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As people spend less time out and about and more time daydreaming about when a vaccine will arrive, lifestyle shoes are only gaining traction. One obvious beneficiary is Allbirds , the San Francisco-based maker of comfortable, sustainable kicks that launched in 2016 and quickly became a favorite in Silicon Valley circles before taking off elsewhere. Though the company saw its business slow this year because of the pandemic, its products are now available to purchase in 35 countries and its 20 brick-and-mortar stores are sprinkled throughout the U.S. and Europe, with another outpost in Tokyo and several shops in China. Investors clearly see room for more growth. Allbirds just closed on $100 million in Series E funding at roughly the same $1.6 billion valuation it was assigned after closing on $27 million in Series D funding earlier this year, and blank-check companies have been calling, says cofounder and CEO Joey Zwillinger. He talked with us  earlier this week in a chat that has

Business travel SaaS startup TravelPerk has launched an open API-based platform — letting its customers and partners build custom integration and apps. The initial APIs cover HR and expense management use-cases, but more are set to be added as usage and demand grows. “Applications we’ve seen being built on the platform already include HR functionality (think BambooHR), expense management systems, company payment cards, financial reporting, and ERP,” says co-founder and CEO Avi Meir, discussing the launch. Longer term he says the hope is the platform generates “a huge range” of additional functionality for customers to draw on. “Many of our customers are tech companies full of developers, so we’re confident that if we give them the tools it will be boundless what they can create,” he adds. “In fact, we’re working with one customer already who is using our API to build a custom approvals process because they need a more complex system than the standard offering.” TravelPerk has b

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Company documents appear to show rising levels of human injuries in areas where robots operate. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2EL4B7C

Developer CD Projekt Red had previously said it would not impose mandatory overtime. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2ERmMJ2

Logging and monitoring tends to be an expensive endeavor because of the sheer amount of data involved. Companies are therefore forced to pick and choose what they monitor, limiting what they can see. Coralogix wants to change that by offering a more flexible pricing model, and today the company announced a $25 million Series B and a new real time analytics solution called Streama. First the funding. The round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners and O.G. Tech Ventures with help from existing investors Aleph VC, StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners and 2B Angels. Today’s round, which comes after the startup’s $10 million Series A last November, brings the total to $41.2 million raised, according to the company. When we spoke to Coralogix CEO and co-founder Ariel Assaraf last year regarding the A round, he described his company as more of an intelligent applications performance monitoring with some security logging analytics. Today, the company announced Streama, which has

All staff and participants will wear devices that send an alert when too close to others. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3n5X9W8

Retailers and consumer brands are focused more than ever in their histories on using e-commerce channels to connect with customers: the global health pandemic has disrupted much of their traditional business in places like physical stores, event venues and restaurants, and vending machines, and accelerated the hunt for newer ways to sell goods and services. Today, a startup that’s been helping them build those bridges, specifically to expand into newer markets, is announcing a huge round of funding, underscoring the demand. VTEX , which builds e-commerce solutions and strategies for retailers like Walmart and huge consumer names like AB InBev, Motorola, Stanley Black & Decker, Sony, Walmart, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, has raised $225 million in new funding, valuing the company at $1.7 billion post-money. The funding is being co-led by two investors, Tiger Global and Lone Pine Capital, with Constellation, Endeavour Catalyst and SoftBank also participating. It’s a mix of inve

French startup Memo Bank has unveiled three different plans for its new customers. The company is building a business bank for small and medium companies that generate between €2 million and €50 million in annual turnover. Earlier this year, Memo Bank obtained licenses from the French regulator (ACPR) and the European Central Bank to become a credit institution. It can provide all the services you’d expect from a business bank, from current accounts to credit lines. On paper, Memo Bank’s current accounts look a lot like a software-as-a-service product. There are three different plans. For €49 per month, you get one user account and each additional account costs €10 per month. You get 20 transactions in and out per month, each additional transaction costs €0.40 per transaction. For €149 per month, you can create as many user accounts as you want and you get 200 transactions per month. Once again, additional transactions cost €0.40 per transaction. And if you handle a lot of trans

