A couple of years after participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, YayPay is raising $5.3 million from QED Investors, Birchmere, Fifth Third Capital, as well as 500 Fintech Fund, Aspect Ventures, Gaingels, Techstars and Zelkova.YayPay is trying to optimize the workflows in your company’s finance department. In particular, too many mid-sized companies waste a ton of time… Read More

 If you’re in a big city like New York City, you’re probably used to walking around the block away from where you live to the corner shop and picking up a jug of milk or some dishwashing detergent. But Paul McDonald (who says he has not lived in New York), who was at Google for more than 13 years, wants to collapse that distance between walking to that store to pick something up… Read More

 Nobody likes to lose. Especially gamers. But unlike other sports or activities, video games aren’t conducive to practice.Sure, you could play Destiny 2 until your thumbs bleed. But when it comes to fine tuning — maybe you’re slow to react to enemies on the top left side of the map, for example — video games don’t offer the environment to practice, practice… Read More

 Heptio, the startup founded by Kubernetes co-founders Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round led by Madrona Venture partners. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners also joined in this round, which comes less than a year after the company’s $8.5 million Series A round. Read More

 Affectiva, the startup that spun out of the MIT Media Lab several years ago with tools designed to understand facial emotions, announced a new cloud API today that can detect a range of emotion in human speech.When we speak, our voices offer subtle and not so subtle cues about our emotions. Whether our voices are tight or loud or soft can give valuable clues about our feelings. Humans can… Read More

 Slack today announced a slew of new updates, and also said that the company now has more than 6 million daily active users and has crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue.Silicon Valley’s favorite enterprise chat app, still seems to be growing quite a bit and continues to roll out the drip-drip-drip of products you’d see from a company looking to capture new enterprise users. Read More

 I’ve always wanted to create my own animations. One idea is simple. My characters would be born, live, fall in love, and die in real time in a 80 year long masterpiece of constant animation. It would be a commentary on the death of the soul and the deep longing of men and women to be truly understood. My more complex idea would involve a princess who has to fight a dragon. With Dodles… Read More

 How’s this for a prediction: “Camera media will be bigger than TV.” That’s according to Camera IQ CEO Allison Wood. By “camera media” she means filters, lenses and other augmented reality effects — Wood told me she’s been studying AR and camera effects for years, including a stint as an assistant professor at the Pratt Institute. Last year,… Read More

 WeWork, the behemoth co-work company valued at $20 billion, has filed a complaint with New York’s Southern District Court, alleging that China-based UrWork is guilty of trademark infringement. The argument is that UrWork is a name that is far too similar to WeWork given that both companies operate in the co-working industry. UrWork is reported have a valuation over $1 billion, having… Read More

 One of the primary benefits of using Slack is the ability to communicate and share information across a company, but as usage scales it can sometimes lead to information overload and an inability to keep work organized. Pingpad released an update today to bring an organizational layer to Slack that could help teams keep their project information more orderly inside the communications… Read More

 French startup Soundcharts is building a sort of App Annie for music artists. This service gives you a ton of data about what’s playing on the radio around the world, what’s popular in Spotify playlists and more. The company just raised $3.1 million (€2.65M) from Alven Capital, as well as Kima Ventures and Global Founders Capital. Many big music labels already work with companies… Read More

 Software quality-assurance testing has sometimes taken a backseat in today’s rush-rush agile development environment. Into the breach has stepped on-demand testing startups like Test IO, giving developers easy access to a stable of qualified QA testers. The company announced a new plug-in today that embeds the Test IO service directly into the Atlassian Jira development workflow tool.… Read More

 Marketplace banking — the idea that your bank will provide access to various third-party money-related apps and services within its own app — seems an inevitability in the next couple of years as Open Banking becomes a reality. That’s seeing a number of challenger banks skating to where the puck is going, including Starling Bank, which today is launching the Starling Marketplace. Read More

 EEVO’s goal, in the words of co-founder and CEO Alejandro Dinsmore, is “democratizing the creation and delivery of immersive experiences.” In other words, the Brooklyn startup aims to help publishers and other content creators build virtual reality experiences for smartphones without making a big investment. Read More

 Darkstore, the on-demand fulfillment startup, recently partnered with T-Force Final Mile to expand to 33 additional markets across the nation. This brings Darkstore’s total list of markets to 40, which includes San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Miami, Atlanta, Boston, Reno and Austin. Read More

 Looking at the number of exits produced and the total dollar volume those liquidity events commanded, the European startup scene has shown growth over the past year. That fact comes from the Startups M&A 2017 Report — made in partnership with Crunchbase and Mind the Bridge. So how much has changed since the last report? Read More

 Autonomous vehicle startup Zoox is in talks with Japanese investment firm SoftBank to raise more funding. Building vehicles is a capital-intensive business, so it’s no surprise that Zoox would seek more funding. And SoftBank’s Vision Fund has about $100 billion to invest, so the team is looking for opportunities to write big checks. Read More

 Well, this is quite a coup. Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered company builder that invests in individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” to help create new technology startups, has raised $12.4 million in new funding led by Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners. Read More

 Data Artisans, the business arm of open source tool, Apache Flink, announced an early-access release of the commercial version of their platform today that includes a new tool for managing streaming applications.Kostas Tzoumas, CEO at Data Artisans, says managing applications on a real-time streaming product presents some serious challenges for customers, and the new Application Manager is… Read More

 French fintech startup Bankin is partnering with another fintech startup, Yomoni. Bankin brings all you your bank accounts together in a single, unified interface. It’s a sort of Mint, but for the French market. Bankin also competes with another app that I covered just a couple of days ago, Linxo. Both of them want to become the definite financial hub to get an overview on all your… Read More