Home From College, a career platform for young professionals and college students looking for their first job or internship, announced Wednesday that it raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures).
Home From College aims to disrupt the traditional job search for Gen Z, who are gravitating toward more flexible opportunities outside of the 9-5.
Some call Gen Z the “freelance generation,” with 67% of Gen Zers embracing freelance work and 71% prioritizing jobs with flexible working hours, per Fiverr.
Gen Z is also exploring more creative roles, with many looking to build their careers in social media, entertainment, marketing, beauty, and fashion.
Another way that Home From College caters to Gen Z and stands apart from other career sites is its interview feature where students answer questions from real companies, which they can post to their profiles.
Rubrik, a data cybersecurity company that raised more than a half-billion dollars while private, filed to go public after the bell on Monday.
As a private-market company, Rubrik last raised a lettered round in 2019 when it closed $261 million at a $3.6 billion post-money valuation, according to Crunchbase data.
However, subscription revenue grew 40% over the same period, rising from $385.3 million to $537.9 million.
The growth in its subscription revenue, and not its legacy revenues, is the engine that could propel Rubrik to a successful IPO.
A Silicon Valley storyRubrik’s potential IPO could prove a coup for Lightspeed Venture Partners, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital shop.
A group of 200 musicians signed an open letter calling on tech companies and developers to not undermine human creativity with AI music generation tools.
“When used irresponsibly, AI poses enormous threats to our ability to protect our privacy, our identities, our music and our livelihoods,” the letter reads.
Some companies like Adobe and Stability AI are working on AI music generators that use licensed or royalty-free music.
But these tech companies aren’t listening.
“This assault on human creativity must be stopped,” the musicians’ letter says.
With the aim of identifying criminal suspects, U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies.
So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big tech companies, like Google, to turn over information from their vast stores of user data.
Reverse searches effectively cast a digital dragnet over a tech company’s store of user data to catch the information that police are looking for.
Microsoft, Snap, Uber and Yahoo (which owns TechCrunch) have all received reverse orders for user data.
Some companies choose not to store user data and others scramble the data so it can’t be accessed by anyone other than the user.
In 2023, higher egg prices provided an opportunity for alternative protein companies to show they could compete with traditional egg manufacturers.
At this capacity, Onego Bio is close to reaching competitive price points to traditional ways of making egg proteins, she added.
Onego Bio claims Bioalbumen is “bioidentical” to ovalbumin, which is the major protein in chicken egg white.
In preparation for this, Onego Bio recently secured $40 million in Series A funding to get Bioalbumen to market and increase manufacturing capabilities.
Tomosaku Sohara, managing partner of Nordic Ninja said in a statement: “Onego Bio is taking all the right steps to commercialize in record time … with a clear path to industrialization, go-to-market and profitability.
The current AI wave is a never-ending barrage of news items.
To understand what I mean, ask yourself how long you spent considering the fact that Amazon put another $2.75 billion into Anthropic AI last week.
We’ve become inured to the capital influx that is now common in AI, even as the headline numbers get even bigger.
Sure, Amazon is slinging cash at Anthropic, but single-digit billions are chump change compared to what some companies have planned.
Hell, even smaller tech companies — compared to the true giants — are spending to stay on the cutting edge.
Aneja’s current research focuses on the societal impact of algorithmic decision-making systems in India, where she’s based, and platform governance.
Aneja recently authored a study on the current uses of AI in India, reviewing use cases across sectors including policing and agriculture.
At the same time, India had launched its Digital India mission and National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.
What are some issues AI users should be aware of?
Investors need to consider the entire life cycle of AI production — not just the outputs or outcomes of AI applications.
In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor.
“In the original cloud world, the three major cloud vendors were really fighting to try to build what felt like walled gardens, and as long as you built on top of them, everything was great.
Cloud customers looking to switch providers will need to be retained through innovative and accessible features now that the punishment of egress fees is being phased out,” Seseri said.
David Linthicum, a longtime cloud consultant, says that while these recent announcements are a pleasant PR move, he warns folks to review their bills carefully because egress fees aren’t the only problem.
What are we paying for the networking fees, the egress fees, all the other hidden fees that come along with what people call junk fees that come from the cloud vendors?”But this may not affect startups as much as larger enterprise customers.
Will Lawrence, the co-founder and CTO of Iron Sheepdog, likes to say that sometimes building something simple is actually really hard.
Companies can track their contracted trucks through Iron Sheepdog, giving them more transparency into where trucks are, how long a job takes and how much to pay.
Iron Sheepdog announced this week a $10 million Series B round led by SJF Ventures with participation from Grand Ventures, Supply Chain Ventures and strategic partners.
While not the first company to try to build software to manage these short-haul truckers, Iron Sheepdog has been able to see its growth double each year since it was founded.
Contractors want to sign up, too, knowing the app gives them access to a network of more than 4,000 short-haul truckers.
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories and themes from the week.
But while the SBF news was a big deal, there was so very much more to cover on today’s news roundup episode of Equity.
We also dug into two companies building startups focused around kids.
Then, to wrap up, a look at just who unicorn founders really are, and a new $100 million fund that to back climate tech.
