DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ VC Ian Chiu's passion for education began when he shared his secrets to getting scholarships in a book. Now he helps edtech startups make a difference as a top investor at Owl Ventures.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Madeline Renbarger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

At 18, Ian Chiu started writing a book with his brothers on how to land college scholarships. Now as managing director at Owl Ventures, Chiu has coached founders that are edtech success stories. If you ask Owl Ventures' Ian Chiu about the moment he first realized he could help others through education, he will immediately have an answer. So the three brothers decided that writing a guidebook on getting scholarships could be a fun project to share their newly acquired knowledge. But beyond the business side, writing the book also showed Chiu how his work helping others access better education opportunities could make a difference in people's lives.

☆ Report of Argentina fraud probe sinks shares in dLocal
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-26 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

May 26 (Reuters) - Uruguayan fintech dLocal, the South American country's first unicorn, saw its shares plummet on Friday, after Argentine news outlet Infobae published an article saying the government was investigating it for a possible fraud of at least $400 million. Citing unnamed official sources, Infobae said the Argentina government was investigating the fintech for "improper manouevers" and transfers abroad that would constitute a fraud, with most of its income coming from services sold to subsidiaries of the same firm. Infobae said sources at Argentina's customs agency said they were considering reporting dLocal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). dLocal issued a statement denying the article, claiming it had been the victim of "misleading allegations" and that it would continue to process payments normally in Argentina. The fintech's shares were down 17% in afternoon trading after losing more than 34% earlier in the day.

☆ Europe is producing more startup 'mafias' than ever despite tech rout
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-24 | by ( Ryan Browne | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

The average time taken for a startup to hit unicorn status in Europe is now just seven years, according to Accel. Of the 353 "unicorn" companies in the region, 221 have spun out 1,171 new tech-enabled startup companies as employees at these firms left to start up their own ventures, Accel said, citing Dealroom data. Startup mafias have existed for decades. These "mafias," which are firms started by employees of other tech firms, have historically led to the creation of some of the largest tech companies known today. The largest cohort of newly established startup mafias comes from fintech, with almost 20% of European startups spun out of unicorns operating in the sector.

Persons: Accel, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Niklas Zennstrom, Taavet Hinrikus, I'd, Harry Nelis, Klarna, Wise Organizations: Accel, Spotify, PayPal, Elon, Ventures, Fund, Shell, Unilever, CNBC, Startup Locations: Europe, Israel, American, Silicon Valley, West Coast, Palo Alto, Netherlands, fintech

☆ VC firm Sequoia is pulling out all the stops to dominate AI, insiders say. The firm is using everything from 'speed dating' to star studded summits to woo founders.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-22 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Ben Bergman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

It's just one move of many the VC firm has taken to cement its position in the white-hot AI space. Huang and Grady wrote a public blog post on Sequoia's website inviting AI founders to email them their ideas and pitches directly. But the firm has been louder where it counts, investing in splashy AI startups like Harvey and LangChain. Every member of the firm, from managing partner Roleof Botha on down, has made AI a top priority, with Grady, Huang, and Buhler most prominently involved. Both Huang and Buhler now spend over 90% of their time researching AI companies, versus 50% in previous years, they said.

☆ A 30-year-old university dropout and former Pizza Hut delivery driver is now worth $1.1 billion — 3 times more than Ed Sheeran
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-21 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Ben Francis is a university dropout and former Pizza Hut delivery driver who founded Gymshark. The 30-year-old is up seven places to 184th on this year's Sunday Times Rich List. He's now worth £900 million, or $1.1 billion, putting him up seven places to 184th on this year's Sunday Times Rich List. After leaving Aston University in Birmingham, England, Francis cofounded the sportswear company Gymshark. The pair were turning over about £300 a day at that time, Francis wrote.

☆ Cloud-based Restaurant365 hits unicorn status after $135 mln funding round
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

May 19 (Reuters) - U.S. cloud-based restaurant manager Restaurant365 has turned a 'unicorn' after a $135 million funding round, the company said on Friday. Start-up funding space, which is reeling from liquidity crunch since last year, has started to see some signs of relief. Earlier in the week, Reuters reported that U.S. property insurer SageSure achieved an unicorn status after closing a $250-million funding round. "L Catterton has deep experience investing in world-class restaurant brands globally," says Ian Friedman, Partner at L Catterton who will join Restaurant365's board. "The primary driver of this round is uniting with two strategic investors so intimately tied to the restaurant industry," the company said.

