on

Hong Kong exchange chief to step down after failed LSE bid

Charles Li will not seek reappointment when contract expires in October 2021




on

Brazil approves QE to fight coronavirus woes

Central bank of Latin America’s largest economy can now engage in monetary financing




on

Uber Eats delivers, Reliance Jio, future of fashion

A collapse in global car-booking demand was offset by a surge in food delivery at Uber




on

US and China say trade talks on track despite coronavirus tensions

Two sides hold call on ‘phase one’ deal in rare easing of war of words over pandemic




on

Chinese stranded abroad accuse Beijing of abandoning them

Government’s travel ban due to coronavirus makes it nearly impossible for citizens to return home




on

Franklin Templeton tussles with India regulator after freezing funds

US asset manager apologises following comments by company’s president over debt rules




on

It may be too soon to make a big move toward ‘value’ stocks

Cheaper parts of the market can lag a lot more before the current global downturn ends




on

India’s lockdown puts squeeze on mango harvest

Prices fall as farmers struggle to sell fruit seen as national delicacy




on

Saudi sitcom breaks taboos on homosexuality and Israel

Popular programme is sparking debate about social change during holy month of Ramadan




on

Belarus holds military parade despite coronavirus risk

President Lukashenko under fire from neighbouring countries for lax approach to pandemic




on

Cockroach Labs scores $86.6M Series D as scalable database resonates

Cockroach Labs, the NYC enterprise database company, announced an $86.6 million Series D funding round today. The company was in no mood to talk valuations, but was happy to have a big chunk of money to help build on its recent success and ride out the current economic malaise. Altimeter Capital and Bond co-led the […]




on

Sinch acquires SAP’s Digital Interconnect messaging business for $250M

M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense. The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, […]




on

Sleuth raises $3M Seed to bring order to continuous deployment

Sleuth, an early stage startup from three former Atlassian employees, wants to bring some much-needed order to the continuous delivery process. Today, the company announced it has raised a $3 million seed round. ​CRV led the round with participation from angel investors from New Relic, Atlassian and LaunchDarkly. “Sleuth is a deployment tracker built to […]




on

Run:AI brings virtualization to GPUs running Kubernetes workloads

In the early 2000s, VMware introduced the world to virtual servers that allowed IT to make more efficient use of idle server capacity. Today, Run:AI is introducing that same concept to GPUs running containerized machine learning projects on Kubernetes. This should enable data science teams to have access to more resources than they would normally […]




on

GitHub gets a built-in IDE with Codespaces, discussion forums and more

Under different circumstances, GitHub would be hosting its Satellite conference in Paris this week. Like so many other events, GitHub decided to switch Satellite to a virtual event, but that isn’t stopping the Microsoft-owned company from announcing quite a bit of news this week. The highlight of GitHub’s announcement is surely the launch of GitHub […]




on

Confluent introduces scale on demand for Apache Kafka cloud customers

We find ourselves in a time when certain businesses are being asked to scale to levels they never imagined. Sometimes that increased usage comes in bursts, which means you don’t want to pay for permanent extra capacity you might not always need. Today, Confluent introduced a new scale-on-demand feature for its Apache Kafka cloud service […]




on

Box makes quick decision to add new collaboration capabilities in face of pandemic

When the shutdown began six weeks ago, the powers that be at Box sat down for a meeting to discuss the situation. They weren’t in the same room of course. They were like everyone else, separated by the virus, but they saw this as a key moment for Box as a company. They had been […]




on

Harbr emerges from stealth to help build online data marketplaces

Harbr co-founder Anthony Cosgrove has been working with data for over 15 years, so he has an inkling of some of the problems associated with pulling data together in a way that makes it easy for others to consume, whether internally or externally. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he decided to start a company to […]




on

Zoom acquires Keybase to get end-to-end encryption expertise

Zoom announced this morning that it has acquired Keybase, a startup with encryption expertise. It did not reveal the purchase price. Keybase, which has been building encryption products for several years including secure file sharing and collaboration tools, should give Zoom some security credibility as it goes through pandemic demand growing pains. The company has […]




on

Zoom consultant Alex Stamos weighs in on Keybase acquisition

When Zoom started having security issues in March, they turned to former Facebook and Yahoo! Security executive Alex Stamos, who signed on as a consultant to work directly with CEO Eric Yuan. The goal was to build a more cohesive security strategy for the fast-growing company. One of the recommendations that came out of those […]




on

VC’s largest funds make big bets on vertical B2B marketplaces

During the waning days of the first dot-com boom, some of the biggest names in venture capital invested in marketplaces and directories whose sole function was to consolidate information and foster transparency in industries that had remained opaque for decades. The thesis was that thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger […]




on

Health APIs usher in the patient revolution we have been waiting for

Rish Joshi Contributor Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT. More posts by this contributor Health APIs usher in the […]




on

Microsoft and AWS exchange poisoned pen blog posts in latest Pentagon JEDI contract spat

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected […]




on

Oakland Startup, The History Project, Raises $2M To Build Digital Time Capsules of Family, Personal Histories

After years of working in mobile advertising, founder Niles Lichtenstein discovered a box of records from his late father. That compelled him to start putting together memories and online histories earlier, by documenting his mother’s life history and how he first met his wife. That developed into an interactive timeline where he collected songs from […]




on

Robots To Eat All The Jobs? Hackers, Policy Wonks Collaborate On A Basic Income Createathon This Weekend

In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman have spoken up in favor of a universal basic income that would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce […]




on

Airbnb Pledges Transparency, Education To Fight Commercial Hosting, But Provides Little Detail

