From Online payment to eCommerce

Coursera’s co-founder Daphne Koller set to start anew at Calico

daphnecoursera In a blog post, Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller announced she is leaving the company to join Alphabet subsidiary Calico. Koller founded Coursera with Andrew Ng back in 2012 after working together on artificial intelligence research at Stanford. The two supported the company’s growth until Ng left to become chief scientist at Baidu’s research arm.  Today Coursera has grown… Read More

Social investing site Instavest raises $1.7M in seed funding

Businessman Celebrating Part of YC’s Winter 2015 class, Instavest is a startup trying to turn investing — an activity most of us are used to doing privately — into a social activity.
The site launched about a year and a half ago with the goal of helping average retail investors learn from others who have more experience in investing and the stock market.
Today the startup announced… Read More

Blockai’s new tool combines tweeting and claiming copyright

Blockai Homepage Blockai is supposed to help photographers and artists defend their intellectual property. Now it’s launching a new feature to make that process easier — or at least better-integrated with Twitter.
Previously, Blockai users would go to the startup’s website to upload their work, creating a record in a public database (namely, the blockchain) stating that they’re the… Read More

Netlify, a sevice for quickly rolling out static websites, raises $2.1M

netlify Mathias Biilmann — a former CTO of a firm that built websites for small businesses — says developers have gotten so used to using Github as a central workflow, they expect the entire rest of the developer experience to work the same way. “The way that a front-end developer would work would be to go into a server and change how things were structured, but then Git came in… Read More

Why startups need a defensive IP strategy

Towers at Walls of Avila One of the things I really love about working with startup founders is that they are by nature an optimistic crowd: They set out to build amazing things, change the world and fundamentally shift the way people view things. What they often don’t realize, though, is that in the midst of brutal competition, the path to scale and success is often lined with unexpected co-travelers and events. Read More

ZeroCater raises $4.1 million to keep office workers well-fed in the U.S.

 While it seems like a new food delivery business launches or gets funded every season in the U.S., several have scaled back, like Sprig, or shut down entirely like Spoonrocket. Among those that have survived, however, are smart sites and apps ser...