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That feeling when you're trying to take a vacation because your parents are in town but then Elon Musk strikes a deal to buy Twitter.
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Elon Musk has already lined up a a new chief executive for Twitter, according to Reuters sources, who tell the outlet he mentioned as much when pitching banks earlier this month. Reuters reports that Musk also mentioned features to grow business revenue, including new ways to make money out of tweets that contain important information or go viral, and that he brought up charging a fee when a third-party website wants to quote or embed a tweet from verified individuals or organizations. Bloomberg meanwhile reported today that
Musk specifically discussed job cuts as part of his pitch to the banks.
Apple is doing well, but it made clear today that its business has cooled off a bit, reporting that profit rose 6% to $25 billion in its second fiscal quarter, a slowdown from the double-digit growth in each of the previous five quarters. Apple CEO Tim Cook also cautioned that the Covid outbreak in China will curtail demand and impair production of iPhones, iPads and Macs. The NYTimes has more here.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, the country has faced an unprecedented barrage of hacking activity. “Russia is typically considered one of those countries where cyberattacks come from and not go to,” says Stefano De Blasi, a cyber-threat intelligence analyst tells Wired.
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Ayar Labs, a seven-year-old, Emeryville, Ca.-based chip-to-chip optical connectivity company, has raised $130 million in funding led by Boardman Bay Capital Management. Other backers in the round (and there were a lot of them) include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NVIDIA, Applied Ventures, Intel Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures. More here.
Divergent Technologies, an eight-year-old, L.A.-based car manufacturing startup that's 3D printing car parts, has raised $160 million in Series C funding from Tom Steyer, former Goldman Sachs president John Thornton, and others. Dot.LA has more here.
Inventa, a 15-month-old, São Paulo-based B2B wholesale marketplace for shopkeepers, raised $55 million in Series B funding led by Greylock (marking its first investment in Brazil). Other investors in the round included Greenoaks, Andreessen Horowitz, Monashees, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, and half a dozen other backers. Founder and CEO Marcos Salama was previously a GM with Rappi. Bloomberg has more
here.
Kelonia Therapeutics, a newish, Cambridge-based vivo gene delivery biotech company, has raised $50 million in Series A funding from investors including Alta Partners, Horizons Ventures, Venrock, and others. EndPoints News has more here.
Movable Ink, a 12-year-old, New York-based company that uses AI to personalize marketing content, has raised $55 million in Series D funding led by Silver Lake Waterman, with participation from Contour Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and others. TechCrunch has more here.
OneFootball, a 14-year-old, Berlin-based soccer media platform, has raised $300 million in Series D funding led by Liberty City Ventures. Other backers in the round included Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, Senator Investment Group, and numerous others. CoinDesk has more here.
Sun King, a 15-year-old, Nairobi, Kenya-based company that provides solar energy products to off-grid homes in Africa and Asia, has raised $260 million in Series D funding led by BeyondNetZero. Other backers in the round included M&G and Arch Emerging Markets Partners. TechCrunch has more here.
Vivian Health, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based health care jobs marketplace, has raised $60 million in funding led by Thoma Bravo, with participation from IAC and Collaborative Fund. FierceHealthcare has more here.
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| Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings |
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Bounce, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup building a network of short-term storage locations by partnering with local retailers, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. TechCrunch has more here.
CommandBar, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based software development company whose search interface sits on top of web-based apps so that users can access functionalities by searching simple keywords, has raised $19 million in Series A funding co-led by Insight Partners and Itai Tsiddon, the co-founder of Lightricks. Other backers include Thrive Capital and BoxGroup. TechCrunch has more here.
Doppler, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based data encryption and management platform, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by CRV, with participation from Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Y Combinator. TechCrunch has more here.
Exafunction, an 11-month-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based startup that says it's developing a platform to abstract away the complexity of using hardware to train AI systems, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Greenoaks, with participation from Founders Fund. The outfit previously raised $3 million in seed funding. TechCrunch has more here.
Hour One, a three-year-old, New York and Tel Aviv-based AI video generation company that says it creates synthetic characters that look and sound like real people, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners. Calcalist has more here.
Lemon Water, a nearly five-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based lemon-flavored, sugarless water brand, has raised $31 million in Series A funding from Beechwood Capital, Goat Rodeo Capital, Melitas Ventures, NNS Capital, Trousdale Ventures and Beyoncé. The outfit has now raised $42.2 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.
Mozart Data, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based data platform, raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Goldcrest Capital, Spearhead, Apollo Projects, and Valor Equity Partners. TechCrunch explains what the company does here.
Radius, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based online real estate brokerage that features a social network of real estate agents, live audio chat rooms, a referral marketplace to receive referrals, and a service that vets leads, has raised $13 million in Series A funding led by Crosscut Ventures and NFX. More here.
