Uber Is Reportedly Going to Sell Its Southeast Asian Division to Competitor GrabSources say Uber is considering bailing on its Southeast Asia division, with plans to sell it to regional competitor Grab, CNBC reported on Friday. Singapore-based Grab claims to have 95 percent market share in southeast Asia and recently held a $2.5 billion round of funding in July 2017. It operates in more than 100 cities and has a presence in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar, among other countries; according to the CNBC report, Uber is pursuing the same kind of exit it pulled off in China, where it lost billions of dollars before finally selling out to rival Didi Chuxing:
Businesses Move To The Midwest, First Stop: ColumbusAccording to VentureOhio’s 2017 Venture Report, more VC funding is currently flowing through Ohio than at any point in the state’s history. In fact, in 2016, $470 million was invested in 210 startups, a 46 percent increase over the previous two years. On top of that, Columbus, its capital city, is now the top U.S. metro for scaling young companies, according to a recent report by the Kauffman Foundation. So, why now? In short, the Midwest is buzzing, and it’s being driven by a national VC industry that’s hit a record high (the highest since the dot-com era). Since 2013, Ohio-based venture capital funds have raised nearly $1 billion in new capital, and over 70 percent of those dollars were raised by Columbus-based investors. Now, national investors are noticing: take JD Vance and Steve Case’s new seed fund, for example. The Rise the Rest® Seed Fund will invest $150 million in startups in the Midwest with the support of a group of America’s major business leaders, including Jeff Bezos and Howard Schultz. [ Forbes ] Female Founders Got 2% of Venture Capital Dollars in 2017Things are changing for women in the startup and venture capital world. Last year, a handful of them came forward to share their stories of facing sexual harassment and discrimination—and a number of the industry’s powerful men, including Binary Capital co-founder Justin Caldbeck, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, and former Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson—lost their jobs as a result. [ Fortune ] Uber exec Andrew Chen leaving for Andreessen HorowitzA new start-up is making jackets out of the material used in spacesuits. The start-up, called 13-One, has jackets lined with a radiant barrier developed by NASA scientists to protect astronauts from extreme temperatures. The technology provides a light-weight, reflective insulation that's capable of retaining 90 percent of one's body heat. "This is a technology that was used in space and is still being used in space," says Hema Nambiar, founder and CEO of 13-One. "Now it's for everyday use." [ CNBC ] E18 "Angel": Rob May, angel & founder Talla: investing criteria, Talla ICO, blockchain, cryptoWebmail.us co-founder back at it with new startup in BlacksburgAn early pioneer of the technology scene in Virginia Tech’s backyard is back in town with plans to grow his next venture here. The company is Chartio, a data visualization startup that has already built a reputation for itself in San Francisco with about 40 employees and plans to get much, much larger. One of the men bringing the company into Blacksburg is Kevin Minnick, who co-founded Webmail.usin 1999 and sold the company to Rackspace eight years later in a stock deal worth about $10 million at the time. [ Roanoke ] Silicon Valley parents are raising their kids tech-free — and it should be a red flag
4 potential reasons for the rise of overvaluationsLast summer, Carolle Nau, a designer and creative director at the tech and business incubator SkyLab Bostoån, spent some time volunteering at a homeless shelter in Roxbury, a historically black neighborhood in Boston. Specifically, she was there to help out with a program that taught young women staying at the shelter how to code. “I was blown away by how thirsty and bright these young women were,” Nau tells Fast Company. But many of them were in their late teens or early twenties–right at the point at which they were beginning to age out of the shelter system. Nau discussed the issue with her friend and SkyLab Boston cofounder Brigitte Wallace, and the two of them began to ponder how they could continue to foster these young women’s interest in coding, while providing them a secure, stable place to live and from which they could build out a career and resources. At the same time that they first started talking about this idea, an old Victorian house on Nau’s street in Roxbury went on the market. They decided to buy, and begin to realize their vision.[ Fast Company ] Harvard and the ValleyCoworking community CreativeCubes invests $4.8 million to bring Orange Theory Fitness franchises to its Melbourne spacesTech workers in Silicon Valley are sending their kids to a $28,000-a-year private school that shuns technologyMontana-based mapping startup onXmaps raises a round of funding fit for Big Sky CountryA mapping startup based in Missoula, Mont., which allows users to download sophisticated offline topographic maps outlining public and private lands and a number of other features geared towards hunting, fishing and camping, has pulled in its first major outside funding. onXmaps has closed a $20.3 million Series A round led by Summit Partners. Bessemer Venture Partners, Millennium Technology Value Partners, Next Frontier Capital and NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke also participated in the round. The company is calling the fundraise one of the biggest ever among startups based in Montana. This is impressively the first bout of outside funding that the 70-person startup has ever taken since being founded in 2009. The company’s founder and CEO Eric Siegfried, an avid outdoorsman himself, had created a more basic program to integrate these maps with his own Garmin GPS. After finding his friends were interested in having a product like this too, he put down $27k of his personal funds into the venture and turned his wife’s scrap-booking room into an HQ of sorts, copying the software he’d written to microSD cards and laser-printing labels. [ TechCrunch ] South Korea aims for startup goldRajeev Behera is coming after your performance reviews. “It’s an extremely broken process,” he says. “Ask anyone about them, and no one is really happy.” In 2014, Behera and two cofounders set out to tackle the problem with a new software company called Reflektive, quickly gaining the support of top investment firms such as Andreessen Horowitz. And Reflektive has set its own near-annual tradition of raising money most years since. The latest: a $60 million Series C funding round led by growth equity specialist TPG Growth. [ Forbes ] Is Crypto the Future of Early Stage Funding?Butthurt Ex-Google Employee Who Wrote the Anti-Feelings Diversity Memo Lost His Labor Relations ChallengeStartup Grind Perth Hosts Jemma Green Power Ledger Febuary 2018VC Lecture Ron Neumunz 13 2 2018Simon Foster (Chatter Research) - Getting real-time customer feedbackTrans Students, School Shooting, And Bill Gates Answers A Tough QuestionDiscuss: How do you know if you should bootstrap your startup?Audio Of The Week: A Decentralized AI PlatformRobot assistants and a marijuana incubator |