Turkey’s Spyke raises $55M in a seed round to bring a social twist to casual mobile games

Istanbul has become a city to watch when it comes to casual gaming startups, boosted by the likes of Peak (acquired by Zynga for $1.8 billion) and Dream (valued at $1 billion in a funding round last year). Now, a new startup is announcing a major round of funding to make its own mark on […]

Jack Dorsey dials in on his dream job — bitcoin missionary

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week, we took a break from contextualization for some guides to consumption. This week, we’re looking at what’s happening in the mind of one Jack Dorsey. You can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny. the big thing While […]

NFT music rights startup Royal banks $55M investment led by a16z Crypto

Less than three months after announcing a $16 million seed round led by Founders Fund and Paradigm, NFT music rights startup Royal has raised another major bout of funding, banking a $55 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto investment arm. The startup partners with musicians and allows users to buy NFTs which represent collective […]

Ex-Apple designer’s ultra-premium audio hardware startup Syng raises $48.75 million

Audio startup Syng has been building on quite a bit more hype than the average fresh hardware startup, largely because of the team behind it. Founder and CEO Chris Stringer was Jony Ive’s first hire at Apple and worked at the company for 21 years. In an interview, Stringer referred to the first time he […]

Vyne raises $15.5M seed round to grow its merchant-focused open banking solutions

Open banking — a new approach to payments and other financial services that disrupts traditional card-based infrastructure by linking directly into banks — is having a moment. On the heels of open banking startup TrueLayer hitting a $1 billion valuation in its latest round after seeing strong traction for its services, today another open banking […]

Facebook’s CTO to step down after 13 years at the company

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer just announced that he will stepping down from the role next year and transition to a part-time position as a “Senior Fellow” at the company. It’s one of the biggest leadership departures for Facebook in recent memory. He will be replaced in the role by long-time executive Andrew Bosworth […]

OpenSea admits incident as top exec is accused of trading NFTs on insider information

The “eBay of NFTs” is running into a scandal as it admits one of its employees traded the crypto digital assets using insider information from the platform. Yesterday, a top executive at NFT platform OpenSea was accused of front-running sales on the platform, purchasing pieces from NFT collections before they were featured on the homepage […]

Early-stage benchmarks for young cybersecurity companies

Entrepreneurs require guideposts when building large companies, and customer and revenue expectations can be established by looking at what successful cybersecurity companies have accomplished.