Niche co-founders Rob Fishman and Darren Lachtman are reuniting at video startup BratFour years ago, Rob Fishman and Darren Lachtman launched Niche, a company that matched social media stars with brands that wanted to pay them to promote their products. That worked well: Two years later, Twitter bought the company for a pile of money. Now they are getting the band back together. Lachtman, who left Twitter this summer, is rejoining Fishman, who has already launched Brat, a video startup. You can call them both co-founders, if you like. Fishman and Lachtman have more resources to work with: They’ve just raised $10 million in a round led by A. Capital, the firm led by Ronny Conway, along with previous investors Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital and Box Group, who had already kicked in $2.5 million. [ Re/Code ] Evolve Foundation launches a $100 million fund to find startups working to relieve human sufferingIt seems there’s nothing but bad news out there lately, but here’s some good news — the nonprofit Evolve Foundation has raised $100 million for a new fund called the Conscious Accelerator to combat loneliness, purposelessness, fear and anger spreading throughout the world though technology. Co-founder of Matrix Partners China Bo Shao will lead the fund and will be looking for entrepreneurs focusing on tech that can help people become more present and aware. [ TechCrunch ] Sources: Snap has acquired Metamarkets for less than $100M to step up its ad tech playAs Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, gears up to report its quarterly earnings next week, it looks like the company is making some moves to beef up its primary business line, advertising.TechCrunch has learned that the company has acquired Metamarkets, an ad tech startup that provides programmatic ad data-related services to marketers, such as a data dashboard to measure how campaigns are performing; an API to import your programmatic data into other apps; and inventory discovery and bid monitoring for exchanges. [ TechCrunch ] Life Inside the RVs of Silicon ValleyIn Silicon Valley, one of the wealthiest regions in the United States, some people have been forced out of permanent housing and into their RVs. This past summer, we met ten of the area’s mobile residents.
AT QUITTING TIME on a weekday afternoon, a woman with a Stanford ID badge dangling from a lanyard arrives at her Palo Alto home—though it doesn’t seem like this particular home would be hers. “Karen,” who prefers that we don’t use her last name, lives in a Silicon Valley Hooverville: a line of Jaycos and Winnebagos, Pace Arrows and Tiogas, parked along the side of El Camino Real. Spanish explorers blazed the trail (its name translates to “the royal highway”) to connect their missions as they were colonizing early Alta California; now the road runs amid the luxe campuses of tech companies, spreading their own kind of cultural hegemony. In this stretch through Palo Alto, six lanes of suburban traffic whizz by Stanford’s manicured soccer fields, stadium, and wooded jogging paths. Like much of Silicon Valley, the area somehow feels both harried and tranquil, a pastoral pressure cooker that squeezes out anyone who can’t keep pace with its strangulating cost of living. Those inside the RVs are reminded of how they’re being left behind by each passing car that oh-so-slightly jars their home. Whoosh. Whoosh. “It’s like getting hit in the head,” as one resident puts it. “Not real hard—but just hard enough, to where you just want it to stop.” [ Topic ] Tusk Ventures has closed its debut fund with $36 millionBradley Tusk, a former political operative who helps companies launch political-style campaigns, runs several businesses. One of them, Tusk Ventures, has been working with startups for a couple of years and until recently, accepted its payment in equity only. That changed in early 2016 when the outfit began raising money from outside investors looking to get into the some of those deals. Now, says the firm, it has officially closed that debut fund with $36 million, from 22 individual and institutional investors. According to Jordan Nof, a former Blackstone director who joined Tusk in 2015 and largely oversees the fund’s day-to-day operations, the new fund already has stakes in seven companies, and the team plans to fund up to 25. [ TechCrunch ] A grade school backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel is closing another outpost in New York CityAltSchool, an educational software developer and network of "micro-schools" with four locations in California and New York, is shuttering another outpost. The startup's schoolhouse in Manhattan's East Village will close its doors at the end of the academic year, according to an email obtained by Business Insider from vice president of schools at AltSchool, Sam Franklin, to parents of AltSchool students on Thursday night. [ Business Insider ] Feature Friday: AirCraft By DronebaseI hesitate to call this a feature, even though it is, as AirCraft is a way bigger deal than a new feature. Our portfolio company Dronebase operates the largest drone pilot network in the world. Tens of thousands of pilots fly missions for Dronebase and the Dronebase mobile apps are used by most of these pilots to do these missions. Pilots connect their mobile phones to their drone consoles and the smartphone adds a lot of capability during the mission. [ AVC ] AR/VR Acquisition Pace Picks Up Despite Industry SetbacksNearly every major tech company has a stake in augmented or virtual reality. Or both. But even though some of the world’s largest companies are diving headfirst into both AR and VR, the categories remain nascent. Aside from Snap filters and occasional enterprise use cases, both AR and VR have yet to disrupt the ways in which we compute. However, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others think that mainstream adoption is a matter of when, not if. Therefore, it wouldn’t be surprising to see increased acquisition activity for startups operating in similar spaces. And while acquisition activity is up, the bark is bigger than the bite. [ CrunchBase ] Cindy Mi on Building VIPKID, the World's Largest English Learning Platform for ChildrenWhy Do So Many Hardware Startups Fail?Palo Alto nonprofit Benetech wins a $42.5M Dept. of Education grant, a nod to founder Jim Fruchterman’s quest to help the blindMark Cuban has invested more than $1 million in a Harvard grad's company that builds video games to make hiring easier |