In response to calls for stronger action on hosts that aren’t casual users, Airbnb said it would start sharing some data with governments and getting hosts to agree to a policy of listing only their permanent homes. Here’s what Brian Chesky said in a post today: Today, we’re taking the next step to turn these principles into […]




on

Regalii, A Startup In NYC’s Washington Heights, Uncovers Where Immigrants’ Remittances Really Go

It’s not a converted industrial warehouse in Brooklyn. Or a stately, century-old building in the Flatiron. But YC-backed Regalii’s atypical office location up in the Dominican-heavy Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan has given it plenty of insights into its working-class immigrant customer base. The startup, co-founded by several Latino founders who personally knew the hassles of sending money home, […]




on

Bucket, A Travel Planner That Automatically Creates Recommendation Lists, Expands Nationwide

Early Facebook employee and longtime travel aficionado Julia Lam began studying consumer travel habits over a year ago to see how people planned their vacations and business trips. What she found was that people were often using a mess of Chrome tabs and text files. So she started Bucket with former Facebook engineer John Sichi […]




on

Rwanda’s Not-So-Improbable Ambition To Be A Startup Hub of Africa

It’s an odd feeling to come from California, one of the world’s most prodigious economies where the infrastructure and public systems are simultaneously falling apart in plain view, and arrive in the tiny, landlocked East African country of Rwanda. The first thing you notice is how exceptionally clean the streets of Kigali appear. That’s because of a ban on non-biodegradable […]




on

Elder Care Startup Honor Makes Contractors Full-Time Workers With Equity

Honor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company focused on caring for seniors as Baby Boomers tip over into retirement, is making its contractor workforce into a full-time one. The care workers, called CarePros within the company, will have the potential for stock options. “I really don’t want two classes of people in our company. Everyone is in it […]




on

A Long Game

“When do you think people in the Bay Area started to realize that you could make more money from tech than from real estate?” Jed Kolko asked me. We were sitting at Ma-velous, a coffee shop frequented by San Francisco’s political movers two blocks from City Hall and kitty corner from Twitter’s headquarters in the Shorenstein-owned former San Francisco Furniture Mart.




on

With voter verification, Brigade becomes a more legitimate platform for political debate

Kim-Mai Cutler Contributor Kim-Mai Cutler is an operating partner for Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm and was previously a journalist covering technology, finance and policy issues at TechCrunch -- best-known for her long-form work on the Bay Area. More posts by this contributor The outlook for Bay Area startup space in 2017 OpenVote launches […]




on

UK election will not settle Brexit

Fundamental questions about the country’s direction will remain unanswered




on

Rights and wrongs of Macron’s vision for Europe

The EU should do more to defend itself, without expecting the US to underwrite the peace




on

A saint among the sinners of the Afghan war

The death of a doctor who transformed Afghan lives contrasts with revelations of US ignorance




on

Britain cannot rely on a special relationship

Boris Johnson stood up to Washington over Huawei, but he badly needs a US trade deal




on

Merkel and Macron: Europe’s missed chance

German and French leaders’ hesitation could be fatal




on

Coronavirus lays a political minefield

Hopefully, its defeat will show the worth of intelligent and honest government




on

Johnson’s covert Brexit plan is self-isolation

The real story is that all traces of the EU are to be expunged from the public realm




on

National action cannot fix a global pandemic

US, China and Europe must work together to defeat coronavirus




on

How coronavirus is remaking democratic politics

The superficial conclusion is that it will be a gift to populists and authoritarians 




on

The danger in the coronavirus recovery will be inertia

A make-do-and-mend approach will not be enough — we need a societal transformation




on

Johnson can now redeem his debt to the NHS

Covid-19 and his brush with mortality present the UK prime minister with a unique chance




on

How politics thwarted the UK’s Covid-19 response

Ministers failed to grasp the threat as Boris Johnson tried to swerve a tough response




on

Stilt, which provides financial services for immigrants, raises $7.5 million seed round

Stilt, a Y Combinator alum that provides financial services for immigrants without Social Security numbers or credit reports, announced today that it has closed a $7.5 million seed round. It also launched FDIC-insured pre-approved global bank accounts today. The startup has raised equity from investors including Liron Petrushka; Hillsven Capital; Streamlined Ventures; Gokul Rajaram; Bragiel […]




on

Longtime VC Todd Chaffee of IVP says late-stage scene is now ‘M&A world’

Todd Chaffee has long been one of the most senior members of the late-stage venture firm Institutional Venture Partners. Chaffee joined IVP in 2000 after logging six years at Visa, and went on to lead rounds in numerous prominent later-stage companies, many (but not all) of which have gone public, including Coinbase, Compass, Klarna, Kayak, […]




on

Workstream, a platform for deskless work, raises $10 million to serve local businesses

Deskless workers make up 80% of the global workforce, but to Desmond Lim, that job title is his entire world. Lim grew up in Singapore and saw his father wake up every morning, six days a week, at 5 a.m. to start his job as a driver. Lim and his mom, who worked as a […]




on

VC’s largest funds make big bets on vertical B2B marketplaces

During the waning days of the first dot-com boom, some of the biggest names in venture capital invested in marketplaces and directories whose sole function was to consolidate information and foster transparency in industries that had remained opaque for decades. The thesis was that thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger […]




on

Health APIs usher in the patient revolution we have been waiting for

Rish Joshi Contributor Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT. More posts by this contributor Health APIs usher in the […]




on

Owkin raises $25 million as it builds a secure network for healthcare analysis and research

Imagine a model of collaborative research and development among hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, universities and other research institutions where no one shared any actual data. That’s the dream of the new New York-based startup Owkin, which has raised $25 million in fresh financing from investors, including Bpifrance Large Venture, Cathay Innovation and MACSF (the French Pension […]