For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our weekly informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just in town...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 386th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Wednesday, February 14, 2018, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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Sramana Mitra: In terms of areas of interest for these kinds of seed investments, what degree of relevance do you need with SAP’s current technology? Does it need to be built on HANA? Does it need to...

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These days, Silicon Valley is not the darling of the world anymore. Rather, it is facing a techlash for all sorts of issues. The foremost among these is automation and the prospect of robots...

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Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) recently celebrated its fourteenth anniversary amid much controversy. While it continues to outpace market expectations on all financial fronts, the social pressure on the...

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Sramana Mitra: Talk about the customer acquisition strategy and the scaling of revenue. Rob Douglas: Customer acquisition is a three-step process. Step one is, BioConnect needs to be integrated into...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Nitin Rai, Managing Director at Elevate Capital. Nitin made a compelling case for investing in niche businesses with the upfront goal of scoring...

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 The blockchain is the buzziest thing on the internet these days and now MIT professor and godfather of the Human Genome Project George Church wants to put your genes on it. His new startup Nebula Genomics plans to sequence your genome for less than $1,000 and then add your data to the blockchain through the purchase of a “Nebula Token.” Read More

 PAX Labs has a new CEO. The company, which makes loose-leaf vaporizers, has brought on Bharat Vasan as Chief Executive Officer. Vasan has spent the last 15 years in consumer hardware, serving as the President and COO of August Home, which was acquired by Swedish lock maker Assa Abloy in 2017. Before August, Vasan was the cofounder of Basis (a fitness-based wearable company), which was acquired… Read More

 Attentive is coming out of stealth today with the announcement that it’s raised $13 million in Series A funding.The company was founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones. They previously founded TapCommerce, a mobile ad startup that was acquired by Twitter for a reported price of $100 million. Long and Jones both worked at Twitter for a couple of years before leaving to start something… Read More

 Tronc, the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, announced today that it now owns a majority stake in BestReviews, which publishes in-depth reviews of consumer products. According to an SEC filing, Tronc agreed to pay a total of $66 million, including $30 million in cash and $36 million in Tronc’s common shares, for a 60% stake in BestReviews.  Read More

 ClearBrain has a big goal: “Our mission is to democratize AI for marketers.” That’s how co-founder and CEO Bilal Mahmood put it, though he and his co-founder Eric Pollman aren’t trying to do all that at once. Instead, they’re tackling a more specific challenge — helping companies target ads toward the users most likely to sign up for a subscription, buy… Read More

 Studio, a startup that delivers coaching, music and competition to treadmill runners’ smartphones and smartwatches, is getting a boost from treadmill maker Life Fitness. Studio founder and CEO Jason Baptiste explained that through this partnership, Studio’s classes will be available on Life Fitness treadmills in gyms, starting with the ones equipped with the company’s… Read More

 Notation Capital, the NY-based pre-seed fund that launched in 2015, has just picked up a fresh $27 million in capital to invest in to super early stage startup sin the NYC area. The fund is called Notation II, and it’s still run by Nick Chirls, who led seed investment at betaworks and helped build Alphaworks, and Alex Lines, an architect at betaworks who contributed to products like… Read More

 Kids don’t try their hardest unless they think someone’s watching. Overcrowded classrooms and distracted parents can make pouring effort into school work feel pointless. But Seesaw’s app turns their assignments into social media they share with teachers, peers and mom and dad. Now it’s invading schools across the country and just raised a Series A round from LinkedIn… Read More

 Flux, the London fintech startup founded by former early employees at Revolut, has deepened its partnership with U.K. challenger bank Starling to add Flux-powered loyalty points to Starling’s mobile banking app. It builds on earlier Flux integration that sees Starling support item-level digital receipts powered by Flux and supported merchants (to date, this includes all 111 EAT stores in… Read More

 Highfive, a startup that’s building an integrated software and hardware video conferencing solution, today announced that it has raised a $32 million Series C round, which brings the Redwood City-based company’s total funding to $77.4 million. The lead investor for this round was Dimension Data, a major global technology integrator and managed services subsidiary of Japan’s… Read More

 French startup Cityscoot announced a $50 million round of financing yesterday (€40 million). RATP Capital Innovation and Inventure Partners are leading the round, with existing investors Caisse des Dépôts and LeasePlan also participating. Cityscoot operates an electric scooter-sharing service in Paris and plans to expand to other cities in France and Europe. You can now find around… Read More

 Viacom has acquired VidCon, a move that seems designed to help the media giant connect with younger audiences. Viacom’s blog post describes VidCon as “the premier event for the worldwide online video community,” drawing more than 30,000 attendees to its flagship conference in Anaheim, Calif. (It’s also held smaller events in Amsterdam and Melbourne.) The company was… Read More

 Pushing through a funding round is never an easy process — and for Captain401 co-founder Roger Lee, it was even more tricky this time around. That’s because Lee and his team raised $11 million right around the birth of his first baby. That gave Lee an even deeper appreciation and understanding for the need of robust employee benefits, which was part of the original goal of… Read More