Saturday, June 10, 2017

Postmates acqhires Secret CEO David Byttow’s startup Bold

 The founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most famous flameouts, anonymous social app Secret, is the new product lead for Postmates’ app. After Secret shut down and gave investors back their money, David Byttow went on to raise a $1 million seed round from Index to launch a blog publishing tool for enterprises called Bold. Today Bold was acqhired by Postmates, Byttow confirmed to… Read More

How augmented reality could save tech from itself

 Indeed, as technology marches relentlessly forward, it feels like many of today’s positions could soon be displaced. But just as with past technological inflection points — whether the steam engine, the telegraph, the computer or even industrial robots — technology will always give as much as it takes, as it always has. That matters little to people who have lost their… Read More

Thursday, June 8, 2017

Shedul raises $6 million for hair salon booking

 Beauty parlors manage a lot of appointments, but about half of them are still using pen and paper, estimates Shedul. The startup is trying to change that, by offering scheduling software for the the salon and spa industry. And it’s been catching on because it’s free. Now they’re raising $6 million led by Dubai’s Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP), with participation… Read More

Facebook is speeding up training for visual recognition models

 Every minute spent training a deep learning model is a minute not doing something else and in today’s fast paced world of research, that minute is worth a lot. Facebook published a paper this morning detailing its personal approach to this problem. The company says its managed to reduce the training time of a ResNet-50 deep learning model on ImageNet from 29 hours to one. Facebook managed… Read More

Algolia raises $53 million for its search engine API

 French startup Algolia just raised a $53 million Series B round led by Accel, a couple of years after raising $18.3 million with… Accel also leading the round. So it looks like it’s a love story between the VC firm and the software-as-a-service startup. The reason is quite simple. Algolia is still growing like crazy with its annual recurring revenue doubling every year.… Read More

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Scout RFP raises $15.5 million to help companies manage purchases

 Running a company is expensive. And it’s more than just the product and employee costs that add up. From furniture to electronics, there’s a lot of day-to-day corporate spending that can be hard to keep tabs on. That’s why procurement software has become a big business. Investors are betting that Scout RFP will emerge as a leader in the space. Menlo Ventures is leading a… Read More

Illumio, a specialist in segmented security, raises $125M at $1b+ valuation

 Another day, another major round of funding for a security startup, underscoring just how active the area of IT protection is right now — both in terms of business need and as an investment opportunity. Today, Illumio — a startup that provides data center and cloud security services, monitoring and protecting individual applications and processes within an enterprise network by… Read More