☆ Victor Wembanyama: How ‘Wembymania’ gripped France due to the most exciting draft prospect since LeBron James
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Ben Morse | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

There have been few players whose journey to the pinnacle of basketball have been as highly followed; in figures released by the NBA, Wembanyama is No. And I keep having to explain to them that having a sold-out, 15,000-people crowd for a regular French professional basketball game is not normal at all,” she said. His father was a high jumper, his mother was a former basketball player who is now a coach and his two siblings – older sister Eve and younger brother Oscar – are basketball players. And the French basketball system where he has been nurtured has helped develop his unique talent, says Krasnoff. “And it certainly has driven US interest in French basketball, at least as far as Wembanyama is concerned.

☆ Swedish singer Loreen wins Eurovision Song Contest for 2nd time at event feting Ukraine
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-14 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

Swedish singer Loreen won the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her power ballad "Tattoo," at a colorful, eclectic music competition clouded for a second year running by the war in Ukraine. Loreen, 39, previously won Eurovision in 2012 and is only the second performer to take the prize twice, after Ireland's Johnny Logan in the 1980s. Under the slogan "united by music," Eurovision final fused the soul of the English port city that birthed The Beatles with the spirit of war-battered Ukraine. Now in its 67th year, Eurovision bills itself as the world's biggest music contest — an Olympiad of party-friendly pop. "Now, the music industry, the world, knows that if you appear at Eurovision, you could be in for a great thing," said Steve Holden, host of the official Eurovision Song Contest podcast.

☆ A Guide to Eurovision 2023
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-12 | by ( Elisabeth Vincentelli | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Finland is another favorite, with a demented entry, Kaarija’s “Cha Cha Cha,” which is basically electronic body music, set in a glittery thunderdome. For Weir, who presents Peacock’s Eurovision coverage, this all shows the daring tastes of Eurovision viewers. It’s often countries most Americans would struggle find on a map that deliver Eurovision’s most memorable performances, even if they don’t necessarily make it out of the semifinal. “The response I got last year was just how impressed people were that there was an act for Moldova that had them standing on their couches and dancing,” Weir said. Competition for the most awkward Eurovision lyrics is close, as always, but let’s give Israel’s Noa Kirel a nod of approval for coming up with a tongue-twisting rallying cry in her song “Unicorn”: “It’s gonna be phenomen-phenomen-phenomenal/Phenomen-phenomenal/Feminine-feminine-femininal.”Classic Eurovision poetry.

☆ Meta Platforms scoops up A.I. networking chip team from Graphcore
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Meta Platforms Inc. has hired an Oslo-based team that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore. "We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. They bring deep expertise in the design and development of supercomputing systems to support AI and machine learning at scale in Meta's data centers," said Jon Carvill, the Meta spokesperson. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has become increasingly reliant on AI technology to target advertising, select posts for its apps' feeds and purge banned content from its platforms. The 10 employees' job descriptions on LinkedIn indicated the team had worked on AI-specific networking technology at Graphcore, which develops computer chips and systems optimized for AI work.

☆ Meta Platforms scoops up AI networking chip team from Graphcore
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Katie Paul | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

May 5 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) has hired an Oslo-based team that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore. "We recently welcomed a number of highly-specialized engineers in Oslo to our infrastructure team at Meta. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has become increasingly reliant on AI technology to target advertising, select posts for its apps' feeds and purge banned content from its platforms. The 10 employees' job descriptions on LinkedIn indicated the team had worked on AI-specific networking technology at Graphcore, which develops computer chips and systems optimized for AI work. A new category of network chip has emerged to help keep data moving smoothly within those computing clusters.

☆ Shopify tried to challenge Amazon in logistics. It never came within 100 miles. Was it all a waste?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Emma Cosgrove | Madeline Stone | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Shopify is selling most of its logistics business to freight unicorn Flexport in an all stock deal. Though Shopify's logistics journey began in 2019 as Shopify Fulfillment Network, the current iteration is less than a year old, and investors had become wary of the level of investment that getting the outfit into competitive shape would take. The acquisition was previously considered key to Shopify's fulfillment ambitions, and its team has been involved in the company's efforts to develop fulfillment software. Derek Lossing, an Amazon Logistics alum-turned investment advisor with Cirrus Global Advisors, said an acquisition-driven strategy may have been the right course — especially when the alternative involved contracting with legacy logistics players, which can take months. To some, the question of whether Shopify's layover into logistics was a waste of talent, time, and resources, can't be answered until Flexport takes hold and Clark flexes the muscles he gained building Amazon Logistics.

