Google quietly launches Meet, an enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts

 Google has quietly launched a new video conferencing application called Meet by Google Hangouts, which is designed for HD video meetings. The web and mobile application appears to be the latest addition to Google’s lineup of business products known as G Suite, though product page on the G Suite website listed in the app’s description page on…

WorkJam raises $12 million to communicate with hourly workers

 There is plenty of enterprise software for the white-collar workforce, but there still isn’t an ideal way to communicate with employees who aren’t sitting at a desk. That’s the thesis behind WorkJam, which is announcing $12 million in funding from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Founder Collective and NovelTMT. The Montreal-based startup, whose clients include… Read…

Reflect drops public beta to power developer-first data visualization

 Data visualization has been done — we have publicly traded, interactive, real-time and heck even artificially intelligent companies promising data visualization. But despite all the noise, Portland-based Reflect is making a go of it in the space, opening up its public beta today. By putting developers first and letting them integrate and customize visualizations in their own… Read More

Lux Capital closes $400 million fund to back startups “inventing the future”

 Lux Capital’s portfolio companies sound like they ripped their product concepts from the pages of science fiction. Among these are self-driving car startup Zoox, a company gathering oceanographic data from fleets of autonomously operating boats called Saildrone, Desktop Metal whose 3-D printers that can make objects out of alloys on the spot, and 3Scan, a…

Pypestream raises $15M for its customer messaging platform

 Pypestream is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding. When the startup launched more than a year ago, founder and CEO Richard Smullen was pitching text messaging as the best way for customers to communicate with businesses — specifically, through the Pypestream app, where businesses can create their own accounts with a…

A year after Jasper acquisition Cisco expands the platform

 Just over a year ago Cisco bought Jasper Technologies for $1.4 billion, and with that transaction, created the company’s IoT cloud business. This week, Cisco is making a series of announcements at Mobile World Congress related to expanding the platform. When a startup like Jasper gets acquired by a big company like Cisco, the standard line of…

Ambitious Alibaba takes aim at the kings of cloud computing

 When you think of the biggest cloud players in the world, one company you might not consider is Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant that held a record $25 billion U.S. IPO in 2014. Alibaba entered the cloud computing business in 2009, just three years after Amazon launched its cloud division, AWS — and Alibaba’s cloud computing…

Workfit raises $5.5 million seed round to be your AI meeting assistant

 Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo. Battery Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Salesforce Ventures and a number of angels joined together to finance a $5.5…

Veeva defied detractors when it launched a cloud life sciences biz a decade ago

 It’s safe to say that Veeva is not a household name, but 10 years ago this month the company launched the first of a set of enterprise tools, like content management and CRM, designed for the unique requirements of the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry. You have to remember, this was a fairly revolutionary notion…

SoFi confirms $500 million in new funding as it pushes beyond lending

 Online finance startup SoFi got its start refinancing student loans but gradually has been adding other services to members. To expand into new regions and move closer to becoming a full-service financial services company, SoFi has confirmed that it raised an additional $500 million in equity financing led by Silver Lake. Read More

Communication platform Layer raises $15M and acquires interactive messaging startup Cola

 Layer, the messaging platform that won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield back in 2013, is making two big announcement today: It’s raised $15 million in Series B funding, and it’s acquiring another startup, Cola. Layer makes it easy for businesses to add messaging capabilities to their  iOS, Android and web products — customers include Trunk Club, Staples…

DeepCoder builds programs using code it finds lying around

 Like all great programmers I get most of my code from StackOverflow questions. Can’t figure out how to add authentication to Flask? Easy. Want to shut down sendmail? Boom. Now, thanks to all the code on the Internet, a robot can be as smart as a $180,000 coder. The system, called DeepCoder, basically searches a…