The enterprise strikes back

 For startups working to sell to large corporations, their investors and their tens of thousands of employees, it’s welcome news. A confluence of factors may make 2017 fertile ground for tech offerings. The stock market is at record highs, last year’s IPO crop such as it was is outperforming the preceding group, 2017’s own brace…

Looker catches the fancy of CapitalG, Goldman and Geodesic with $81.5M Series D

 Business intelligence platform Looker is announcing a wholesome $81.5 million Series D today led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s cleverly named growth investment arm. Goldman Sachs and Geodesic Capital helped fill out the round, joining existing investors, KPCB, Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint and Sapphire Ventures. Rather than compete in segmented markets against visualization and data… Read More

HelloSign moves into digital workflow with new HelloWorks product

 HelloSign, founded in 2011, has been best known to this point as an e-signature company, but today it announced something a bit more substantial, a new product called HelloWorks, which allows the company to move into workflow, digitizing processes that involve complex forms. For many years now, HelloSign CEO Joseph Walla said, the way we…

Aiden closes $750,000 seed round in its quest to amplify marketers

 Aiden, a London-based startup building a machine learning-powered personal assistant to save mobile marketers time and money, closed a $750,000 seed round today from Kima Ventures and a number of angels including Nicolas Pinto, Pierre Valade and Jonathan Wolf. The team first demoed the capabilities of its service on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt as a Battlefield finalist.  In recent……

GE invests $2 million in Alchemist Accelerator to back industrial IoT startups

 Alchemist Accelerator has raised $2 million from GE Digital to start a new program for industrial IoT startups. Stanford lecturer Timothy Chou, formerly President of Oracle On Demand, will chair Alchemist’s new IIoT accelerator along with GE Digital’s West Coast group. In the past, enterprise hardware and software startups were seen as capital intensive, with…

Cloud Foundry launches its developer certification program

 Cloud Foundry, a massive open source project that allows enterprises to host their own platform-as-a-service for running cloud applications in their own data center or in a public cloud, today announced the launch of its “Cloud Foundry Certified Developer” program. The Cloud Foundry Foundation calls this “the world’s largest cloud-native developer certification… Read More

Industrious buys Pivotdesk, raises $25M to be WeWork without startup bros

 In the recruiting wars, a cool office is critical. Not just for scrappy startups, but big businesses with regional HQs as well. So while WeWork signs questionable 20-year leases to provide desks for twenty-something engineers, Industrious is taking a more classy and conservative approach to cowering space. Think 30 to 60 year olds typing to…

Airobotics scores authorization to fly autonomous drones in Israel

 A startup based in Petah Tikva, Isreal, Airobotics,has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for business purposes in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace. Airobotics’ drones are marketed for use in site surveying, security and other industrial… Read…

Matroid can watch videos and detect anything within them

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth that times the frame rate. Matroid, a computer vision startup launching out of stealth today, enables anyone to take advantage of the information inherently embedded in video. You can build your own detector within the company’s intuitive, non-technical, web platform to detect people…

CoreOS extends its Tectonic Kubernetes service to Azure and OpenStack

 While CoreOS is probably still best known for its Linux distribution, that was only the company’s gateway drug to a wider range of services. Tectonic, the company’s service for running Kubernetes-based container deployments in the enterprise, sits at the core of its business. Until now, Tectonic could only be used for installing and managing Kubernetes on bare-metal and…