Pendulum helps companies, governments and other organizations track harmful narratives on social media platforms and elsewhere on the web. The company today announced that it has raised a $5.9 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Cercano Management and others. The service was incubated inside Madrona Venture Labs. “Pendulum’s platform applies […]
Peter Reinhardt leaves Twilio to run his carbon mitigation startup
Peter Reinhardt spent the last decade as CEO at Segment helping to build the customer data platform, selling it to Twilio for $3.2 billion along the way. Today, Reinhardt announced he was leaving Twilio to be full-time CEO at Charm Industrial, a carbon mitigation startup he co-founded in 2018. Reinhardt expressed mixed emotions about leaving, […]
Abbott tells CES it’s getting into consumer biowearables
US medical device maker, Abbott, is moving into making general purpose consumer biosensing wearables. The company has been making continuous glucose monitor (CGM) hardware for diabetes management for years (since 2014) — but in a healthtech keynote at CES yesterday, Abbott’s chairman and CEO, Robert B Ford, announced it’s developing a new line of consumer […]
Nigerian ethical credit-recovery fintech Bfree secures $1.7M, expands to Asia, Europe, South America and across Africa
Bfree, a Nigerian credit management fintech has embarked on global expansion after raising $1.7 million in a pre-Series A round, to tap the opportunities in emerging markets, where digital lending apps have recently sprung up in droves. Funds that participated in the latest round included 4Di Capital, Octerra Capital, VestedWorld, Voltron Capital, Logos Ventures, and […]
Roblox pauses service in China as it takes ‘important transitory actions’
On December 8, Roblox’s Chinese version LuoBuLeSi, published and operated by Tencent, abruptly closed down its server five months after it launched on iOS and Android. Many users, taken by surprise, took to Chinese social media to complain about the short notice. What users had been playing was in fact an “archive-deleting test version,” LuoBuLeSi […]
Startups at CES showed that age-tech can help everyone
Age-tech startups at this year’s CES demonstrated the potential breadth of the sector. If tech can help an older person live more comfortably, it can also help out a lot of other people. After all, the usefulness of things like mobility aids, health monitoring platforms and long-term financial planning aren’t limited to the elderly. Yesterday, […]
Daily Crunch: France’s data watchdog bites Google and Facebook over cookie consent violations
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After talking to marketing leaders for a year, here’s my advice for CEOs
Marketing makes or breaks a company. When I am asked what is the No. 1 thing that I would do to help a company scale massively, it is focusing on marketing. Period.
Twitter wants you to retweet with TikTok-like reaction videos
Everybody wants a little of that TikTok magic. To that end, Twitter is rolling out a new test feature that invites people to post video reactions to tweets instead of quote-tweeting the old-fashioned way. It’s a very un-Twitterlike choice, but the company has been actively experimenting with new products for a while now, including the […]
Khosla Ventures debuts first opportunity fund
Managing partner Samir Kaul told TechCrunch that the fund gives the firm an opportunity to retain its pro rata and double down on earlier investments.