Greetings from Chittorgarh, one of my stops on a two-week excursion through Goa and Rajasthan, India. I’ve been a little too busy exploring, photographing cows and monkeys and eating a lot of delicious food to keep up with *all* the tech news, but I’ve still got the highlights. For starters, if you haven’t heard yet, […]
Shawn Xu Contributor There has never been a better time to start, join or fund a startup as a student. Young founders who want to start companies while still in school have an increasing number of resources to tap into that exist just for them. Students that want to learn how to build companies can […]
“KP used to be a small team doing hands-on company building. We’re moving away from being this institution with multiple products and really just focusing on early-stage venture capital,” Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman tells me. Indeed, 47 years after its founding, the storied venture fund is going “back to the future” with today’s announcement […]
Nine years after launching its online magazine, and three years after diversifying into the subscription box business, FabFitFun has raised $80 million in a growth round of funding, led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from its previous investors Upfront Ventures and NEA. The Los Angeles-based company has steadily expanded its retail and lifestyle empire through […]
One way to gain ground on a competitor is to poach their best executives. We’ve seen it time and time again, from high-level Tesla employees fleeing for Lyft or Apple stealing Google’s AI talent. DoorDash, a well-funded food delivery unicorn, is familiar with this method of staffing. The company announced this morning that it has poached […]
Slack is losing its chief product officer, April Underwood, ahead of a direct listing expected in 2019. Tamar Yehoshua, a long-time Google vice president, has been tapped to fill Underwood’s shoes as Slack’s new product chief. Underwood joined Slack, the provider of workplace communication tools, in 2015 as its head of platform after a five-year […]
Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory. Aurora, the developer of a full-stack […]
South Korea has got its third unicorn startup after Viva Republica, the company beyond popular payment app Toss, announced it has raised an $80 million round at a valuation of $1.2 billion. This new round is led by U.S. firms Kleiner Perkins and Ribbit Capital, both of which cut their first checks for Korea with this […]
Telemedicine startup Nurx — once dubbed the “Uber for birth control” — has launched a direct-to-consumer Human papillomavirus (HPV) testing kit. The addition means its customers can in the comfort of their own homes test for the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. and a cause of genital warts and cervical cancer. The Y Combinator […]
It pays to have the most popular game in the world. Epic Games, the creators of the runaway gaming smash hit Fortnite, have raised $1.25 billion in a new round of financing. via GIPHY It’s been 20 years since Epic Games first released its Unreal game development engine in concert with its first person shooter, […]