| Friday! [Turns up Daft Punk.] Hope you have a fun weekend, everyone. See you Monday.:) |
| Top News |
| You’ll soon be able to send expiring emails in Gmail. Walmart is likely to reach a deal to buy a majority stake in Indian e-commerce player Flipkart by the end of June in what could be the U.S. retail giant’s biggest acquisition of an online business, reports Reuters. Apple just detailed how it plans to crack down on leaks . . . in a leaked memo. Elon Musk offered a rare mea culpa earlier today, tweeting, “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake,” he wrote. “Humans are underrated.” More here. |
| New Fundings |
| Agreement Express, a 17-year-old, Vancouver-based wealth management, payments, and insurance provider platform, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Frontier Capital. More here. Biocytogen, a 10-year-old, Beijing-based contract research organization that’s focused on gene-targeted animal models, just raised $65 million in Series C funding. CMB International led the round. FierceBiotech has more here. empow, a four-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based security firm, has raised $10 million in funding led by Ascent Venture Partners. More here. Honest Buildings, a six-year-old, New York-based project management platform for commercial real estate owners, has raised $25 million in Series B funding, including from QuadReal and Altus Group. More here. Kadena, a year-old startup that’s selling private distributed ledger technology, has raised $12 million in Series B funding, including from Devonshire Investors, SV Angel, Multicoin Capital, Susquehanna International Group and Asimov Ventures. Coindesk has more here. Local Crate, a three-year-old, St. Paul, Mn.-based meal kit startup, just raised $1.4 million in seed funding from The Syndicate Fund, Matchstick Ventures, M25 Group and Router Ventures. More here. Mapillary, a 4.5-year-old, Malmo, Sweden-based street-level imagery platform that extracts map data using computer vision, has raised $15 million in Series B funding, led by BMW i Ventures, with participation from Samsung Catalyst Fund, NavInfo, and the company’s earlier backers. More here. Onapsis, a nine-year-old, Boston-based company that sells business-critical application cybersecurity and compliance software, raised $31 million in Series C funding. LLR Partners led the round, with participation from earlier investors .406 Ventures, Evolution Equity Partners and Arsenal Venture Partners. More here. PullRequest, a year-old, Austin, Tex.-based code-review-as-a-service startup, has raised has raised $8 million Series A funding just months after closing on $2.3 million in seed funding. The new round was led by Gradient Ventures, which also led the seed financing. Other investors in the round include Y Combinator, Fika Ventures, Lynett Capital and Defy Partners. TechCrunch has more here. |
| New Funds |
| Lerer Hippeau, the New York-based early-stage venture firm, has raised $150 million in capital commitments for its sixth fund, shows an SEC filing. The firm closed its fifth flagship fund with $113 million in 2015. It separately closed a $28 million fund for follow-on investments in its breakout portfolio companies last year. More here. |
| Exits |
| The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is acquiring Cipher Browser, a decentralized app browser and wallet for the Ethereum blockchain that it will be using to bolster its own similar product. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. TechCrunch has more here. Yahoo Japan says it’s buying 40 percent of a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange — BitARG Exchange Tokyo — in the process becoming the latest major Japanese financial services company to join the digital money industry. CNBC has more here. |
| People |
| Elliott Broidy, an L.A.-based venture capital and a deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, resigned from his position today after it was reported that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, negotiated a $1.6 million settlement between Broidy and a Playboy playmate following an affair. It’s the second time that Broidy has been in the news over the last month. Ben Davenport, the cofounder and CTO of blockchain security company BitGo, said today that he’s stepping down to spend more time with his family and the broader bitcoin community as he determines next steps. Coindesk has more here. Pappas Capital, a Research Triangle Park, N.C.-based venture firm focused on life sciences, has brought aboard Tom Mathers, the the former CEO of CoLucid Pharmaceuticals, a Pappas Capital portfolio company that was acquired last year by Eli Lilly & Company for about $1 billion. Mathers, who is based in Boston, is expected to help create a new biopharmaceutical company that will be backed by Pappas. |
| Data |
| Games, dating apps and streaming services contributed to a rise in consumer spending in iPhone apps last year, according to new data from app store intelligence firm, Sensor Tower. The firm found that U.S. iPhone users spent 23 percent more on in-app purchases in 2017 than they did the year prior – or, an average of $58 per active user was spent on in-app purchases, up from $47 in 2016. TechCrunch has much more here. Asian investors directed nearly as much money into startups last year as American investors did—40 percent of the record $154 billion in global venture financing versus 44 percent, according to a new WSJ analysis of private markets data. More here. |
| Essential Reads |
| An electrified road for charging vehicles was just opened in Sweden. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, this week applied to test cars without drivers on California roads. A look at Red Antler, the increasingly powerful Brooklyn-based creative agency that has helped brands like Allbirds and Casper hone their customer pitches. |
| Detours |
| Nine ways you’re cooking pasta wrong (including pouring the sauce on top). How to get the most out of college visits with your kid. The monkey selfie lawsuit lives. |
| Retail Therapy |
| If you need more attention, this should do the trick. |