Hailo, a Tel Aviv-based startup best known for its high-performance AI chips, today announced the launch of its M.2 and Mini PCIe high-AI acceleration modules. Based around its Hailo-8 chip, these new models are meant to be used in edge devices for anything from smart city and smart home solutions to industrial applications. Today’s announcement comes about half a year after the company announced a $60 million Series B funding round . At the time, Hailo said it was raising those new funds to roll out its new AI chips, and with today’s announcement, it’s making good on this promise. In total, the company has now raised $88 million. “Manufacturers across industries understand how crucial it is to integrate AI capabilities into their edge devices. Simply put, solutions without AI can no longer compete,” said Orr Danon, CEO of Hailo, in today’s announcement . “Our new Hailo -8 M.2 and Mini PCIe modules will empower companies worldwide to create new powerful, cost-efficient, innovative AI

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Customers names, addresses, emails and the last four digits of credit cards were among data stolen. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3jhuBGO

While the current version of iOS is iOS 14.0.1, Apple is already testing iOS 14.2. The company released an early beta version of the update yesterday, and it includes a new set of emojis, as Emojipedia spotted . Apple already shared an early look of the new emojis back in July . Overall, there will be dozens of new emojis this year. Emojis will also be more diverse and inclusive than ever with new variations of existing emojis. Earlier this year, the governing body in charge of approving new emojis, the Unicode Consortium, approved 117 new emojis as part of Unicode 13.0. Operating system developers and social network companies, such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and Mozilla, then draw their own versions of the new emojis and release them on their platforms. In this release, you’ll find a transgender flag, a smiling face with tear, pinched fingers, two people hugging, some insects and animals, a disguised face and more. My favorite is arguably disguised face:

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French fintech startup October has raised some fresh capital to invest in small and medium companies on its lending platform. Overall, the company has gathered $300 million (€258 million) from various partners that will be deployed over the next few years. This is not a traditional startup funding round as today’s new investment is specifically designed to finance new loans on its platform. October isn’t selling equity in exchange for capital. October works with small companies in France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany that need a credit line. For small and medium companies, you can apply for a loan and get an answer just a few days later. October evaluates risk before handing out loans thanks to industry-specific data analysis and human analysts. Loans range from €30,000 to €5 million. There’s no personal guarantee and interest rate varies depending on the risk associated with your application. On the other side of the marketplace, individuals can contribute to SME fin

Real time monitoring of commuters' movements helps staff to respond to congestion hot spots. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3jfWGhR

Workforces are getting more global, and people who work day in, day out for organizations don’t always sit day in, day out in a single office, in a single country, to get a job done. Today, one of the startups building HR to help companies provision services for and manage those global workers better is announcing a funding round to capitalise on a surge in business that it has seen in the last year — spurred in no small part by the global health pandemic, the impact it’s had on travel and the way it has focused the minds of companies to get their cloud services and workforce management in order. Papaya Global , an Israeli startup that provides cloud-based payroll, as well as hiring, onboarding and compliance services for organizations that employ full-time, part-time, or contractors outside of their home country, has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Workday Ventures — the corporate investment arm of the HR company — Access Industries (v

In what began as a kind of funny, savvy marketing stunt that has since gained traction, a nearly three-year-old, Santa Monica-based startup that sells water from the Austrian Alps under the brand Liquid Death , has raised $23 million in Series B funding. Backers in the round include an unnamed family office; Convivialité Ventures, which is Pernod Ricard Group’s venture arm; the musician known as Fat Mike; and earlier backer Velvet Sea Ventures. The company, originally incubated with the help of the L.A.-based startup studio Science, has now raised a little more than $34 million altogether. We talked with Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario, who was formerly a West Coast agency exec, not long after he launched the company to the public, and he argued at the time that canned water could give sugary energy drinks like Rockstar, Monster and Red Bull a run for their money if it was also named like a heavy metal act. Indeed, our favorite part of the product has long been its promise to

Customers of a service for rural areas say they have been unable to join video meetings. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2ScIESe

Dr John Wright looks at the kit installed in a Bradford mosque in the hope of limiting the spread of Covid-19. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/33eaHqA

