Long-time collaborators Tencent Holdings and JD.com have each bought minority stakes in Better Life, a Chinese retail conglomerate. According to a filing made on Friday by Better Life, which is traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Tencent paid 886.9 million RMB (about $140 million) for a 6% stake, while JD.com took a 5% stake for 739.1 million RMB ($117 million). Read More
from TechCrunch
It’s official, the Dropbox IPO filing is here. Going public is a huge milestone for Dropbox and has been one of the most anticipated tech IPOs for several years now. We knew that it had already filed confidentially, but the company has now unveiled its filing, meaning the actual IPO is likely very soon, probably late March. The filing shows that Dropbox had $1.1 billion in revenue for… Read More
from TechCrunch
WeChat is far and away the biggest messaging platform in China at the moment, and that is helping to drive a push among the smaller players to get together for better scale. Today, Momo, the Chinese location-based social networking app that has more recently made a big push into dating services and is traded on Nasdaq with a market cap of around $6 billion, announced that it has… Read More
from TechCrunch
What if instead of blasting cargo into space on a rocket, we could fling it into space using a catapult? That’s the big, possibly crazy, possibly genius idea behind SpinLaunch. It was secretly founded in 2014 by Jonathan Yaney, who built solar-powered drone startup Titan Aerospace and sold it to Google. Now TechCrunch has learned from three sources that SpinLaunch is raising a massive… Read More
from TechCrunch
If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are basic tasks that can free up a human rep to handle the more difficult matters, but it can be exasperating when there is no easy way to talk to a person. Agent IQ, a startup that has developed customer service bots, acknowledges… Read More
from TechCrunch
Feature Labs, a startup with roots in research begun at MIT, officially launched today with a set of tools to help data scientists build machine learning algorithms more quickly. Co-founder and CEO Max Kantor says the company has developed a way to automate “feature engineering,” which is often a time consuming and manual process for data scientists. “Feature Labs helps… Read More
from TechCrunch
Few problems are as much of a headache for the modern corporate worker as buying things on the company’s dime. Companies are loathe to hand out credit cards to everyone in the building, but they also want their employees to do your job without having to fill out six forms in triplicate to requisition a pencil. They also want to control spending and track who bought that $2,000 bottle… Read More
from TechCrunch
KKDay, a startup from Taiwan that operates a platform that helps travelers find local activities, has raised $10.5 million. The funding round was led by Japanese travel operator H.I.S. with participation from existing backer MindWorks Ventures, the Hong Kong-based VC. KKDay is one of a number of services that cater to Asia’s burgeoning regional tourism market. The idea is to allow… Read More
from TechCrunch
Tinyclues, the French startup that offers an intelligent campaign marketing solution that uses AI to help push the right products to the right customers, has closed $18 million in Series B investment. Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers Alven, Elaia Partners, and ISAI. Read More
from TechCrunch
ParkBee, a Netherlands-founded startup that lets private car parks monetize underutilized spaces by making them bookable to the public, has picked up €5 million in new funding Read More
from TechCrunch