SkySafe, a six-month-old, San Diego, Ca.-based company whose technology can disable drones that are flying where they shouldn’t, has raised $3 million in seed funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Founder Collective, SV Angel, and BoxGroup. No doubt the company is serving a fast-growing need, particularly given the number of drones poised to […]
SV ANgel
A New Way to Fund Unicorns Starts to Look Less Magical
If you haven’t heard of a fairly new twist on investing called special purpose vehicles (SPVs), you probably aren’t an institutional investor or a wealthy individual with direct ties to either a venture firm or a high-flying startup like Pinterest or Postmates. But don’t worry if you’ve missed the opportunity to invest in one. Investors […]
A Slick New 401(k) Platform, From TaskRabbit Cofounder Kevin Busque
In recent years, Kevin Busque began to notice something at TaskRabbit, the outsourced jobs marketplace that he co-founded seven years ago with his wife, and TaskRabbit’s CEO, Leah. The company employs a lot of younger employees, and according to Busque (who was long the company’s VP of Technology but also tackled HR for some time), […]
Piazza, Backed By Sequoia and Others, Looks to Next Round
You might not be familiar with the 25-person, Palo Alto, Ca.-based startup Piazza, but plenty of engineering and other STEM students are aware of it. The online platform where students and instructors come together to learn and teach was first conceived by founder and CEO Pooja Sankar, who as a first-year student at the Stanford Graduate […]
Pushbullet, Beloved by Users, Shoots for Fresh Funding
Pushbullet, a San Francisco-based, six-person software startup whose free app makes it easy for users move notifications, links, and files between devices, is announcing $1.5 million in seed funding from General Catalyst Partners, SV Angel, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Paul Buchheit, and other angel investors. It’s in the market again, too. As is often the […]
Erin Glenn, Alphaworks’s New CEO, on Waiting for the SEC
Any new CEO has a lot to contend with, like getting to know employees and clarifying the business’s strategy. Erin Glenn, who recently joined the New York-based crowdfunding platform Alphaworks, has to worry about something else, too: the SEC. Launched by Betaworks in February of this year, Alphaworks is a white label platform that obtains […]