Google has quietly launched a new video conferencing application called Meet by Google Hangouts, which is designed for HD video meetings. The web and mobile application appears to be the latest addition to Google’s lineup of business products known as G Suite, though product page on the G Suite website listed in the app’s description page on the App Store is not yet live. The… Read More
There is plenty of enterprise software for the white-collar workforce, but there still isn’t an ideal way to communicate with employees who aren’t sitting at a desk. That’s the thesis behind WorkJam, which is announcing $12 million in funding from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Founder Collective and NovelTMT. The Montreal-based startup, whose clients include… Read More
Data visualization has been done — we have publicly traded, interactive, real-time and heck even artificially intelligent companies promising data visualization. But despite all the noise, Portland-based Reflect is making a go of it in the space, opening up its public beta today. By putting developers first and letting them integrate and customize visualizations in their own… Read More
Lux Capital’s portfolio companies sound like they ripped their product concepts from the pages of science fiction. Among these are self-driving car startup Zoox, a company gathering oceanographic data from fleets of autonomously operating boats called Saildrone, Desktop Metal whose 3-D printers that can make objects out of alloys on the spot, and 3Scan, a startup that makes detailed… Read More
Pypestream is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding. When the startup launched more than a year ago, founder and CEO Richard Smullen was pitching text messaging as the best way for customers to communicate with businesses — specifically, through the Pypestream app, where businesses can create their own accounts with a variety of different “pypes”… Read More
Just over a year ago Cisco bought Jasper Technologies for $1.4 billion, and with that transaction, created the company’s IoT cloud business. This week, Cisco is making a series of announcements at Mobile World Congress related to expanding the platform. When a startup like Jasper gets acquired by a big company like Cisco, the standard line of reasoning goes something like this:… Read More
When you think of the biggest cloud players in the world, one company you might not consider is Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant that held a record $25 billion U.S. IPO in 2014. Alibaba entered the cloud computing business in 2009, just three years after Amazon launched its cloud division, AWS — and Alibaba’s cloud computing efforts are among the ambitious projects that… Read More
Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo. Battery Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Salesforce Ventures and a number of angels joined together to finance a $5.5 million seed investment in the… Read More
It’s safe to say that Veeva is not a household name, but 10 years ago this month the company launched the first of a set of enterprise tools, like content management and CRM, designed for the unique requirements of the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry. You have to remember, this was a fairly revolutionary notion a decade ago when very few companies were running enterprise… Read More
Online finance startup SoFi got its start refinancing student loans but gradually has been adding other services to members. To expand into new regions and move closer to becoming a full-service financial services company, SoFi has confirmed that it raised an additional $500 million in equity financing led by Silver Lake. Read More
Layer, the messaging platform that won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield back in 2013, is making two big announcement today: It’s raised $15 million in Series B funding, and it’s acquiring another startup, Cola. Layer makes it easy for businesses to add messaging capabilities to their iOS, Android and web products — customers include Trunk Club, Staples and Udacity.… Read More
Like all great programmers I get most of my code from StackOverflow questions. Can’t figure out how to add authentication to Flask? Easy. Want to shut down sendmail? Boom. Now, thanks to all the code on the Internet, a robot can be as smart as a $180,000 coder. The system, called DeepCoder, basically searches a corpus of code to build a project that works to spec. It’s been used… Read More
FOSSA wants to help developers manage the tricky terrain of open source license management, and today it announced a $2.2 million seed round. The company also announced that its license management product by the same name was available in open Beta. Let’s start with the funding, which was led by Bain Capital Ventures along with an all-star list of participants including Salesforce… Read More
Lower airspace isn’t crowded with drones quite yet. But as drones become more pervasive, a startup called AirMap is building software and system to help drone operators fly only where it’s safe and legal to do so. The task will prove completely different than that of managing airliners as we do today, says AirMap CEO and cofounder Ben Marcus who is also serving as the co-chair for… Read More
MobileIron, which went public in 2014, has been known mostly for helping large companies manage mobile devices, especially in a time when people tend to bring their own. Today it announced it was expanding that mission to the Internet of Things. When you think about it, it’s a logical move for a company that is used to overseeing a large number of devices and helping IT keep them secure. Read More
A startup called Exyn Technologies Inc. today revealed AI software that enables drones to fly autonomously, even in dark, obstacle-filled environments or beyond the reaches of GPS. A spin out of the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Labs, Exyn uses sensor fusion to give drones situational awareness much like a human’s. In a demo video shared by the company with TechCrunch, a… Read More
Kirill Tatarinov has seen computing from bottom to top. As a student in the USSR he wrote programs on punch cards to manage the cutting edge hardware clones that Russia was churning out and now, as CEO of Citrix, he’s working on the next generation of managed computing. His vision for the future is simple: he thinks 3D will be the next big UI shift and that we need to be ready. Tatarinov… Read More
MuleSoft is the latest “unicorn” to file for an IPO. The company, which helps businesses like Netflix and Spotify with their APIs, has unveiled its financials to the public in an S-1 filing, suggesting that they are targeting a debut as soon as March. In the filing we see that MuleSoft had $187.7 million in revenue last year, up from $110.3 million in 2015 and $57.6 million… Read More
YotaScale, a graduate of Alchemist’s enterprise accelerator, is announcing a $3.6 million venture round today from Engineering Capital, Pelion Ventures and angels Jocelyn Goldfein, Timothy Chou and Robert Dykes. The startup employs machine learning to help balance performance, availability and cost for enterprise cloud computing. Competitors CloudHealth Technologies and Cloudability… Read More
Cervin Ventures, under the direction of Preetish Nijhawan and Neeraj Gupta, is announcing its latest $56 million fund. Built on the success of previous angel and micro-venture portfolios, Cervin is targeting seed-stage startups across the enterprise stack — running the full gamut of infrastructure, data and software. Both Nijhawan and Gupta come from operational roles. Preetish… Read More
Chances are that your current company is collecting a ton of data about your customers every second. It’s a goldmine and it often sits there in a corner, unused. Vize is a business intelligence tool that will let you learn more about your business and take advantage of all your data. The company is currently participating in Y Combinator’s winter batch. “The main use case… Read More
IBM wants to bring machine learning to its traditional mainframe customers, and eventually to any technology with large data stores hidden behind a company firewall in what IBM calls a “private cloud.” Yes mainframes, those ginormous computing machines from an earlier age, are still running inside some of the world’s biggest companies including banks, insurance companies… Read More
It’s hard to fathom that the work of Reverend Thomas Bayes is still coming back to drive cutting edge advancements in AI, but that’s exactly what’s happening. DARPA-backed Gamalon is the latest carrier of the Bayesian baton, launching today with a solution to help enterprises better manage their gnarly unstructured data. The world of enterprise is full of unstructured data. Read More
Samanage, makers of customer service software in the cloud, had a couple of major announcements today. For starters, they got a $20 million investment, and they also announced a major step: the launch of their enterprise product on the Salesforce platform. Let’s start with the funding. The round included money from Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Ventures, Marker LLC, Salesforce Ventures… Read More
Amazon has taken the wraps off of its own Skype competitor. Chime is a new video conferencing and communications from AWS that’s focused on business users. Beyond VoIP calling and video messaging, Chime includes virtual meetings, allowing users to host or join a remote meeting through the service. Pricing starts at $2.50 per user per month on the lowest end, with a higher tier plan… Read More