Neuron Mobility , a Singapore-based e-scooter rental startup, announced today that it has added $12 million to its Series A. Led by Square Peg, an Australian venture capital firm and GSR Ventures, this increases the round’s new total to $30.5 million. The company, which operates in Australia and New Zealand in addition to Southeast Asian markets, first announced its Series A in December 2019. Singapore’s Neuron Mobility raises $18.5M to bring its electric scooters to more international markets Part of Neuron Mobility’s growth plans hinges on the increased adoption of electric scooters and bikes during the COVID-19 pandemic . Many people are using their cars less frequently because they are working remotely or there are movement restrictions where they live. When they do go out, electric bikes and scooters offer an alternative to public transportation and ride-hailing services for short trips. Neuron Mobility’s chief executive Zachary Wang said the company raised a Series A+ i

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The venture capital world is rapidly changing, and thank heavens we have two of the smartest VCs on the future of investing, productivity tools, and remote work joining us today to make sense of all the noise. On Extra Crunch Live today, Sarah Cannon and Nina Achadjian, two VC partners based in Index Ventures ’ SF office, will talk about these subjects and more. Plus, we will be taking questions from the audience, so come prepared. Login details are below the fold for EC members, and if you don’t have an Extra Crunch membership , click through to signup. As I wrote when we announced the slate last week: First, we have Nina Achadjian , who officially joined Index Ventures several years ago out of the firm’s SF office and was promoted to partner earlier this year . Achadjian has been searching for and investing into some of the most interesting new collaborative companies that are rebuilding the enterprise from the ground up (which happens to have been a brilliant move given our re

NtechLab , a startup that helps analyze footage captured by Moscow’s 100,000 surveillance cameras , just closed an investment of more than RUB 1 billion ($13 million) to further global expansion. The five-year-old company sells software that recognizes faces, silhouettes and actions on videos. It’s able to do so on a vast scale in real time, allowing clients to react promptly to situations. It’s a key “differentiator” of the company, co-founder Artem Kukharenko told TechCrunch. “There could be systems which can process, for example, 100 cameras. When there are a lot of cameras in a city, [these systems] connect 100 cameras from one part of the city, then disconnect them and connect another hundred cameras in another part of the city, so it’s not so interesting,” he suggested. The latest round, financed by Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and an undisclosed sovereign wealth fund from the Middle East, certainly carries more strategic than financial

As machine learning has grown, one of the major bottlenecks remains labeling things so the machine learning application understands the data it’s working with. Datasaur , a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch, announced a $3.9 million investment today to help solve that problem with a platform designed for machine learning labeling teams. The funding announcement, which includes a pre-seed amount of $1.1 million from last year and $2.8 million seed right after it graduated from Y Combinator in March , included investments from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman. Company founder Ivan Lee says that he has been working in various capacities involving AI for seven years. First when his mobile gaming startup, Loki Studios was acquired by Yahoo! in 2013, and Lee was eventually moved to the AI team, and most recently at Apple. Regardless of the company, he consistently saw a problem around organizing machine learning labeling teams, one that he felt he

The tech giant says its system could be used to scan into shops, offices or stadiums. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3ibJoBC

When people ponder the investment opportunity around collectibles, they probably think about things like wine auctions , sales of very expensive, old cars or baseball cards , or maybe a pocket watch that made an unlikely appearance on an antiques TV show, hoping that their piece of treasured tat might one day also be worth millions. But a startup announcing some funding today is hoping that you might add another kind of more realistic kind of collectibles investment into the mix: taking equity in an objet  that you might not own outright, but might still prove to give you good dividends. New York-based Rally , which has built a platform for owners to list rare collectibles, and for others to take investments in them starting at $1, has raised $17 million in an investment of its own, on the back of reaching 200,000 users investing in some 120 “IPOs”, equivalent to more than $15 million worth of assets, according to the startup. Along with the investment, Rally is also announcing a

By BY MARIA CRAMER from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/3n0XSYq

The game relied on Flash, which will no longer be supported by Facebook after December. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/30z9fgX

