For startups working to sell to large corporations, their investors and their tens of thousands of employees, it’s welcome news. A confluence of factors may make 2017 fertile ground for tech offerings. The stock market is at record highs, last year’s IPO crop such as it was is outperforming the preceding group, 2017’s own brace of offerings are doing well in the market and… Read More
Business intelligence platform Looker is announcing a wholesome $81.5 million Series D today led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s cleverly named growth investment arm. Goldman Sachs and Geodesic Capital helped fill out the round, joining existing investors, KPCB, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint and Sapphire Ventures. Rather than compete in segmented markets against visualization and data… Read More
HelloSign, founded in 2011, has been best known to this point as an e-signature company, but today it announced something a bit more substantial, a new product called HelloWorks, which allows the company to move into workflow, digitizing processes that involve complex forms. For many years now, HelloSign CEO Joseph Walla said, the way we moved paper processes into the digital realm was… Read More
Aiden, a London-based startup building a machine learning-powered personal assistant to save mobile marketers time and money, closed a $750,000 seed round today from Kima Ventures and a number of angels including Nicolas Pinto, Pierre Valade and Jonathan Wolf. The team first demoed the capabilities of its service on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt as a Battlefield finalist. In recent… Read More
Alchemist Accelerator has raised $2 million from GE Digital to start a new program for industrial IoT startups. Stanford lecturer Timothy Chou, formerly President of Oracle On Demand, will chair Alchemist’s new IIoT accelerator along with GE Digital’s West Coast group. In the past, enterprise hardware and software startups were seen as capital intensive, with the challenge of… Read More
Cloud Foundry, a massive open source project that allows enterprises to host their own platform-as-a-service for running cloud applications in their own data center or in a public cloud, today announced the launch of its “Cloud Foundry Certified Developer” program. The Cloud Foundry Foundation calls this “the world’s largest cloud-native developer certification… Read More
In the recruiting wars, a cool office is critical. Not just for scrappy startups, but big businesses with regional HQs, as well. So while WeWork signs questionable 20-year leases to provide desks for twenty-something engineers, Industrious is taking a more classy and conservative approach to coworking space. Read More
AWS continues to add yet more software and services to build out its revenues and touchpoints with businesses that already use its cloud infrastructure for storage and to host and administer services and apps. The latest product, launching today, is Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center solution. AWS said it is based on the same tech that Amazon itself has built and uses in-house… Read More
A startup based in Petah Tikva, Israel, Airobotics, has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for business purposes in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace. Read More
Medical billing is a largely untapped and lucrative industry, potentially pulling in $55 billion globally by 2020. But it’s inner workings are still very murky — most of the time it’s not clear how much something will cost and sometimes you don’t even get the (possibly whopping) bill until months down the road. Founder Katelyn Gleason wants to make it easier to know… Read More
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth that times the frame rate. Matroid, a computer vision startup launching out of stealth today, enables anyone to take advantage of the information inherently embedded in video. You can build your own detector within the company’s intuitive, non-technical, web platform to detect people and most other objects. Reza Zadeh, founder… Read More
While CoreOS is probably still best known for its Linux distribution, that was only the company’s gateway drug to a wider range of services. Tectonic, the company’s service for running Kubernetes-based container deployments in the enterprise, sits at the core of its business. Until now, Tectonic could only be used for installing and managing Kubernetes on bare-metal and AWS… Read More
The way Ripcord CEO Alex Fielding discusses chief competitor Iron Mountain, the record keeping company sounds like it runs the warehouse from the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The startup comes out of stealth this week with the announcement of $9.5 million in funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for its goal of taking corporate records paperless through its industrial… Read More
Lystable, a startup that makes a workflow management platform aimed at businesses needing to manage lots of freelancers, has topped up its Series A again — this time with an additional $10 million, which founder and CEO Peter Johnston says will be use to fund a change of business model with a payments focus. Read More
Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it’s a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to connect to the cloud to deliver answers to your questions. Now, a startup called Mythic (formerly known as Isocline) is launching a chip and software that will change all that, putting voice control, computer vision… Read More
LinkedIn, the social network for the working world that is now owned by Microsoft, is quietly adding more features to fill out some of its bigger ambitions to provide more services to enterprises, tapping into its user base of over 465 million professionals. Today, the company is adding a new “enterprise” tier to its Sales Navigator product — a subscription-only service… Read More
Adobe opened its Digital Marketing Summit in Las Vegas this week with a big splash, announcing a new “Experience Cloud,” which brings all of its digital cloud businesses together onto a single platform. While there is an element of pure marketing at play here, it also makes sense for Adobe to pull its various digital clouds — Creative, Document, Marketing, Analytics and… Read More
SirionLabs, a startup providing vendor management software to enterprises, is adding a US headquarters to its footprint. The company was initially founded in India and has raised $16.95 million from Sequoia Capital India, Canopy Ventures and Qualgro VC to extract data from contracts to ensure transparency and accountability. The establishment of a US presence represents a strategic shift… Read More
IBM unveiled its “Blockchain as a Service” today, which is based on the open source Hyperledger Fabric, version 1.0 from The Linux Foundation. IBM Blockchain is a public cloud service that customers can use to build secure blockchain networks. The company introduced the idea last year, but this is the first ready-for-primetime implementation built using that technology.… Read More
As part of IBM’s annual InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, the company is announcing a new machine learning course in partnership with workspace and education provider Galvanize to familiarize students with IBM’s suite of Watson APIs. These APIs simplify the process of building tools that rely on language, speech and vision analysis. Going by the admittedly clunky name IBM… Read More
The competitive deck appears nearly stacked against the startup, and it seems that every other month a new product launches from a major tech company that’s billed in the tech press as the next “Slack Killer.” What Slack does isn’t actually all that original as startup ideas go. It merely provides an environment for teams to share information inside a chat client. Yet… Read More
One down, many more to go! The first episode of TechCrunch’s latest podcast, Equity, our venture capital-focused podcast is out. This week, TechCrunch’s Matthew Lynley, CrunchBase editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I sat down with investor and SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin to talk about Tesla’s $1 billion raise, the return of IPOs and recent acquisitions in the technology… Read More
An Israeli tech startup called Utilis has taken top honors at Imagine H2O this year, for technology that can detect underground leaks in underground, potable water supply systems through analysis of satellite imagery. Americans waste 1 trillion gallons of water every year thanks to leaky faucets, faulty sprinkler systems and other small systems. Utilis’ tech can find leaks to systems… Read More
Additive manufacturing startup Carbon is on a mission to help manufacturers and designers cut their costs, waste less energy and materials while speeding up the time it takes to get from concept to product on the market. The company, which has raised $221 million in venture capital, is firing up a new service aimed at contract manufacturers, and other high volume manufacturing businesses,… Read More
Glen Tullman doesn’t like it when someone tells him he’s sick when he’s feeling fine. It’s something he thinks his customers probably don’t want to hear, either. Tullman runs a startup called Livongo Health, which offers a blood glucose monitor accompanied with a service designed to intervene and help coach people through managing diabetes. Livongo Health helps… Read More
