‘I wanted to hit a nerve’: How one entrepreneur exposed Silicon Valley’s anxieties.“Most CEOs I know are deeply depressed, often,” Sunil Rajaraman says on Recode Decode. Sunil Rajaraman didn’t plan to go viral. After texting back and forth with a friend about Silicon Valley stereotypes in August, he hastily formed them into a blog post called “This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley,” firing off his first draft on the blogging platform Medium. To his surprise, a lot of people read it — more than one million of them, Rajaraman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. [ Recode ]Vista Equity Sets $10 Billion Upper Limit For New FundVista Equity Partners, the private-equity firm that recently took software company Solera Holdings Inc. private,
set a $10 billion upper limit for its sixth flagship buyout fund, said people familiar with the matter, potentially making it one of the largest technology-focused funds ever raised. Vista on March 11 held an initial closing for the new fund, securing more than the $5.78 billion it raised for its fifth fund in 2014, said one of the people familiar with the fundraising. JOSH KUSHNER’S HEALTH-INSURANCE START-UP OSCAR IS STILL BLEEDING MONEYWhile Donald Trump’s 35-year-old son-in-law Jared Kushner is touring the White House grounds and helping lead the president-elect’s transition effort, his brother is struggling with a whole separate set of issues. Oscar Health, the billion-dollar start-up co-founded four years ago by real-estate scion Josh Kushner—the one dating supermodel and aspiring computer programmer Karlie Kloss, not the one married to Ivanka Trump—is reportedly hemorrhaging money. Despite presenting itself as a scrappy tech upstart and not a decidedly less-sexy health insurance company, Oscar isn’t turning “the industry on its head”, as promised, so much as proving that millennial-friendly branding isn’t enough to overcome the massive economic headwinds battering the health care industry. [ Vanity Fair ] BuzzFeed Wants to Sell You Stuff. The company has acquired Scroll, an e-commerce startup from Quirky founder Ben KaufmanTwo years ago, Ben Kaufman, then-CEO of well-funded consumer product startup Quirky, delivered one of the most awkward, and candid, on-stage interviews I’ve ever witnessed at Fortune’s annual Brainstorm Tech conference. Quirky was in meltdown mode at the time. But instead of trying to spin the situation into a positive, Kaufman, then 28, clearly articulated where Quirky had gone wrong, admitting that the company’s mission, a platform to bring people’s inventions to market, had failed. The biggest reason for the failure, he said, was, “because of the traditional bounds of brick and mortar retail.” [ Fortune ] Reese Witherspoon Launches New Multimedia Venture With Peter Chernin At AT&TReese Witherspoon and Otter Media, the joint venture between media executive Peter Chernin’s The Chernin Group and AT&T, today launched Hello Sunshine, a new cross-platform content company dedicated to telling female-driven stories, FORBES can exclusively report. [ Forbes ] Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei has hired an editor to cover tech at his media startupPolitico co-founder Jim VandeHei’s new company doesn’t have a name yet. And he has yet to explain exactly what the company will be, exactly. But he’s hiring for it anyway. Here’s his newest recruit: Kim Hart, the current press secretary at the Federal Communications Commission, will oversee tech coverage for the newco, which should launch early next year. Hart says she will work “in parallel” with Dan Primack, the star finance reporter VandeHei hired away from Fortune last month. David McCabe, who has been covering tech for The Hill, will report to her, and she says she’ll likely hire another two reporters before launch. [ Recode ] LATEST FUNDING France’s Sigfox raises $160 million to expand its IoT network to 60 countriesFrench IoT startup Sigfox announced today that it has raised $160 million as it continues to build out its communication network for connected objects.The latest round comes less than two years after the company raised $115 million, a sum that was then the largest round of VC funding ever raised in France. That was later surpassed by BlaBlaCar, which raised a $200 million round. [ Venture Beat ] Fashion startup Koovs raises $16m from India’s Times Group, other investorsFashion store Koovs has raised US$16 million from India’s largest media house, the Times of India Group, and other investors. The firm said the fundraising is part of a three-year program to secure US$43.3 million, planned since 2015. With the latest tranche the company has raised US$38.4 million to date. [ Tech In Asia ] Cogito raises $15 million to help call center staff