ezCater raises $100M as it looks to own office catered meals around the worldEveryone at the office needs lunch (or in some cases dinner) — but for salespeople trying to entice a potential lead or convince an architect to pick up their project, they might need to use a free meal as a bit of a lure to get them in the room to make that pitch. It was a problem that Stefania Mallett, CEO of ezCater, and co-founder Briscoe Rodgers ran into plenty of times — and decided to turn it into a full company. [ Tech Crunch ] Veriff raises $7.7M Series A to become the ‘Stripe for identity’Veriff, the Estonian startup that wants to become something akin to the ‘Stripe for identity’, has raised $7.7 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, joining an impressive list of backers that include Taavet Hinrikus, Ashton Kutcher, Paul Buchheit, Elad Gil, SV Angel, ACE Ventures, and Superangel. Mosaic’s Simon Levene, and Hinrikus, who co-founded and is chairman of TransferWise, have joined the Veriff board. [ Tech Crunch ] The 29-year-old CEO of Stripe reveals what it's really like running a $9.2 billion startup
Investors said Domo was worth $2.28 billion — but when it has its IPO, it could be worth just $511 million
$2 billion SurveyMonkey just confidentially filed to go public after almost 20 years as a private company
Khosla Ventures’ newest partner worries for too-young CEOs when they have too-appeasing venture capitalistsIt’s hard for Silicon Valley investors to not coddle a young, hotshot CEO. Being too mean draws a bad reputation among entrepreneurs and could lead the investor to not see the next great deal. And focusing on older, less-spry founders might cause a venture capitalist to lose touch with today’s consumers, customers and products, and totally whiff on a wave of innovation. [ Re/Code ] Rapid ExperimentationIt can be exhausting to try and stay caught up on every new tech company being started. The Gotham Gal said me to yesterday, “everyone is an entrepreneur these days.” She’s right about that directionally although most companies have employees who are not founders so it is not exactly correct. [ AVC ] The inside story of how AI got good enough to dominate Silicon ValleyAlex Krizhevsky didn’t get into the AI business to change the course of history. Krizhevsky, born in Ukraine but raised in Canada, was just looking to delay getting a coding job when he reached out to Geoff Hinton about doing a computer-science PhD program in AI at the University of Toronto. The fateful moment was when, as a graduate student, Krizhevsky and a fellow student named Ilya Sutskever, decided to enter the ImageNet competition, a test for AI consisting of a huge database of online images. [ QZ ] As Thai Startups Rise, 500 TukTuks Targets $20 Million For Second Fund The largest payment app in South Korea, Toss, has pulled in $40 million in fresh investment from Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia China. The deal for Viva Republica, Toss’s parent company, comes just over a year after it raised $48 million from payment giant PayPal and others. There’s no valuation for this newest round, but we do know that it is a ‘bridge’ intended to bring new investors in and help accelerate the business for a large raise further down the line. (It is also the first Korean investment for both GIC and Sequoia China.) [ Tech Crunch ] After twenty years of Salesforce, what Marc Benioff got right and wrong about the cloudAs we enter the 20th year of Salesforce, there’s an interesting opportunity to reflect back on the change that Marc Benioff created with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for enterprise software with his launch of Salesforce.com. [ Tech Crunch ] How China's Alibaba Is Winning Over Hong Kong And Taiwan -- Startup By StartupNearly 400 startups showed this month at Asia's biggest annual tech show in Taipei, up more than 100 from last year. Anchoring their showroom at 2018 Computex Taipei was the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, part of the China-based Alibaba e-commerce empire. The fund's management carved out a mini amphitheater surrounded by some of the 23 prosperous companies from Taiwan and 16 from Hong Kong that it has supported since 2015 with a fund size of $461 million. [ Forbes ] A hot startup raised $66 million in 5 days using these 24 slidesTech investors are throwing money at Front, a five-year-old startup that aims to change the way teams get work done. The startup makes a shared inbox app that lets teams handle messages from email, texts, Slack, and social media, all in one place. [ Business Insider ] Silicon Valley firms crunched their hardest in 2017 to rebrand ordinary merchandise long produced by other industries as uniquely innovative product lines. Some of them were pretty obnoxious, like Lyft’s totally-not-just-a-bus shuttle service, or WeLive’s attempt to market living in communal housing as a lived experience, or the company selling a “private pop-up space” that is literally a tent. Almost all of them felt like ideas cooked up in an ideological and economic bubble. [ Gizmodo ] Wealth management startup SigFig secures $50 mln round led by General AtlanticMicrosoft extends education push with acquisition of Flipgrid, a student video discussion platform9 charts that capture the US private equity industryElastic Path Raises A $43M Series B To Ramp Up R&D For Commerce Platform Mercari Wants to Be the First Japan Startup to Make It in U.S.Email security startup Tessian raises $13M led by Balderton and AccelTurning Trash Into Profits: How To Finance Deals That Don't Work For Venture CapitalFalkonry, A Machine Learning Startup, Adds Strategic Investors In $4.6M Series A 30Ventures raising $15 million venture capital fundExecs from DJI, 3DR and Skydio to discuss drones at Disrupt SF 2018Kaspersky pulls plug on Europol joint venture after EU parliament vote to ban its softwareGoogle to Invest $550 Million in China E-Commerce Site JDThe Three Layers Of ManagementThe Philly startup making POC-inspired cosmetics will launch its first collection this summerWish Founder Revamps 'Culture And Operations' To Tackle Walmart, Amazon |