☆ Opinion: Why Britain is so weirded out by pledging allegiance to Charles
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Opinion Laura Beers | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

In a break with tradition, the public will be invited to pledge allegiance to King Charles III during the coronation ceremony on Saturday May 6. While many Brits I’ve spoken to are simply indifferent to the proposed pledge, there has also been an unprecedent degree of public vitriol over the scheme. Yet, objections to the proposed pledge are as much about its content as its form. The proposed coronation pledge, in contrast, invites Britons to pledge their loyalty to the King, and to his “heirs and successors” – a positively undemocratic pronouncement. That complexity cannot simply be smoothed away by inviting people to pledge allegiance to the crown.

☆ Centuro Global becomes the latest AI startup to tap up investors in 2023. Check out the 16-slide pitch deck it used to raise $4 million.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Riddhi Kanetkar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

AI startup Centuro Global just raised $4.1 million in fresh funds. The London-based company is among a raft of AI startups to lure cash from investors in 2023. London-based Centuro Global, founded in 2018, wants to make an array of time-consuming tasks associated with expansion – often outsourced to consultants – much easier to complete. Centuro Global is the latest in a line of AI startups to raise capital in Europe since the advent of ChatGPT-3 in November. Early-stage AI startups are getting traction on the continent, with the likes of ElevenLabs, Teton.ai, and DeepRender all raising rounds this year.

☆ Amazon is spending less on warehouses — and more on AI and its cloud business
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Sindhu Sundar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon signaled its commitment to AI investment amid a surge of interest in the technology. Amazon plans to build "the world's best personal assistant," CEO Andy Jassy told analysts Thursday. "And we are adding more dollars for large language models and generative AI." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy echoed the company's commitment to AI, saying the e-commerce giant would be among the few companies to prioritize developing large language models, the technology behind generative AI tools like chatbots. "If you look at the really significant leading large language models, they take many years to build, and many billions of dollars to build," he told analysts Thursday.

☆ A drug company abandoned a treatment for ‘bubble boy disease.’ After a 5-year fight, this little girl is about to get it
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Elizabeth Cohen Lauren Mascarenhas | Elizabeth Cohen | Lauren Mascarenhas | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +29 min

The Sulacks weighed their options: Have a transplant with a match that was less than ideal – far less – or wait for gene therapy to become available. The news release didn’t say anything else about the SCID gene therapy. Or was the company abandoning its plans for SCID gene therapy altogether? In February, 2021, the parents of more than 20 children who were waiting for the gene therapy treatment, including the Sulacks, wrote a letter to Gaspar. Insurance companies have sometimes balked at paying for gene therapy, which is typically given in one treatment.

☆ Corporate Tech Leaders Get Back to Basics
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Isabelle Bousquette | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

“It’s all about balancing priorities across both keeping the lights on, as well as new innovations, in order to support business needs,” said Sharmeelee Bala, Chief Information Officer at JCPenney. Photo: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg NewsThe era of the unicorn chief information officer is over, executive recruiters say. Many companies are now looking for IT chiefs who can deliver on the basics—including uptime, security and cost optimization—rather than tremendous innovators who can push boundaries and drive major change. To blame are tighter budgets, lower appetite for risk and a realization that some companies haven’t done a great job of keeping their foundational IT investments in order in the first place, recruiters said. The shift is a natural symptom of the economic cycle, they said.

☆ Melinda French Gates' former chief of staff, who cofounded a unicorn startup, says 'Do you have any questions?' is the most important interview question to nail. Here's how to answer it.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-23 | by ( Jeffrey Spector | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

His top interviewing tip is to knock the "question" question out of the park. Job candidates are focused on giving the right answers. My top interviewing tip is to knock the "question" question out of the parkSometimes, job candidates say they don't have any questions. Can you prove that you did your due diligence and have the competencies needed in the job you're applying for? Interviewers want to see candidates think specifically about this sector, this organization, and this role.

