Today, the startup emerged from stealth with the Fused platform, and $1 million in pre-seed funding.
It takes data, fed from satellites, sitting in storage repositories and runs it through its platform to make it usable.
The platform is essentially a middleware processing layer that helps turn the geospatial data into something more consumable.
It consists of several open source pieces and a serverless processing engine.
They can then transfer this data to other programs for further analysis or create data visualizations based on the data.
Everbridge, a critical event management (CEM) software company, is going private in a $1.8 billion all-cash deal that will see it taken over by private equity giant Thoma Bravo — 20% more than what was originally announced last month.
Things never recovered, with its valuation hovering at below the $1 billion mark for the past six months.
Premium planThoma Bravo, a private equity firm renowned for snapping up underperforming enterprise software firms, is effectively paying a premium in excess of 83%* on Everbridge’s market cap on February 2.
“We look forward to working with Everbridge to expand their ability to capitalize on opportunities in an expanding marketplace for risk, compliance, and safety solutions,” Thoma Bravo partner Hudson Smith said in a press release.
*This article was updated on March 1, 2024, with amended acquisition price and premiums after Everbridge’s “go shop” process yielded greater interest.
That’s where Codified, an early stage startup that was nurtured last year inside venture capital firm Madrona Ventures, comes into the picture.
The company was built from the ground up from a data veteran with an eye toward solving the data compliance problem, and today it announced a $4 million seed round.
Company founder and CEO Yatharth Gupta sees that data is at the center of today’s technology, yet companies struggle to control access to it.
Both jobs, he says, were heavily involved in data and he saw the kinds of problems he’s trying to solve with Codified.
Investors in today’s round include Vine Ventures, Soma Capital and Madrona Venture Labs where Codified incubated last year.
Google said Thursday it plans to roll out the SoundPod, its portable speaker designed to instantly validate and announce successful payments, to small merchants across India over the coming months.
The Google Pay expansion in India, where the company is among the mobile payment market leaders, comes even as the firm winds down some of its payments apps in the U.S.
The sound-box was invented to serve small Indian merchants unable to afford regular point-of-sale devices but accepting of UPI payments.
The company said merchants who use SoundPod to process 400 payments in a month will get $1.5 in cashback.
Reliance, India’s largest firm by market cap, also began testing a similar device at its campus last year, TechCrunch earlier reported.
Ina Herlihy believes e-commerce brands are losing out on organic traffic and potential revenue by relying on third-party community sites, like Reddit and Facebook Groups.
By building an onsite community, brands are able to increase that retention and drive more organic traffic because the community is on their own domain.
In addition, AddGlow integrates with a brand’s catalog so community members can tag products when mentioning them.
“We started partnering with smaller brands, and now we’re building additional functionality to support larger brands, too,” Herlihy said.
Our goal is to foster a safe space for community members to seek personal advice and build meaningful connections.”
Milewski and Schwartz bootstrapped Zūm Rails, building it up to a team of 30 people.
“We reached the point where we realize that bootstrapping is no longer healthy for our business,” Schwartz told TechCrunch.
In addition, Zūm Rails is working on a FedNow offering in the U.S. that will enable businesses to send and receive FDIC-insured payments within seconds.
Zūm Rails’ performance to date “is really impressive,” Jake Olson, vice president at Arthur Ventures, told TechCrunch.
Any organization that views the streamline digital financial interaction coupled with the instant payments capability as a competitive advantage will be a great fit for Zūm Rails.”
An engineer by training, Meyerowitz leans heavily on that concept at Clairity Technology, the direct air capture startup he founded in 2022.
The company is currently working on the next size up, which should be able to capture one metric ton per year.
Clairity is one of the latest entrants into the direct air capture (DAC) market, where companies compete to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the lowest cost.
He and his team, now eight strong, have designed a box that’s “good enough” to capture carbon dioxide over 80% purity, he said.
By using carbon dioxide as an ingredient, “it improves the quality of the concrete.
Orbital operations company Astroscale has revealed new details about its approach to refueling satellites in space, as part of a $25.5 million project exploring the concept with the Space Force.
The concept of on-orbit servicing and repair is attractive to anyone who doesn’t want to see a $100 million investment literally burn up.
Astroscale won a Space Force contract last Summer to explore the possibility in orbit, and the company just published how it plans to do so.
After refueling it, the APS-R will back off and perform an inspection of the client satellite, looking for any fuel leaks or other issues its operators might want to check.
No doubt we’ll hear more about this and other space sustainability projects well before then.
In this edition of WiR, we cover Carta’s allegedly unethical tactics, Samsung’s Ballie home robot, Volkswagen bringing ChatGPT into its cars and Amazon embracing more generative AI.
Saarinen alleged in a LinkedIn post that Carta misused sensitive information that startups entrust to the company in pursuit of its own goals.
Samsung’s Ballie returns: Remember Ballie, Samsung’s spherical home robot from CES 2020?
Volkswagen cars get ChatGPT: Volkswagen is getting into the ChatGPT game.
Enterprises skeptical of GenAI: Generative AI gets a lot of press, from image-generating tools like Midjourney to Runway to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
There are a ton of tools out there that help you keep eye contact when talking with people online – some (Plexicam, CenterCam) place the camera in front of your screen.
Others use AI to edit the video stream to make it look as if you’re looking at the camera (it’s creepy AF when done poorly).
EyeQ is taking a different approach, and we took a closer look at CES 2024 in Las Vegas.
The lack of personal connection and the inability to maintain eye contact during video calls are major contributing factors to this issue.
“Our primary focus is on the online healthcare and consultancy markets, where making authentic eye contact is crucial.
