LendUp has built business providing personal loans to customers that traditional financial institutions wouldn’t touch. As it looks to expand into credit cards and other services, the company has raised some strategic funding from PayPal and also has expanded its executive ranks. LendUp wants to provide better financial products for the people who most need them, serving […]
Ah, another day, another stealth mobile gaming startup getting funded by Shakira. LA-based Wonder announced today that it has closed a Series A round of funding led by Grishin Robotics and TCL Communication Holdings Ltd.; Wonder announced they had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in July of last year, but we now know that they have […]
Teamwork makes the dream work, as the saying goes. And in the case of Houzz, the founding team of Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen have made that dream work in spades. The husband-and-wife duo has built a massive startup out of what started as a online look book for their own home improvement project in […]
Amazon’s Alexa voice platform has now passed 15,000 skills — the voice-powered apps that run on devices like the Echo speaker, Echo Dot, newer Echo Show and others. The figure is up from the 10,000 skills Amazon officially announced back in February, which had then represented a 3x increase from September. The new 15,000 figure […]
Technically, Facebook can’t suspend people’s accounts just for sharing 50-plus false, sensational or clickbaity news articles per day. It doesn’t want to trample anyone’s right to share. But there’s nothing stopping it from burying those links low in the News Feed so few people ever see them. Today Facebook announced an algorithm change that does […]
LeEco wanted too much too fast, and its overzealousness caught up with it almost immediately. Chairman Jia “YT” Yueting has long acknowledged the company’s cash problems in the wake of its rapid growth, but while PR has tried to backtrack and otherwise spin his statements in the past, new comments this week paint an even […]
Google today is more formally taking the wraps off its internal incubator, Area 120, with the launch of a dedicated website, alongside the launch of one of the program’s more interesting projects to date: a way to advertise within VR. The new experiment, which is simply called Advr, involves a cube-like ad format which allows video […]
Google News is looking different today. That’s because Google today launched a major redesign of its news aggregation site that brings it in line with the rest of its services and removes a lot of the clutter that accumulated over the years. After years of sticking with essentially the same design, nobody was going to […]
An augmented reality headset startup founded by former Valve employees and funded by Android co-creator Andy Rubin’s Playground Global is shutting down after it failed to receive further investment, Polygon reports. CastAR was building a headset device that projected holographic images into the field-of-view of a user, similar to products being built by companies like […]
If you need to transfer a couple hundred megs to a coworker or friend across the country, you aren’t short on options. In fact, options are thick on the ground, and all have their own issues. Don’t you wish you could just speak a few magic words and send stuff directly to them, no intermediate […]
Okay, European startup fans. You’ve procrastinated long enough. Tomorrow, we’ll be releasing a batch of 50 pairs of tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2017, but in order to take advantage of this limited-time 2-4-1 opportunity, you’ll need to sign up today. Signing up is pretty dang easy, if we do say so ourselves. To do so, […]
Alibaba is doubling down on Southeast Asia after it announced a deal to pay close to $1 billion to raise its stake in e-commerce firm Lazada from 51 percent to 83 percent. The Chinese firm made an initial $1 billion investment in April 2016 at a valuation of $1.5 billion — this second deal raises that […]