☆ I make $7,000 a month writing children’s books and teaching others how to self-publish. Here’s how I got started.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Perri Ormont Blumberg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Ren Lowe is an author, the CEO of Brown Unicorn Publishing, and a self-publishing coach. While on maternity leave in 2021, I wrote seven children's books with my daughter, Kameryn, which was the start of my self-publishing business. I started my sister company, Brown Unicorn Publishing, in October 2021, which offers "done for you" publishing services that range in price from $3,000 to $4,500, and my monthly income increased. From November 2021 through August, I earned a little more than $30,000 from the publishing services alone. In my first children's book, the illustrator created the images in the wrong sizing dimensions, and I panicked.

☆ Exclusive: The University of California has invested billions in venture capital firms since 2000 and it has lost hundreds of millions so far. Here's why.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-11 | by ( Ben Bergman | Darius Rafieyan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Insider obtained UC Investments' returns through a Public Records Act request. Unlike many other financial institutions, VC funds are not required to show their return on investment in startups. UC Investments, which has been managed by Jagdeep Singh Bachher since 2014, declined to comment. Though selling early produced an initial windfall, UC Investments could have ultimately missed out on substantial gains from these VC funds. By comparison, UC Investments earned a 8.3% return for its investment in public markets.

☆ Ralphie, the internet-famous French bulldog once called a 'fire-breathing demon,' seems to have finally found his forever home
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-09 | by ( Aaron Mcdade | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Ralphie, who went viral earlier this year for a Facebook post that described him with brutal honesty, has been adopted. Ralphie spent time with the Niagara SPCA this year after two owners decided he was too much to handle. The 26-pound, one-year-old white French bulldog with black spots drew quite a bit of attention earlier this year after a January Facebook post described the temperamental pup as "a whole jerk." "Ralphie is a terror in a somewhat small package," a January Facebook post from the Niagara County SPCA read. However, as someone with experience training dogs, Jason knew helping Ralphie through his triggers and aggression would take time.

☆ Coronation roles for Prince George, Camilla's grandchildren, says Buckingham Palace
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-04 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/2] The invitation for the Coronation of Britain's King Charles III is seen in this undated handout image obtained by Reuters April 4, 2023. LONDON, April 4 (Reuters) - King Charles's grandson Prince George and the grandchildren of the Queen Consort Camilla will play major roles in the coronation of the British monarch next month, Buckingham Palace confirmed on Tuesday. George, 9, the eldest son of heir to the throne Prince William, will be one of the king's four pages of honour who will accompany him at the grand ceremony on May 6, and join the procession through the nave of London's Westminster Abbey. Camilla's four pages will be made up of her grandchildren Freddy Parker Bowles, and Gus and Louis Lopes, as well as her great-nephew Arthur Elliot. British newspapers had previously reported that the queen consort wanted her grandchildren to play significant roles, even though their parents are the children from her marriage to her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles.

☆ Check out the 9-slide pitch deck Quantexa, a data intelligence startup, used to raise $129 million at a $1.8 billion valuation
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-04 | by ( Callum Burroughs | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Quantexa, a data intelligence startup, has become a unicorn following its latest funding round. The London-based company has raised $129 million in a round led by GIC. The startup positions itself as a "decision-making" platform that provides companies with the best data available to help reduce costs and optimize growth. The new investment values the business at $1.9 billion, bringing Quantexa's total funds raised to $370 million. The company had seen a lot of inbound interest from investors leading into this funding round, Marria added.

☆ Base10 Partners is offering its limited partners direct access to investing in unicorn startups in order to compete against VC firms with much bigger funds. Here's how.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-31 | by ( April Joyner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Limited partners, the investors that back VC firms, are seeking out more direct deals in startups. But often LPs don't get in until long after the VC firms have invested, so they get smaller returns. VC firm Base10 Partners has launched a program to give LPs earlier access and more upside. As the exuberance in venture capital has crashed to a halt, the institutions that back VC firms, known as limited partners, have had plenty to grouse about. The VC firm Base10 Partners seeks to offer its own limited partners a remedy to this dilemma.

☆ 3 tips on scaling your business during an economic downturn, according to a tech CEO
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-30 | by ( Matt Wursta | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Matt Wursta is the founder and CEO of Wursta, a tech consultancy. I started Wursta, a tech consultancy, nearly 10 years ago, but as a business owner, I hadn't seen the market rise and fall so acutely until last year. Building a new business is by nature an uncertain endeavor, but unpredictable economic times can create the best environments for building a thriving business. Here are three tips for capitalizing on the downtimes to make the most for your business. Without sufficient cash (or cash alternatives) on hand, it becomes much more difficult to make the most of the opportunities that present themselves.

Search resuls for: "Unicorn"

25 mentions found