Sealed, a 10-year-old, New York-based company that designs, manages and finances home weatherization and electrification projects, has raised $29.5 million from earlier investors, including Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, Fifth Wall, CityRock, Cyrus, and KeyFrame Capital. TechCrunch has more here.
Vanilla, three-year-old, L.A.-based estate and wealth management platform, has raised $30 million in Series B funding round led by Insight Partners. More here.
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Cartwheel, a two-year-old, L.A.-based delivery management platform for restaurants, retailers, couriers, and more, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Moonshots Capital. Other backers include Chingona Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, Act One, and Pitbull Capital. Restaurant News has more here.
CytoTronics, a new Boston-based biotech spinout of Harvard that's building a next-generation complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-powered drug discovery platform, has raised $9.25 million in initial seed funding. Anzu Partners led the round, joined by Milad Alucozai of BoxOne Ventures and (unnamed) institutional investors. More here.
Glorang, a five-year-old, Seoul, South Korea-based edtech startup that offers after-school classes and extracurricular activities via online for students between the ages of 3 and 18, has raised $10 million in Series A funding co-led by Korea Investment Partners and Murex Partners, with participation from Japan’s Pksha Capital. The company has now raised $18 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.
Lucid Green, a four-year-old, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based cannabis supply chain platform, has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Gron Ventures, with participation from Gotham Green Partners. More here.
Our Happy Company, a Singapore-based NFT music platform whose cofounders include singer John Legend and Twitch cofounder Kevin Lin, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Infinity Ventures Crypto and Animoca Brands. Decrypt has more here.
Taelor, an eight-month-old, San Francisco-based menswear rental subscription service that uses AI to select clothes for people based on their personal goals and preferences, has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding led by Bling Capital. WWD has more here.
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January Ventures, a four-year-old, Boston-based early-stage venture firm that says it's designed to replace the "friends and family round," has raised $21 million in capital commitments for its second fund, including from institutional LPs that include Wellington Management, Bank of America, IDEAL Investments, and The Kapor Foundation. TechCrunch has more here.
Flare Capital Partners, an eight-year-old, Boston-based venture capital firm, has raised $350 million for a fund focused on healthcare technology companies. Flare had $255 million for its second fund in 2019. More here.
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G/O Media, the owner of websites that once belonged to the blog empire Gawker Media, has acquired the business news site Quartz, the latest deal in a wave of consolidation among digital publishers. The companies aren't disclosing the deal price, though the New York Times suggests Quartz's options were dwindling, with the outfit losing $6.9 million last year on revenue of $11.1 million.
Lumiata, a nine-year-old, healthcare-specific AI platform, was acquired by Somatus, a six-year-old kidney care company. Lumiata had raised $45 million over the years, including from defy.vc, Allegis Capital, Sandbox Industries, Blue Venture Fund, and Khosla Ventures. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
PullRequest, a five-year-old startup that came out of Y Combinator in 2017 and helps software developers by providing an external code review team, was acquired by HackerOne, a bug bounty company. PullRequest had raised roughly $13 million, per Crunchbase data; terms of the deal aren't being disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.
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Bausch + Lomb, the contact lens maker, has filed to raise as much as $840 million in an IPO, a long-awaited deal that may show green shoots in U.S. capital markets, Bloomberg optimistically notes. More here.
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Courtesy of the WSJ: Elon Musk sold roughly $4 billion worth of Tesla stock in the two days after agreeing to buy Twitter for $44 billion, according to regulatory filings made public late today. He reported selling a total of more than 4.4 million shares on Tuesday and Wednesday at prices between around $870 and $1,000 a share, the filings show. Musk is Tesla’s largest shareholder and owned roughly 17% of the company before this week’s sales, according to FactSet. The Tesla shares are down more 20% since April 4, after Musk balked at joining the Twitter board, notes the Journal.
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Snap is taking another stab at hardware with a selfie drone called Pixy that follows users around to capture video that can be sent back to Snapchat. CEO Evan Spiegel says his big bet is that people would rather spend
time in the real world than an entirely virtual one.
Airbnb is going all in on the “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy that much of the business world has been forced to adopt, committing to full-time remote work for most employees and a handful of perks, like 90 days of international work/travel. Airbnb began aggressively subleasing its office space in San Francisco during the pandemic.
Robinhood said today that its revenue fell to $299 million in the first quarter, a decline of 43% from the same period last year and the company’s fifth consecutive quarterly drop.
Google now lets you request the removal of personal contact information from search results; here's the way to do it.
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A 311-liter bottle of 32-year-old Macallan single-malt called The Intrepid hits the auction block next month. The bottle is the world’s largest in volume; at nearly 6 feet, it's also the tallest.
Former Disney honcho Michael Eisner is asking $225 million for his cliff-top compound in Malibu. If the deal closes for that amount, the home will be the most expensive ever sold in California, breaking the state record that Marc Andreessen set when he paid $177 million for his Malibu compound late last year.
Really big bags. 👀
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