Tencent to open AI research center in Seattle

 Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent will be opening a new AI research center in Seattle, according to The Information. The company has long had a core office in Palo Alto, but this will be its first major machine intelligence R&D effort in the country. Earlier this week Tencent announced that it would open its first data…

Data management startup Rubrik confirms $180M round at a $1.3B valuation

 Rubrik, a startup that provides data backup and recovery services for enterprises across both cloud and on-premises environments, has closed a $180 million round of funding that values the company at $1.3 billion. The news confirms a report we ran earlier this week noting that the company was raising between $150 million and $200 million….

Cloudera finishes up 20% in stock market debut

 Cloudera, the enterprise big data company, closed the day up over 20% at $18.09, after pricing its IPO at $15 per share.  This is also above the range of $12 to $14 that enterprise big data company was preparing for. While the surging stock price is great for new investors, the outcome is still a significant…

Equity podcast: Earnings clown car and the profitable-ish Dropbox with Hunter Walk

 Welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the narrative. Homebrew’s own Hunter Walk joined us for this episode along with co-hosts Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and myself. This week has been a delightful clown car of technology earnings, so we dove into Twitter’s surprisingly strong report that drove its…

Investors are betting 3DR can find life after Solo as a drone data platform

 An early player in drone-tech, 3D Robotics Inc., announced that it has raised $53 million in a Series D round of funding on Thursday, including new equity funding and conversion of debt equity. Atlantic Bridge led the round joined by Autodesk Forge Fund, True Ventures, Foundry Group, Mayfield and other undisclosed investors, according to the…

Microsoft meets expectations with $23.6B in revenue, Azure revenue up 93%

 Microsoft just reported earnings for the last quarter. The company reported non-GAAP revenue of $23.6 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.73. Wall Street’s cadre of crack analysts expected the company’s earnings per share to come in at around $0.70, with revenue hitting about $23.6 billion. In the year-ago quarter, Microsoft reported earnings per share…

Marketing tech company Zeta Global raises $140M at a $1.3B valuation

 Zeta Global, the marketing tech company that has recently acquired the likes of eBay’s enterprise arm and Acxiom Impact, is preparing for another round of acquisitions and investments in its technology. To do so, the company today announced that it has raised a $140 million Series F round. Read More

UiPath raises $30M to build ‘software robots’ for internal business tasks

 The world is awash with bots these days — applications the run either partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other artificial intelligence technologies to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done. In the enterprise equivalent, a company that is building something akin to this for…

Dropbox really wants us to know its finances are healthy

 Healthy financial milestones sugarcoat the conversation temporarily, but eventually Drew Houston is going to have to step into the public markets. At that point nobody will care how fast Dropbox grew its revenue back in the day. The question will be whether Dropbox is a company that can eventually sustain $10 billion in yearly revenue….

Oracle delivers artificial intelligence across its customer experience cloud

 Oracle announced a slew of AI-driven capabilities across its Customer Experience Cloud Suite  today that are designed to help users to deliver better, faster and more personal experiences. If you think you’ve heard this before, it’s because Oracle joins its customer experience  competitors in offering a similar set of capabilities complete with underlying artificial… Read More

Airbnb’s new open source library lets you design with React and render to Sketch

 Today, Airbnb’s design team open sourced its internal library for writing React components that easily render directly to Sketch. Instead of trying to get Sketch to export to code, the Airbnb team spent its time on the opposite — putting the paintbrush in the hands of the engineer. Everyday engineers and designers have the luxury of…

Talkdesk launched an app store for enterprise call center customers

 Over the last several years Talkdesk has offered a way for businesses to get a cloud-based call center up and running. Today the company is launching AppConnect, a place where customers can connect with other vendors that provide services adjacent to its offerings. As a result, it can round out the products and services needed…