Fundings & Exits

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Lambda School aims to cash in by upskilling untapped talent

 As the saying goes, the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. Also not evenly distributed: Access to the expensive education typically needed to stand a chance of obtaining one of the jobs of the future. Y Combinator backed Lambda School is hoping to change this, with a new approach to funding higher education. Read More

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Google reportedly offered $30 billion to acquire Snapchat

 Nerdy Google has failed at social time and time again, so it considered buying teen sensation Snapchat. According to reports, the search giant held informal talks with Snap and floated an offer of $30 billion in 2016 before Snap’s last funding round, and just before its IPO this year. That offer was apparently an open secret inside Snap, and was on the table after the IPO, too. Read More

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Hustle scores $8M to kill telemarketing with personalized texts

 No one picks up the phone and everyone gets too much email. If you want to contact people for fundraising, a political campaign or marketing, texting is the way to go. But a generic mass text is more like spam than a convincing conversation. Hustle lets you personalize every message and turn it into persuasive one-on-one dialogue. Read More

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Vetted raises $3.3M to treat your pet at home

 What’s worse than going to the doctor? Taking your pet to the doctor. Not only is it a major hassle to actually transport your dog or cat to the vet, but you usually end up paying way too much for way too little time spent with the actual veterinarian. Vetted wants to change this. Read More

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Facebook buys Ozlo to boost its conversational AI efforts

 Facebook has gone ahead and purchased Charles Jolley’s conversational AI startup Ozlo. Jolley, formerly Head of Platform for Android at Facebook, will not be returning to the company. The Ozlo team is expected to join Facebook to work on natural language processing challenges. Ozlo launched with a consumer facing app back in October 2016. Jolley told me at the time that the… Read More

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Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers, outpacing Apple

 Spotify’s singular focus on music sees it adding subscribers faster than the iPhone company with a streaming app on the side. Spotify has added 20 million paid subscribers in less than a year, while it’s taken Apple Music more than a year and a half to make that progress. Spotify now has 60 million subscribers, compared to Apple Music’s 27 million (as of June). Read More

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