to require more than just playing upon user nostalgia for a bygone brand.

The question moving forward is whether HMD will be able to reassert Nokia as a truly bleeding-edge brand, as it continues to flood the market with branded devices. After all, the smartphone market is starting to plateau and much of the competition has begun to scale back their releases.

UK-based security researcher Robert Wiggins has found two exposed TeenSafe servers, leaking the passwords and information of some users of the monitoring service.

TeenSafe is meant to protect teenagers by letting their parents monitor their texts, phone calls, web history, location, and app downloads. The breach was first reported by ZDNet.

According to the report, TeenSafe left two of their servers, which were hosted on AWS, exposed and viewable by anyone. Moreover, the database included information such as the parent’s email address, child’s Apple ID email address, device name, device unique identifier, and plaintext passwords for the teenager’s Apple ID.

So… just about everything.

TeenSafe requires that teenagers abstain from using two-factor authentication so that parents can keep an eye on their activity, making those teenagers even more vulnerable to malicious actors now that their personal information has been exposed.

TeenSafe claims on its website that it encrypts data so that it wouldn’t be accessible in the case of the breach.

According to ZDNet, the server held at least 10,200 records from the past three months containing customer data. The publication also included that some of those records were duplicates and that one of the servers appeared to store test data.

That said, it’s unclear if there are other leaky servers with exposed data yet to be discovered.

TeenSafe says it has more than 1 million parents using the platform.

“We have taken action to close one of our servers to the public and begun alerting customers that could potentially be impacted,” a TeenSafe spokesperson told ZDNet on Sunday.

We reached out directly to TeenSafe and will update the post if/when we hear back.

Managing, buying, and selling commercial real estate is a fairly primitive process. Crexi founder Mike DeGiorgio remembers one experience in 2014 when he was required to fax and mail details about an urgent transaction to the leasing office, a move that made him think he was back in the era of Pogs and MTV’s Real World Season 1.

“There simply was no great industry solution for researching markets, finding comps, transacting, connecting with key stakeholders, purchasing or investing in properties, renting or leasing space, getting a loan, finding partners to purchase properties with, marketing yourself or the properties you own, sell, or lease etc,” he said. “I started thinking about technology solutions for the commercial real estate industry to solve many of these inefficiencies in the CRE space. I could not figure out why it hadn’t been done and set out to build CREXi to help industry stakeholders be more efficient and to make the industry more liquid, transparent, and easier to access.”

Crexi – the CRE stands for “commercial real estate” – has been around since 2015 but recently announced an $11 million Series A as well as some interesting user numbers. Key investors include Jackson Square Ventures, Manifest Investment Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Freestyle Capital, TenOneTen Ventures, and Founder Collective. The company has managed over 100,000 “properties brought to market” on its platform and they have 200,000 users per month. They see more than 6,000 properties listed on the site each month.

The service is a suite of tools that streamlines the entire CRE processing.

“We give brokers the ability to find, manage and qualify leads, market their properties with customizable emails, and communicate with interested parties through in-app messaging. Additionally, our features help brokers interact with the industry and its stakeholders; solicit, make, accept, counter, and negotiate offers; run competitive bidding processes; run escrow and closing processes; research markets and sold properties etc,” said DeGiorgio.

While CRE isn’t very sexy, it’s clear that the industry can use all the help it can get. Considering Crexi manages $450 billion in property value, it’s also clear that this is a lucrative market ripe for disruption.

“We are the first platform to take the entire commercial real estate transaction process online with a simple to use and intuitive interface,” said DeGiorgio. “We collaborate with brokers and principals to blend technology with the fundamentals of CRE transactions, addressing the shifting needs of industry professionals to maximize revenue and minimize time spent on administrative tasks.”

Now he just has to get everyone to throw away their postal scales and fax machines and he help CRE enter the era of Honey Boo Boo and leave the era of the Olsen Twins.

It was just matter of time, really. Amazon’s push to get its smart assistant on every piece of hardware imaginable now includes Windows 10 laptops, starting with Acer’s Spin 3 and 5 lines. Both include models sporting Alexa, currently available at retail.

Acer looks to be all in with the assistant — Alexa is coming to a number of other PCs from the company, including the Nitro 5 Spin gaming laptop and its all-one-ones, in the coming weeks. Beyond that, the company’s also bring Alexa to a number of existing systems courtesy of a software update, arriving later this week.

In a press release, Alexa VP Steve Rabichin says the company is “delighted” to be working with Acer. Well, yeah. The PC space was a pretty clear next step for Amazon, having already established a strong foothold in the smarthome space and slowly attacking the mobile market through third-party partnerships.

The company will, of course, be competing directly with Cortana. Microsoft’s assistant has attempted to establish Windows 10 as its primary stronghold. Apple, of course, brought Siri to MacOS some time back, while Google has been flirting with the form factor on its own devices like the Pixelbook.

From the sound of it, basic functionality doesn’t stray to far from what you’re already getting on the Echo, including things like the weather and smarthome control. In order to really assert its presence, however, Alexa is going to have offer some unique functionality that makes the laptops more than just an auxiliary smart speaker.