Also, thanks very much to Spark PR for showing some SVC love. That color suits you! (Tim, you especially.) We like the added touch of the unicorn piñata.

Bird, the young Santa Monica, Ca.-based electric scooter company that we profiled less than a month ago, is raising as much as $100 million in new funding at a $300 million valuation, according to TechCrunch. More here.

Lloyd Blankfein is preparing to step down as Goldman Sachs CEO as soon as the end of the year, capping a more than 12-year run that has made him one of the longest-serving bosses on Wall Street. According to the WSJ, Goldman isn’t looking beyond the firm’s two co-president to replace him.

LawTrades provides vetted corporate attorneys — each of whom have been General Counsel or senior in-house counsel — to provide on-demand assistance at a remarkably low monthly subscription. The platform provides clear transparent prices with low fixed hourly rates of below $200 per hour, and there is no minimum use requirement. Companies get the benefit of a dedicated project manager to monitor their progress and ability to work with the same LawTrades lawyer over time. For a limited time, you can sign up for one month free. Learn more here.

If want to live outside an expensive city like San Francisco or New York, it pays to have specialized knowledge. So suggests a new survey out of Upwork, the freelancing platform created from the 2013 merger of Elance and oDesk that connects businesses and independent contractors.

According to feedback from more than 1,005 workforce hiring decision-makers conducted on Upwork’s behalf by the company Inavaro, skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want and employers will come to them. The reason: companies say they are struggling to find talent, with the average position open for 36 days and some engineering jobs vacant for up to 45 days.

In fact, though the majority of organizations surveyed — 57 percent — don’t support a work-from-home policy, those that do say they’ve become increasingly inclusive of people who work outside the office, and five times as many hiring managers expect more of their team to work remotely in the next decade than expect less. Put simply, they say the most skilled person for the job outweighs that person’s ability to work in the same location as the rest of the team.

The survey’s findings aren’t a huge surprise for a number of reasons, including that it’s in Upwork’s interests to promote the idea that freelancing is where it’s at. (The more freelancers it has to choose from, the better for its platform.)

It’s also the case that mobility has slowed dramatically, with slightly more than one in ten Americans (11.2 percent) moving between 2015 and 2016 — roughly half the rate that it was 60 years ago, when the Census began tracking American mobility. In some situations, people simply can’t move, particularly in cases where their homes act as a kind of tether. But many more are choosing not to move, including because the cost of living is higher elsewhere and because they are finding job opportunities where they are.

That’s especially true if they’re more educated.

More here.

Allegion, an Ireland-based publicly traded global security products and software company, has launched a $50 million corporate venture fund, after partnering with the corporate venture capital firm Touchdown Ventures, which will help manage the effort. More here.

The high-end audio technology company Bose is getting into the augmented reality game with a new product and a $50 million fund devoted to startups that will develop services for its new platform. TechCrunch has more here.

Mars Petcare, a pet nutrition and healthcare company based in Brussels, Belgium, has created a $100 million venture capital fund called Companion Fund in partnership with Digitalis Ventures, an investment firm with offices in L.A., New York, San Francisco, and London. The fund will provide capital and support to startups that are addressing the needs of pets, pet owners and vets. More here.

Multicoin Capital, a new, Austin, Tex.-based cryptofund that invests in blockchain tokens, says that David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Elad Gil, Vy Capital and Passport Capital are among its investors and that it expects to close its debut fund with $250 million by the end of the second quarter of this year. As CoinDesk notes, Civic founder Vinny Lingham joined the fund as a general partner last December. More here and here.

Boxed, a 5.5-year-old, New York-based bulk-buying site for food and household items, reportedly rejected a $400 million acquisition offer from grocer Kroger. The company has raised more than $130 million in funding from firms that includeEniac Ventures, GGV Capital, DST Global and FJ Labs. Bloomberg has the story here. (And more here in TechCrunch.)

Twitter says it has appointed a new chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal. Agrawal had joined the company in 2011 as an ads engineer. The role was previously held by Adam Messinger, who left in late 2016. CNBC has more here.

Longtime tech journalist Cory Johnson says he has left Bloomberg TV to join the crypto company Ripple as its chief market strategist. Johnson, who helped found TheStreet.com and has worked for CNBC, among other media organizations, had also logged a bit of time as a hedge fund manager and private investor earlier in his career.

