While camouflage might be key to surviving in the wild, in the crowded SaaS marketplace, it’s all about standing out.
Picsart raises $130M from SoftBank, becomes unicorn on the back of its visual creator tools
Picsart COO Tammy Nam said it was now past a $100 million run rate, and that it was worth more than $1 billion after the SoftBank round. That was the extent of our ability to mine her for details.
Bright raises $15M for its live video platform that lets you learn from top creators
Bright, a live video platform that lets fans engage in live conversations with their favorite creators and celebs, has raised $15 million in new funding, the company announced today. The round was co-led by co-founder and talent manager Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, the fund he founded with Ashton Kutcher. RIT Capital and Regah Ventures also […]
AI voice, synthetic speech company LOVO gets $4.5M pre-series A funding
“Voice skins” have become a very popular feature for AI-based voice assistants, to help personalize some of the more anodyne aspects of helpful, yet also kind of bland and robotic, speaking voices you get on services like Alexa. Now a startup that is building voice skins for different companies to use across their services, and […]
Workera.ai, a precision upskilling platform, taps $16M to close enterprise skills gap
Finding the right learning platform can be difficult, especially as companies look to upskill and reskill their talent to meet demand.
Tuna raises $3M to address complexity of e-commerce payments in Latin America
Tuna is on a mission to “fine tune” the payments space in Latin America.
A16Z leads investment in Firemaps, a marketplace for home hardening against wildfires
Wildfires are burning in countries all around the world. California is dealing with some of the worst wildfires in its history (a superlative that I use essentially every year now) with the Caldor fire and others blazing in the state’s north. Meanwhile, Greece and other Mediterranean nations have been fighting fires for weeks to bring […]
Virtual clinic Hey Jane raises $2.2M to solve for state anti-abortion legislation
The idea for the company was driven by Missouri almost closing its one abortion clinic.
Sugar raises $2.5M in seed funding to connect apartment residents
Sugar, a startup that aims to turn apartment buildings into “interactive communities,” has closed on $2.5 million in seed funding. A slew of investors participated in the financing, including MetaProp, Agya Ventures, Concrete Rose, Debut Capital, The Community Fund, Consonance Capital, Lightspeed Scout Fund and Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH syndicate. Also participating were angel investors such […]
Celebrity chef Michael Chernow whips up new lifestyle brand, Kreatures of Habit, raises $2.2M
Michael Chernow is already known as a restaurateur, chef, television host and entrepreneur, but now he can also add lifestyle and wellness guru to that list.