Here's what we know about what's going on inside the world of the fascinating legal cannabis industry right now, from the largest publicly traded companies, to venture-backed startups, to the rapidly shifting federal policies around the drug.
JobTeaser, the graduate recruitment and career guidance platform, has raised £45 million in new funding to help it expand its careers service to more students across the U.K. and Europe.
The investment is led by Highland Europe, with continued backing from existing investors Alven, Idinvest Partners, Seventure Partners and Korelya Capital. It brings the total amount raised to £61 million since the company was founded all the way back in 2008.
JobTeaser says the funding will be used to expand JobTeaser’s partner network of schools and universities across the U.K. and Ireland.
That company’s aim is to become the official careers website for its education partners. The promise is that it can connect more students and graduates to the careers they seek and in turn help corporates and organisations plug gaps in the talent and skills they need.
“We believe the transition between University and the professional world is very difficult for young talent,” Adrien Ledoux, co-founder of JobTeaser, tells me. “A lot of young talent feel lost when it comes to choosing their career; in the survey that we conducted with WISE this year, we discovered that 9 out of 10 young people in Europe want better support to define their career choices.”
Ledoux says JobTeaser’s goal is to transform the way students and recent graduates find work by helping them choose a career path that fits with their aspirations and ambitions. “We are convinced that if each young talent puts their energy into the right job, all of society benefits from it,” he says
To achieve this mission, JobTeaser has built a platform that combines bespoke career guidance with internships, job opportunities and ongoing career and interview support.
In order to reach the largest number of students and recent graduates, JobTeaser provides its “Career Centre by JobTeaser” platform free of charge to universities. It then charges businesses a fee to advertise jobs to that captive audience.
“Businesses can access talent at the right place (the university) and at the right time (when they are looking for their first job),” explains Ledoux. “Our platform allows businesses to pay once to multi-post their job ads and employer-branded content in a single click, which then goes out to all of JobTeaser’s partner higher education institutions.”
It’s this business model that allows JobTeaser to reach businesses, universities and prospective young jobseekers across 19 European countries, says the JobTeaser co-founder.
Since its launch, JobTeaser says it has served 2.5 million students and recent graduates. The company works with more than 70,000 businesses, including Amazon, PWC, Deutsche Bank, Blackrock, L’Oréal and LVMH.
We just closed our $11 million Series A financing, and within 15 minutes of the news hitting the wire, the weirdness began. It turns out that once you announce to the world that you have money, everyone wants a piece. Some want to earn your business, some actually want your business, some want you to move your business, and others just want to straight-up steal your business.
These are the weird things that no one tells you will happen after you close your round that I’m hoping you will find helpful, insightful and maybe spare you a headache or two.
Coinbase is announcing a new initiative called the USDC Bootstrap Fund. As the name suggests, the company wants to support developers with a fund composed of USDC tokens.
DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is a recent trend in the blockchain space. DeFi projects are traditional financial products that you’d expect from a traditional bank, such as lending protocols and derivatives, built on top of a blockchain.
Thanks to the decentralized nature of these protocols, it’s harder to censor them and more people should theoretically be able to access those services.
Going back to Coinbase, the company thinks there’s not enough liquidity for some DeFi protocols. The startup wants to improve that by investing USDC directly in DeFi protocols. Those investments are smart contracts, and returns should be provided by a counterparty, such as a borrower or taker.
In other words, it’ll become much easier to borrow USDC using some DeFi protocols as Coinbase is providing a pool of USDC tokens. Counterparties will have to provide crypto collateral and pay some interest rate.
Coinbase is also announcing its first two investments through the USDC Bootstrap Fund. The company is handing 1 million in USDC to Compound, and 1 million in USDC to dYdX.
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 456th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, September 12, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...
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Sramana Mitra: Does Apple need to click on your button too on the platform? Eyal Shinar: No. Sramana Mitra: Then you don’t need any integration with Apple. Eyal Shinar: That’s correct. That’s what I...
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According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the global cloud integration market is estimated to grow 13.7% annually to $12.24 billion by the year 2022. The growth in the industry is estimated to be...
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I attended a Silicon Flatirons Artificial Intelligence Roundtable last week. Over the years Amy and I have sponsored a number of these and I always find the collection of people, the topics, and the conversation to be stimulating and provocative.
