Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent will be opening a new AI research center in Seattle, according to The Information. The company has long had a core office in Palo Alto, but this will be its first major machine intelligence R&D effort in the country. Earlier this week Tencent announced that it would open its first data center in Silicon Valley. Yu Dong, formally of Microsoft Research,… Read More
Rubrik, a startup that provides data backup and recovery services for enterprises across both cloud and on-premises environments, has closed a $180 million round of funding that values the company at $1.3 billion. The news confirms a report we ran earlier this week noting that the company was raising between $150 million and $200 million. IVP (as we noted sources told us might be the case) led… Read More
Cloudera, the enterprise big data company, closed the day up over 20% at $18.09, after pricing its IPO at $15 per share. This is also above the range of $12 to $14 that enterprise big data company was preparing for. While the surging stock price is great for new investors, the outcome is still a significant disappointment for some employees of the company because their equity compensation… Read More
Welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the narrative. Homebrew’s own Hunter Walk joined us for this episode along with co-hosts Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and myself. This week has been a delightful clown car of technology earnings, so we dove into Twitter’s surprisingly strong report that drove its share… Read More
An early player in drone-tech, 3D Robotics Inc., announced that it has raised $53 million in a Series D round of funding on Thursday, including new equity funding and conversion of debt equity. Atlantic Bridge led the round joined by Autodesk Forge Fund, True Ventures, Foundry Group, Mayfield and other undisclosed investors, according to the company statement. The company didn’t break… Read More
Microsoft just reported earnings for the last quarter. The company reported non-GAAP revenue of $23.6 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.73. Wall Street’s cadre of crack analysts expected the company’s earnings per share to come in at around $0.70, with revenue hitting about $23.6 billion. In the year-ago quarter, Microsoft reported earnings per share of $0.62. Wall… Read More
Zeta Global, the marketing tech company that has recently acquired the likes of eBay’s enterprise arm and Acxiom Impact, is preparing for another round of acquisitions and investments in its technology. To do so, the company today announced that it has raised a $140 million Series F round. Read More
The world is awash with bots these days — applications the run either partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other artificial intelligence technologies to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done. In the enterprise equivalent, a company that is building something akin to this for large… Read More
Healthy financial milestones sugarcoat the conversation temporarily, but eventually Drew Houston is going to have to step into the public markets. At that point nobody will care how fast Dropbox grew its revenue back in the day. The question will be whether Dropbox is a company that can eventually sustain $10 billion in yearly revenue. Read More
Oracle announced a slew of AI-driven capabilities across its Customer Experience Cloud Suite today that are designed to help users to deliver better, faster and more personal experiences. If you think you’ve heard this before, it’s because Oracle joins its customer experience competitors in offering a similar set of capabilities complete with underlying artificial… Read More
Today, Airbnb’s design team open sourced its internal library for writing React components that easily render directly to Sketch. Instead of trying to get Sketch to export to code, the Airbnb team spent its time on the opposite — putting the paintbrush in the hands of the engineer. Everyday engineers and designers have the luxury of operating without design systems, but large… Read More
Over the last several years Talkdesk has offered a way for businesses to get a cloud-based call center up and running. Today the company is launching AppConnect, a place where customers can connect with other vendors that provide services adjacent to its offerings. As a result, it can round out the products and services needed to efficiently run a call center. Read More
Box has been in the process of enhancing its developer platform, and today it announced a new pricing plan designed to provide developers with more cost certainty than the old pricing approach. “We’ve been in the market for 18 months and there has been a tremendous amount of traction, but pricing was still complicated,” Jeetu Patel, CSO and SVP of Box Platform told TechCrunch. Read More
Rubrik, the startup that provides data management services like backup and recovery to large enterprises, is in the process of raising between $150 million and $200 million on a valuation of $1 billion, as we reported yesterday. And as a measure of how it’s growing, today it’s announcing an expansion of its product set, specifically in cloud services. Now Rubrik — which… Read More
Fresh off $8 million in Series A financing, Immuta is releasing the second version of its data science governance platform. With the democratization of machine learning comes new risks for businesses that have too many workers manipulating data sets and models without oversight. The Immuta platform helps companies maintain an understanding of how digital assets are applied and shared across… Read More
Make way for another juggernaut amongst enterprise startups: Rubrik, a data backup company that only emerged from stealth in 2015, is in the process of raising between $150 million and $200 million on a valuation of $1 billion as the company enters a period of strong demand for its storage and data management products, according to sources. TechCrunch first learned of the new fundraise via… Read More
Back in February, the Facebook-led Telecom Infrastructure Project led a call to put $170 million into startups focusing on solutions to improve infrastructure: the switching technologies, engineering, cabling and other components that go into building networking for internet and other communications services. Today comes one more advance on that front: Facebook and the TIP are working… Read More
Microsoft announced some significant integrations between LinkedIn, the professional social network it bought last year for over $26 billion and Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company’s CRM and ERP suite. It was clear that when Microsoft paid that much money for LinkedIn, it had plans to use that data in other Microsoft products. Those ideas began to emerge last summer with some Office… Read More
That was effectively the only conversation missing from Facebook’s F8 conference — an event that even made time for a progress update on a moonshot project that might one day allow us to hear through our skin. Perhaps that’s the luxury of a company whose advertising revenue is up 57 percent year-over-year. But don’t misconstrue unseen for unimportant. Behind… Read More
Microsoft is launching IoT Central today, a new Internet of Things (IoT) service that gives enterprises a fully managed solution for setting up their IoT deployments without needing the in-house expertise necessary for deploying a cloud-based IoT solution from scratch. It’s basically IoT-as-a-Service. In addition, the company is also bringing its Azure Stream Analytics to edge… Read More
Human resources paperwork is never fun to take care of—especially if it’s literally on paper. Swingvy co-founder Jin Choeh says that in Southeast Asia, many small businesses are still stuck with physical spreadsheets and piles of forms. Swingvy wants to help them with affordable cloud-based software. The South Korea and Malaysia-based startup just raised $1.1 million in seed funding… Read More
Microsoft acquired the popular mobile to do list application Wunderlist back in 2015, and now it’s preparing users for its eventual demise with the release of its new application “To-Do,” announced today. The new app was built by the team behind Wunderlist, and will bring in the favorite elements of that app in the months ahead, Microsoft says. The company also added that… Read More
From the stage of F8, Joaquin Quinonero, Facebook’s Director of Applied Machine Learning, described a new technique the company is using to improve the watching experience for 360 videos. The format is challenging to deliver because of its size, but Facebook is using machine learning to reduce the number of pixels that have to be rendered at any one time. By predicting where a viewer… Read More
On day two of Facebook’s F8 conference, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s CTO showed off designs for two new 360 cameras that the company is going to help push to market. The x24, with 24 cameras, and its little brother the x6, with six cameras, can each capture in six degrees of freedom for more immersive 360 content. Facebook plans to license the designs of the two cameras to… Read More
For Microsoft, the last year or so has been all about infusing its various products with “intelligence.” Those smarts may come in the form of advanced analytics or deep learning, but the main point here is that the company believes these techniques can solve major pain points for its customers, whether they are PowerPoint users or SQL Server admins. Read More
