VC firm, Uber ex-CEO put lawsuit on hold so investment deal can go aheadOn Sunday, Uber’s board of directors formalized a new arrangement that enables SoftBank and the Dragoneer Investment Group to purchase at least 14 percent of the ride-hailing startup. The move expands upon negotiations and related moves that took place more than a month ago. Notably, Benchmark, a venture capital firm that had sued former CEO Travis Kalanick, won't pursue its lawsuit for now so that the SoftBank deal can go forward, per The Wall Street Journal. [ Arts Technica ] Top Women Investors Are Answering the VC Boys' Club With One of Their OwnThe female investors of venture capital are expanding their dinner party, so to speak. Jess Lee, the former CEO of fashion shopping site Polyvore who was named Sequoia Capital’s first U.S. female investing partner last year, is on Monday unveiling a networking initiative for female company founders. Along with other female venture capital partners, Lee is launching Female Founder Office Hours—a series of events at which investors will talk with and advise women entrepreneurs in one-on-one sessions. Lee told Fortune that she and the other female VCs see the project as one way to help more women enter the tech ecosystem. [ Fortune ] Former PhotoBox CEO Stan Laurent joins Highland Europe as PartnerOperating experience is something that almost every European VC firm likes to talk up these days, as the region’s venture capital industry tries to shed its investment banker image of yesteryear. However, there’s no denying that the longer you’ve been in VC, the further away you are from your experience at the coalface of running a company. That criticism can’t yet be levied at Stan Laurent, Highland Europe‘s newly appointed Partner, who, until recently, served as chief executive of PhotoBox, the photo-printing consumer company that also owns Moonpig. He joins Highland as a VC after a nearly year-long stint as the growth venture capital fund’s first ever Entrepreneur in Residence. Prior to that, he spent ten years in charge of Photobox, of which Highland was a backer, before the company exited to a private equity consortium in January 2016. [ Tech Crunch ] The project management startup dapulse is changing its name because people kept making fun of it
Meet 9 of tech's newest billionairesYou've almost certainly heard of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. But have you heard of Patrick Collison, David Zalik, or Lucy Peng? As I'm sure you know, the first group of men were startup founders who went on to become tech billionaires. What you may not know is the second group of people have also joined the tech billionaires club. We're taking a look at some of that club's new members. To compile this list, we pulled from Forbes wealth rankings and the Bloomberg Billionaires index. To narrow it down, we limited it to people who have made the bulk of their wealth in the past three years. [ Business Insider ] Departing NSA veterans catch the eye of Silicon Valley investorsWith a newly minted PhD in “pure math” in 2004 (it was actually a dual degree in math and machine learning), Ellison Anne Williams saw her work going in one of three directions: the National Security Agency, IBM or academic research. She chose classified government intelligence work and spent the formative years of her career laboring away in secret, immersed in the agency’s mission. She climbed the ranks to become a senior technologist at the agency. But the urge to be her own boss never went away. So last year, after 12 years at the NSA, she left to start her own cybersecurity company. [ The Washington Post ] This Startup Is Cashing In On India's Massive Demand For English-Speaking WorkforceLanguage learning is big business. In India, the socio-economic status in society is approximately in line with a person's fluency in English, and for millions, proficiency in this language has come to be seen as a key to prosperity. A year ago, capitalizing on the aspirations of people, with an economic motivation, to learn English, Anuradha Agarwal founded Multibhashi. It’s an online language-learning platform that help people learn English through major Indian languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. [ Forbes ] E777: AID:Tech: blockchain to prevent fraud w/digital ID; RoboKind: robots teach children w/autismGraphcore raises $50M amid a flurry of AI chip activityWhile some of the largest chip manufacturers are looking to shift their focus onto the GPU for their biggest machine learnings, there’s a blooming ecosystem of new chip startups looking to rethink the way processing for AI works That includes a European-based startup called Graphcore, which said today that it has raised $50 million in new financing led by Sequoia Capital — following a $30M Series B led by Atomico in July. Graphcore, like some other startups, is looking to rethink the way AI computation works at an actual substrate level. There isn’t a product on the market yet — CEO Nigel Toon says that’s on track for Q1 next year for early-access customers. But it’s been an area that’s been tantalizing enough to convince companies like Google and Apple to look to design their own GPU technology to tap this kind of streamlined processing for operations like computer vision, language recognition, and others centered around machine learning. [ TechCrunch ] Snap has spent $352 million on acquisitions this year — here are all of the startups it's bought so far
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