Former President Barack Obama is in advanced negotiations with Netflix to produce a series of high-profile shows that will provide him a global platform, according to the New York Times.

Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical industry’s enfant terrible, was sentenced today to seven years in prison.

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel just landed a fresh victory in Washington. His data-mining startup, Palantir Technologies, has won a much-contested contract to provide software to the U.S. Army.

The FCC says tiny satellites from a still-in-stealth-mode startup called Swarm Technologies could endanger other spacecraft.

The lucrative art of chicken sexing.

The Sopranos are coming back.

A college student explains modern dating to his mother.

No. Sorry. This should be illegal.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel just told employees in a company-wide directive that he wants the company to work toward break-even this year, an ambitious goal that could require Snap to aggressively cut costs, notes The Information. It reports that Snap last year lost $720 million, before interest, taxes and charges like stock compensation expenses, due mostly to heavy spending on R&D and marketing. More here.

JPMorgan Chase co-president Daniel Pinto warned today that equity markets could fall as much as 40 percent in the next two to three years. Bloomberg has more here.

When Noah Isaacs and John Meadows were best friends, growing up in Berkeley, Ca., they dreamed of remaining friends for life. What they didn’t imagine was living together in New York and starting a company together, yet they have. It’s called Bowery Valuation, and it’s aiming to bring commercial real estate appraisals — currently an $8 billion market — into the modern era at long last.

Investors certainly see the need for an upgrade. The nearly three-year-old outfit just raised $5 million in seed funding, including from Cushman & Wakefield. In fact, the real estate giant is now using the startup’s technology to automate and optimize the entire appraisal process, allowing its appraisers to provide multi-family valuation services (meaning for apartment complexes) for the first time.

For Cushman & Wakefield, that’s a big deal. The valuation and appraisal piece of real estate has remained largely unchanged over time. Appraisers trudge through properties, scribble down details, snap pictures, and complete a painstaking analysis afterward that includes visiting more than a dozen sites to collect information about taxes, zoning, and land use. It’s sufficiently onerous that until Bowery came along, Cushman employees would only appraise bigger commercial buildings — a missed opportunity given that in New York, apartment complexes make up the majority of the buildings.

Yet Isaacs and Meadows say they understood well Cushman’s pain — as well as that of all appraisers. As a University of Pennsylvania undergrad, Meadows knew he wanted to get into real estate development and figured there was no better place to start than by doing appraisals, which is often a building block toward a career in lending or with a brokerage. But when he began work at a large independent appraisal firm in New York, he was horrified by the industry’s antiquated ways of doing things. He plugged along, making mental notes, while Issacs, who’d attended McGill University in Montreal, was working as a statistician for the Toronto Blue Jays. (“Reading the book Moneyball in high school, I thought it would be the coolest job in the world,” says Isaacs. “But it wasn’t all I’d dreamt it would be.”)

Soon, Meadows and Isaacs, whose family worked in real estate, were talking about getting Isaacs to New York.

More here.

17zuoye.com, a seven-year-old, Beijing, China-based online education platform, has raised $200 million in Series E funding led by Toutiao. DealStreetAsia has more here.

Ancient Nutrition, a 1.5-year-old, Nashville, Tn.-based protein supplement and meal replacement brand, has raised $103 million in fresh funding from VMG Partners, Hillhouse Capital, ICONIQ Capital, among others. More here.

Bandura Systems, a 5.5-year-old, Columbia, Md. and St. Louis, Missouri-based developer of a threat intelligence gateway, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding, including from Blu Ventures, Gula Tech Adventures, the Maryland Tech Development Corp., Prosper Women Entrepreneurs, SixThirty, and UMB Financial Corporation. Technical.ly Baltimore has more here.

Camera IQ, a two-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based company whose ambition seems to be helping marketers take advantage of user-generated photos to boost their brands, has raised $4.3 million in seed funding led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from Betaworks, Homebrew and WndrCo. A little more here.

Carsome, a three-year-old, Malaysia-based car-trading platform that lets consumers sell their cars to dealers online, has raised $19 million in Series B funding led by Burda Principal Investments. Earlier backers Gobi Partners,InnoVen Capital and Lumia Capital also joined the round. TechCrunch has more here.

