The past decade in retail has been the golden age of direct-to-consumer (D2C) and digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs) that use the internet to communicate with customers, execute transactions, handle distribution and offer better economics. But as small independent startups have scaled into unicorn territory and as countless brands have saturated digital channels, customer acquisition has […]

Foursquare, the former location-based social network turned enterprise location data platform, has today announced a new partnership with TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor will be using Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK, launched in March 2017, to help the platform better serve users with contextually relevant, real-time information based on their location. Alongside the 13 billion check-ins accumulated on Foursquare’s apps […]

As car and tech companies continue to make inroads on vehicles and services to build autonomous driving systems, a startup that is creating high-definition maps to help these vehicles move around has quietly picked up a significant round of funding. DeepMap — a Palo Alto startup co-founded by James Wu and Mark Wheeler, who previously […]

Rockset, a startup that came out of stealth today, announced $21.5M in previous funding and the launch of its new data platform that is designed to simplify much of the processing to get to querying and application building faster. As for the funding, it includes $3 million in seed money they got when they started […]

HashiCorp, the company that has made hay developing open source tools for managing cloud infrastructure, obviously has a pretty hefty commercial business going too. Today the company announced an enormous $100 million round on a Unicorn valuation of $1.9 billion. The round was led by IVP, whose investments include AppDynamics, Slack and Snap. New comer […]

Neo4j has helped popularize the graph database. Today it was rewarded with an $80 million Series E to bring their products to a wider market in what could be the company’s last private fundraise. The round was led by One Peak Partners and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital with participation from existing investors Creandum, Eight Roads […]

Last year, HPE successfully built and installed a supercomputer on the International Space Station that could withstand the rigors of being in space. Today, the company announced that it is making that computer available for earth-based developers and scientists to conduct experiments. Mark Fernandez, who has the lofty title of America’s HPC Technology Officer at […]

Spoke, a startup that wants to simplify the way companies add and process help desk tickets using artificial intelligence underpinnings, announced it has enhanced its AI engine to allow for more complex queries. The company founders were working at Google after a previous startup had been sold to the search giant when they encountered a […]

Let’s start with a basic premise that the vast majority of the world’s workloads remain in private data centers. Cloud infrastructure vendors are working hard to shift those workloads, but technology always moves a lot slower than we think. That is the lens through which many cloud companies operate. The idea that you operate both […]

Cockroach Lab’s open source SQL database, CockroachDB, has been making inroads since it launched last year, but as any open source technology matures, in order to move deeper into markets it has to move beyond technical early adopters to a more generalized audience. To help achieve that, the company announced a new CockroachDB managed service […]