Kamal Reader

The IPO window is all but closed right now, but a few things appear still to be getting through the cracks and there are big sums attached to that. Today, Banzai — an engagement marketing startup that provides tools to source and connect with potential sales leads, and tools to build and run online video … Read more

It seems perhaps the rules of fairness your parents taught you as children also apply to large multi-billion dollar defense contracts. This week the DoD announced that it was awarding four big tech companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle – an equal opportunity to share in a $9 billion contract to bring the department … Read more

A startup from former Meta employees aims to streamline the content moderation process for companies grappling with some of the internet’s most complex, dangerous challenges. Cinder, which likes to describe itself as an “operating system for trust and safety,” boasts years of combined experience in security and content policy work. That includes CEO and co-founder … Read more

Metagood, a for-profit social impact NFT startup, has raised $5 million in its pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch. “We launched the company on the concept of using NFTs as an expression where everyone does good things for each other and the good stuff is tokenized and exchangeable,” Bill Tai, co-founder and chairman of … Read more

Salesforce has always fashioned itself as a socially responsible company, and that includes working on a Net Zero carbon emissions goal. In fact, it launched Sustainability Cloud in 2019, a product for tracking customer Net Zero goals. This year, they are taking that idea a step further with a new product that incorporates not only … Read more

Less than two months after announcing a new $9.2 billion valuation, TripActions said today it has secured $400 million in credit facilities from Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).  Specifically, TripActions has secured a warehouse debt facility from Goldman Sachs with a $200 million commitment and the potential to “flex up” to $300 million … Read more

Black Sheep Foods, a San Francisco–based food tech company that uses plants to create a similar flavor to animal meat, secured another funding round, this time $12.3 million in Series A capital. The company is leaping over the traditional plant-based foods, like beef, chicken and pork, to focus on scaling production for its lamb-flavored product. … Read more

Matt Barbieri Contributor Share on Twitter Matt Barbieri is partner-in-charge, Media, Technology and Life Sciences at Wiss & Co. Many founders are reactive when business doesn’t go as planned. They may make knee-jerk reactions like: “If I lose 10% of revenue then I’ll just lay off five people.” The problem with such approaches is that … Read more

Foxconn is investing another $500 million in its India business as it ramps up its plans to expand its chipmaking factories in the South Asian market that is slowly becoming a key hardware base for Apple. In a stock exchange filing in Taiwan on Thursday, Foxconn said its Singapore subsidiary will deploy the capital. The … Read more