detect customers’ mood from their voiceArtificial intelligence company Cogito raised $15 million in its latest funding round, the company told VentureBeat today. Cogito combines behavioral science and artificial intelligence to detect a person’s emotional state and determine if their mood has changed and how conversations are going — all in real time. [ Venture Beat ] AdvisorEngine Raises $20M in Series A Financing AdvisorEngine (fka Vanare), a NYC-based innovative digital wealth management technology platform, secured $20m in Series A financing. The strategic investment was made by WisdomTree Investments, Inc. [ Finsmes ] Sparkcentral raises $20 Million growth investment to double down on international expansion and support fast-growing enterprise customer baseSparkcentral, the leading enterprise digital customer engagement platform, today announced $20 million in new funding. In support of its successful international growth, the round was led by the European venture capital fund LRM, with Group MC and existing investors Split Rock Partners and Jackson Square Ventures also participating. This brings the company's total venture funding to $37.5 million. Domino Data Lab, the data science startup Tesla uses, raises $10.5MSlack and other general-purpose collaboration tools can significantly speed up certain team projects, but they only go so far in areas such as data science where the work is usually too complex to be sorted out with a few chat messages.As a result, analytics teams at Tesla Motors Inc. and other leading companies have turned to Domino Lab Inc., which today closed a $10.5 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. [ Silicon Angle ] Seventh Sense Biosystems Raises Series C Round of FundingSeventh Sense Biosystems, Inc. (7SBio), the makers of TAP™, the world’s first push-button blood collection device, announced a $10M round of Series C funding today. Participating in the financing are existing investors Novartis ($ADR), one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, Laboratory Corporation of America® Holdings (LabCorp®) ($LH), the world’s leading healthcare diagnostics company, Polaris Partners and Flagship Ventures. [ Business Wire ] Laundry folding robot from Japan bags $60m funding ahead of 2017 launchWhen we saw Japan’s laundry folding robot in action last year in Tokyo, my colleague was not impressed, calling it “ridiculous” and “and a waste of engineering talent” – not to mention the 10 minutes it takes to fold a single garment. But that has not put off Panasonic, which has just contributed to US$60 million in funding for the startup creators of Laundroid. [ Tech In Asia ] Wearhaus Raises $4M Series A, Flagship Wearhaus Arc Available for PurchaseWearhaus, a hardware and software startup using headphones to bring people together rather than keep them isolated, has secured $4MM in Series A funding and is announcing general availability for the company’s flagship headphones: the Wearhaus Arc. [ Business Wire ] Blockchain Property Rights Startup Bitmark Raises $1.7 MillionTaiwan blockchain startup Bitmark has raised $1.7m in a new seed funding round. Cherubic Ventures, a VC firm focused on early-stage companies, led the round. Bitmark, which is developing technology to register user generated content using blockchain tech, raised the funding from a group of investors that also included Digital Currency Group and WI Harper. [ Coin Desk ] Sesame Street’s VC fund makes its first investment in tutoring app Yup Sesame Ventures, the venture fund formed by Sesame Workshop and New York-based Collaborative Fund in May, has made its first investment in a tutoring platform called Yup. Specifically, Yup (formerly known as MathCrunch) has raised $4 million in a seed extension round led by Sesame Ventures, bringing the company’s total capital raised to date to $7.5 million. [ Tech Crunch ] LATEST EXITS Providence Plans $1 Billion Sale of Diving Group PADIAdvent International has agreed to buy a majority stake in St. Louis, Missouri-based Ansira Partners, a provider of tech-enabled marketing solutions. The seller is KRG Capital Partners. No financial terms were disclosed. Ropes & Gray advised Advent on the deal that’s expected to close by the end of this year. FUND RAISED HTC unveils a $1.5 billion investment fund and research center for ChinaHTC is making yet more moves in China, announcing a partnership with the Shenzhen Municipal Government to kick off two new initiatives. The first of these is a new China VR Research Institute. HTC and this center will work on developing breakthroughs in sensors, displays, graphics, data visualization, human-machine interaction, and other areas. [ Venture Beat ] Curated by Venture Pulse Team. Find us on : [ Venturepulse.org, CrunchBase, AngelList ] |