At the end of the two hours, I was very agitated by the discussion. The Silicon Flatirons roundtable approach is that there are several short topics presented, each followed by a longer discussion.
The topics at the AI roundtable were:
Safety aspects of artificial general intelligenceAI-related opportunities on the horizonEthical considerations involving AI-related products and servicesOne powerful thing about the roundtable approach is that the topic presentation is merely a seed for a broader discussion. The topics were good ones, but the broader discussion made me bounce uncomfortably in my chair as I bit my tongue through most of the discussions.
In 2012, at the peak moment of the big data hype cycle, I gave a keynote at an Xconomy event on big data titled something like Big Data is Bullshit. My favorite quote from my rant was:
âTwenty years from now, the thing we call âbig dataâ will be tiny data. Itâll be microscopic data. The volume that weâre talking about today, in 20 years, is a speck.â
I feel that way about how the word AI is currently being used. As I listened to participants at the roundtable talk about what they were doing with AI and machine learning, I kept thinking âthat has nothing to do with AI.â Then, I realized that everyone was defining AI as ânarrow AIâ (or, âweak AIâ) which has a marvelous definition that is something like:
Narrow artificial intelligence (narrow AI) is a specific type of artificial intelligence in which a technology outperforms humans in some very narrowly defined task. Unlike general artificial intelligence, narrow artificial intelligence focuses on a single subset of cognitive abilities and advances in that spectrum.
The deep snarky cynic inside my brain, which I keep locked in a cage just next to my hypothalamus, was banging on the bars. Things like âSo, is calculating 81! defined as narrow AI? How about calculating n!? Isnât machine learning just throwing a giant data set at a procedure that then figures out how to use future inputs more accurately? Why arenât people using the phase neural network more? Do you need big data to do machine learning? Bwahahahahahahaha.â
That part of my brain was distracting me a lot so I did some deep breathing exercises. Yes, I know that there is real stuff going on around narrow AI and machine learning, but many of the descriptions that people were using, and the inferences they were making, were extremely limited.
This isnât a criticism of the attendees or anything they are doing. Rather, itâs a warning of the endless (or maybe recursive) buzzword labeling problem that we have in tech. In the case of a Silicon Flatirons roundtable, we have entrepreneurs, academics, and public policymakers in the room. The vagueness of the definitions and weak examples create lots of unintended consequences. And thatâs what had me agitated.
At an annual Silicon Flatirons Conference many years ago, Phil Weiser (now the Attorney General of Colorado, then a CU Law Professor and Executive Director of Silicon Flatirons) said:
âThe law doesnât keep up with technology. Discuss â¦â
The discussion that ensued was awesome. And it reinforced my view that technology is evolving at an ever-increasing rate that our society and existing legal, corporate, and social structures have no idea how to deal with.
Having said that, I feel less agitated because itâs just additional reinforcement to me that the machines have already taken over.
Sramana Mitra: Did the pricing change when you made this switch to providing these insights? Jeff Wilkins: Somewhat. We’ve always underpriced our services and probably devalued some of the things...
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For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...
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Sramana Mitra: It’s not a big buyer whose problem you’re solving. You’re solving the small business’ problem of cash flow. A small business working with a large buyer with not very favorable terms...
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According to Gartner, worldwide spending on customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018. Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), which is the leader in the...
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David Cohen and I will be at the Fort Collins Barnes and Noble from 6pm â 8pm on Tuesday 9/10/19 to sign copies of the 2nd Edition of Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup.
Over the next few months, weâll be doing a handful of public appearances around the book. Itâs the first book I wrote and â with David â really learned how to write a book almost a decade ago.
We freshened up the 1st Edition with some new stories, lots of context and history around the evolution of Techstars, updates on where the entrepreneurs highlighted are today, and some other nuggets throughout the update.
When Do More Faster originally came out in 2010, there were three Techstars accelerators (Boulder, Boston, and Seattle) with a fourth about to launch (New York). Today, there are 50 active Techstars accelerators happening each year, located in 13 different countries. In addition to funding 500 companies per year (10 per accelerator), Techstars also runs a number of other activities, including Startup Weekend, Startup Week, a number of corporate innovation initiatives, and a set of Ecosystem Development programs based on work surrounding my book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.
Whenever I ponder it, I get great joy from reflecting on how much progress Techstars has made from 2010 and, more importantly, the amount Iâve learned about entrepreneurship through my involvement with Techstars.