Axis Security launched last year with the idea of helping customers to enable contractors and third parties to remotely access a company’s systems in a safe way, but when the pandemic hit, they saw another use case, one which had been on their road map: helping keep systems secure when employees were working from home. Today, the company announced a $32 million Series B investment led by Canaan Partners with participation from existing investors Ten Eleven Ventures and Cyberstarts. Today’s round brings the total raised to $49 million, according to Axis. Gil Azrielant, co-founder and CTO says that the company was able to make the shift to a work from home security scenario so quickly because it had built the product from the ground up to support this vision eventually. The pandemic just accelerated that approach. “We decided to focus on third parties and contractors at first, but we saw where the puck was going and definitely [designed] the infrastructure to become a full-blown, s

After launching its first bottle in 2018, LARQ has drummed up a good deal of interest among consumers looking for ways to wean themselves off of plastic bottles. Last year alone, the Bay Area-based startup managed to sell 75,000 bottles, with help from retail partners like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s. The feat is made more impressive by the fact that — at $99 — the company’s offerings are pretty steep as far as refillable water bottles go. LARQ’s value proposition is in its UV cap. As someone who’s carried around a lot of reusable water bottles since those heady Nalgene days in college, I’ve got some pretty good horror stories about the veritable forest of fungus that’s grown inside. Diligent washing can be particularly difficult with such a narrow receptacle. The company’s products have also garnered investment interest. Today the company announced a $10 million Series A lead by Seventure, with participation from DCM. The round follows an initial seed fund raised back in June of l

It’s been a big year for online learning companies — and it sounds like Thinkific is no exception. The Vancouver-based startup is announcing that it has raised $22 million in new funding. Thinkific different from businesses like MasterClass (which raised $100 million this year) and Skillshare (which raised $66 million ) because it doesn’t create, distribute or monetize online classes itself. Instead, it’s built a platform where anyone can create their own courses, then sell them on their own websites. Co-founder and CEO Greg Smith said that when someone builds a course with Thinkific, it’s usually when they “want control over their brand, they really want to own that customer relationship, they want people coming back to their website … building their own sustainable businesses.” When I asked whether this model puts more of a burden on the creators to promote their courses, Smith said the company aims to help those creators find success, and it has used the platform itself to cr

A first test flight has been carried out in the Lake District. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3kXSh3g

The kit means a paramedic can "fly" up a fell in 90 seconds rather than go 30 minutes by foot. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3n3xtsY

Many have struggled to get to grips with working from home, but would surveillance technology help? from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/3igFPd7

Flightradar24 says it has been hit by sustained attacks over two days, interrupting its service. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2EGIgrN

The Finnish firm will become the largest provider of base stations and antennas to EE's network. from BBC News - Technology https://ift.tt/2Sc5etS

With lockdowns around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the travel industry especially hard. In Asia, however, several startups are adapting by focusing on domestic activities (or “staycations”) instead of international travel. They include Taipei-based KKday , which announced today that it has closed a $75 million Series C led by Cool Japan Fund and the National Development Fund of Taiwan. Existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and MindWorks Capital also returned for the round. Founded in 2014, KKDay will use its new funding on Rezio , a booking management platform it began piloting in March, starting with Japan and Taiwan. Created for tour operators and activity providers, especially those who previously operated mostly offline, Rezio can help reduce operational costs by allowing its users to set up a booking website that works with different payment gateways and manage availability by tracking bookings from different channels. The latter is especially important during the

Meet Multis , a French startup that is building business bank accounts, except that it lets you store, send and receive cryptocurrencies. The startup just raised a $2.2 million seed round. Investors in today’s funding round include White Star Capital, Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, eFounders, Greenfield One and Digital Currency Group. “It’s very complicated to manage crypto as a company. As soon as you want to hold crypto or start paying employees and contractors, it’s a giant mess,” co-founder and CEO Thibaut Sahaghian told me. If you’re familiar with startups working on business banking, such as Qonto , you already know what to expect from Multis. It’s a software-as-a-servie product designed for teams. Image Credits: Multis After creating a Multis account, you can add other team members and set permissions and limits. Behind the scene, Multis is a multisignature Ethereum wallet. The company doesn’t control the keys, which means Multis can’t access your funds. “From a regu