If you are near Fort Collins, Colorado on Tuesday night (9/10/19), come hang out with me and David at Barnes & Noble, 4045 S College Ave, Fort Collins, CO 80525.
Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to hit a million in revenue? Jeff Wilkins: Two months. Sramana Mitra: What sized contracts were you doing? Jeff Wilkins: We started as a reactive company. A...
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Uizard, the Copenhagen-based startup that is using “machine intelligence” to quickly turn app sketches into prototypes, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding.
The round is led by Nordic VC firm byFounders, with participation from LDV Capital, av8 Ventures, and New York Venture Partners. A number of individuals are also investing, including Scott Kurnit, Julia Qiu, Lars Houbak, and Alex Spiro.
Aiming to accelerate the ideation phase of website and app design, Uizard says it legerages “advanced” machine learning and computer vision to turn a simple sketch into a basic prototype for almost immediate testing.
Sketched can be drawn with pen and paper, photographed, and then uploaded to Uizard for the AI to do its work. “Imagine hand-sketching wireframes on your notebook during a meeting and being able to present a functional prototype from these ideas only seconds after,” reads the company’s pitch.
“Anyone who ever visited the product team office at any tech company would have noticed the thousands of sketches and wireframes covering the whiteboards, sticky notes, and notebooks,” Uizard co-founder and CEO Tony Beltramelli tells me.
“Designers are constantly scribbling their latest ideas but it literally takes days to implement them into testable prototypes”.
Beltramelli says that Uizard enables product teams to go from sketches to working code in as little time as possible. “The value of our product is all about speed of execution,” he adds.
Typical users of the product, which is currently operating as a free to use beta, are UX design teams in enterprises, agencies, and startups.
Beltramelli claims Uizard doesn’t yet have direct competitors and the closest so far has been Airbnb and Microsoft who have showed interest in developing their own non-commercial “sketch2code” technologies.
“UX design teams currently rely on traditional design studios to create interactive prototypes such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and InVision,” he tells me.
On that note, Uizard is also announcing that it has hired Rizwan Khan, formerly sales executive and first international business hire at InVision, as its Chief Commercial Officer. Notably, Benjamin Wilkins, lead designer of Airbnb’s Sketch2code, has also joined the Uizard product advisory board.
Italian startup Freeda Media has raised a $16 million Series B round. Existing investor Alven is leading the round, with Endeavor Catalyst, UniCredit and others also participating. UniCredit is also granting the company a debt facility of $3 million.
The company has managed to attract millions of followers on Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms. It runs short videos, quick interviews and articles. In other words, Freeda wants to create a social version of Elle, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan or Man Repeller.
Freeda is currently live in Italy, Spain and South America. The company currently has 5 million women engaging with their content every day. It reaches 80% of Italian and Spanish women aged 18-34 every month.
On Instagram in particular, the startup says that it is the first female media brand in the world with 100 million interactions in 2019 alone:
With today’s founding round, the goal is clearly on international expansion. The startup is opening an office in London and plans to launch in the U.K. and other English-speaking markets. There are currently 160 people working for Freeda.
The company is still mostly focused on branded content to monetize its audience. But Freeda wants to expand beyond this revenue stream with a new direct-to-consumer brand. You can expect to be able to buy Freeda-branded products starting in 2020.
MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito resigned. Phillip Faraone/Getty Images
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.
MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito resigned after a New Yorker exposé showed he quietly worked with Jeffrey Epstein to secure anonymous donations. Emails showed Epstein also worked as an in-between for other wealthy donors, including Bill Gates and Leon Black, and that Epstein had a role in determining what his donations would be used for at MIT, contradicting previous statements from Ito and the university. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman defended Joi Ito to author and fellow MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award jury member Anand Giridharadas in a private email, Giridharadas tweeted on Friday. Epstein attended a dinner Hoffman hosted to honor an MIT neuroscientist "a few years ago", Vanity Fair reported in July. Apple's biggest event of the year is happening this week â here's everything it's expected to announce. Apple is expected to announce new iPhones, a new Apple Watch, and more. Apple responded to Google's discovery of an iPhone hack, and took Google to task "stoking fear among all iPhone users that their devices had been compromised." Apple confirmed that the hack had been targeted at Uighur Muslims, an oppressed minority living in China. Google Maps is still pointing people who search for abortion clinics to anti-abortion groups, a new report found. The problem stems from how businesses categorize themselves in Google listings, anti-abortion clinics or organizations that deter abortions often use the same keywords as abortion clinics or places that help with carrying out abortions. An astronaut is urging NASA to form a new spacesuit program now if it hopes to get back to the moon in 2024. "An integral system required to put boots on the moon are the boots," panel member Sandra Magnus, a former astronaut, said during a meeting on Friday. Nintendo quietly changed its policy of adding monthly classic games to its Switch console. Twenty games were added all at once on Thursday â over 60 NES and SNES games are now part of the Nintendo Switch Online service. Leaked Apple documents reveal that Siri was designed to deflect questions about feminism and #MeToo, report says. The project instructs Siri developers to respond to such requests either by disengaging, deflecting, and informing because Apple wants its virtual helper to appear guarded and neutral. An investigation by China Labor Watch found the world's largest iPhone factory was breaking Chinese laws on how many temporary staff a factory can employ, Bloomberg reports. Apple and its manufacturing partner Foxconn confirmed the report. WeWork reportedly hired the parents of a high-ranking exec as real estate brokers for a Miami lease, among other potential conflicts of interest. WeWork didn't disclose a collection of deals involving the family members of company officials in its IPO documents, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
You can also subscribe to this newsletter here â just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know."
Chad and Romania are two countries that rarely come up in the same sentence. That is, unless you're discussing their flags.
The two countries, situated in separate continents, share very few historical or geographical links. They don't even have an embassy in each other's country.
Aside from slight variations in color shading, their flags appear identical â an observation that Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to have discovered and shared with Twitter.
According to online encyclopedia Britannica, Romania initially displayed a flag with horizontal stripes of blue, yellow, and red, before settling on its current vertical design in 1861.
Chad, meanwhile, didn't achieve independence from France until 1959, when it decided on its own flag design.
The country initially considered a green, yellow, and red design, but quickly discovered Mali had already taken the same pattern. It then swapped the green for the blue to inadvertently fly a flag that was almost identical to Romania's. The three colors; however, represent the country's rivers (blue), desert (yellow) and the blood of its independence martyrs (red).
The flag of Mali, the country Chad tried to avoid copying, is similar to Senegal's â a single green star in the middle appears to separate the two flags. Guinea's also replicates Mali's design, but is reversed.
Indonesia and Monaco both fly two horizontal stripes: red over white. Poland similarly flies white over red.
Ireland and Cote d'ivoire share the same design, but is flipped on the flagpole.
All of these similarities may have stemmed from coincidence, but other flags have a specific reason for slight variations to a theme.
Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia all sport the same colored horizontal stripes, but that's because they used to be part of the same country of Gran Colombia, which dissolved in 1822, according to Britannica.
French startup Spendesk has raised another $38.4 million Series B round with existing investor Index Ventures leading the round. The company has raised $49.4 million (€45 million) over the years.
Spendesk is an all-in-one corporate expense and spend management service. It lets you track expenses across your company, empower your employees with a clear approval process and simplify your bookkeeping.
The service essentially works like Revolut or N26, but for corporate needs. After you sign up, you get your own Spendesk account with an IBAN. You can top up that account and define different sets of policies.
For instance, you can set payment limits depending on everyone’s job and define who’s in charge of approving expensive payments. After that, everyone can generate virtual cards for online payments and get a physical card for business travel.
When you’re on the road, you can pay directly using Spendesk just like any corporate card. If you have to pay in cash or with another card, you can take a photo of the receipt from the Spendesk mobile app and get your money back.
Many Spendesk users also leverage the service for other use cases. For instance, you can define a marketing budget and let the marketing team spend it on Facebook or Google ads using a virtual card.
You can also track all your online subscriptions from the Spendesk interface to make sure that you don’t pay for similar tools. If you hire freelancers, you can also upload all your invoices to the platform, export an XML with your outstanding invoices and import it to your banking portal.
Spendesk tries to be smarter than legacy expense solutions. For instance, the company tries to leverage optical character recognition (OCR) to match receipts with payments, autofill the VAT rate, etc.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to open offices in Berlin and London, add more currencies and develop new features. Over the past year, the company went from 20 employees to 120 employees. There are now 1,500 companies using Spendesk in Europe.
This feature from The New York Times looks at how trustworthy AI systems can be built using the concepts of time, space, and casuality. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech...
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