CryptoMove, a three-year-old, Walnut Creek, Ca.-based security startup that breaks data into pieces and continually moves it around, making it virtually impossible for hackers to do anything with it should they get ahold of one of the pieces, has raised roughly $8 million in new funding.  Social Capital appears to have led the round, judging by an SEC filing. More about the company here.

Eight, a nearly four-year-old, New York-based maker of a “smart” mattress that tracks 15 sleep factors, has raised $14 million in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Yunqi Partners. The company has now raised $27 million altogether. More here.

ELSA, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based developer of a language-learning app, has raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

The Fabric, a 5.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based startup foundry focused primarily on cloud and IoT infrastructure deals, has raised $15 million for its third funding vehicle. Investors include Verizon Ventures and March Capital Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

Netsparker, an 8.5-year-old, London-based developer of web application security scanning software, has raised $40 million in funding led by Turn/River Capital.More here.

Poka, a five-year-old, Quebec-based training and knowledge platform for manufacturers, has raised $10 million in funding from Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Robert Bosch Venture Capital and the Leclerc family, along with earlier backers iNovia Capital and Uncork Capital. More here.

Prevail Therapeutics, a year-old, New York-based company that was launched last year by OrbiMed’s co-head of private equity and is developing a general therapy for Parkinson’s disease, has closed on $75 million in first-round funding. OrbiMed participated, as you might imagine. So did Pontifax Fund, RA Capital Management, EcoR1 Capital, Omega Funds, BVF Partners, Boxer Capital,Adage Capital Management and Alexandria Venture Investments. FierceBiotech has more here.

Revolution Foods, a 12-year-old, Oakland Ca.-based company that delivers ready-to-eat meal kits for school children and families, just raised roughly $46 million in fresh capital, shows an SEC filing that lists earlier investor Steve Case as a director. More here.

Senic, a 5.5-year-old, Berlin, Germany-based smart home technology startup whose products include a smart home device controller and an Alexa-enabled light that includes speech control, has raised $4 million in seed funding. Investors include Birchmere Ventures, Target Partners, and the home appliance maker Gira. More here.

SolarisBank, a two-year-old, Berlin-based banking platform that lets companies offer their own financial products, has raised €56.6 million ($69.7 million) in Series B funding from investors that include the Spanish bank BBVA (which just yesterday upped its investment in the U.K. challenger bank Atom Bank), Visa, Lakestar, ABN AMRO and earlier backers Arvato Financial Solutions and SBI Group. TechCrunch has more here.

Starsky Robotics, a year-old, San Francisco-based autonomous trucking company, has raised $16.5 million in Series A funding led by Shasta Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

ViewPoint Therapeutics, a nearly four-year-old, San Francisco-based biotech company that’s developing crystallin stabilizers to prevent and treat cataracts and presbyopia, has raised $35 million in Series B funding led by The Rise Fund, with participation from Novo Holdings A/S and other investors. More here.

Wingly, a three-year-old, Paris-based flight sharing platform connecting pilots and passengers, has raised €2m in seed funding, including from Howzat Partners and angel investors Philipp Rösler and Stephane Mayer. Tech.eu has more here.

Lavrock Ventures, a 1.5-year-old, McLean, Va.-based venture capital firm, raised $25 million for its first fund. It expects to invest more than $50 million, however, through the help of special purpose vehicles. VentureBeat has more here.

Prime Venture Partners, a seven-year-old, Bengaluru, India-based seed-stage venture firm, has closed its third fund with roughly $60 million. Started by three serial entrepreneurs – Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani — the firm’s newest fund is its largest. It closed its previous fund with $46 million in 2015. TechCrunch has more here.

Turn/River Capital, a nearly six-year-old, San Francisco-based growth equity and buyout firm, raised $168 million for its third fund, according to a new press release that says the vehicle was raised in less than 90 days. More here.

Fantasy sports site FanDuel is reportedly in advanced talks to go public via a reverse merger with Platinum Eagle Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company formed earlier this year by veteran media executive Jeff Sagansky. Axios has the story here.

Publicly traded health insurer Cigna has agreed to buy the publicly traded pharmacy benefit giant Express Scripts for $52 billion in cash and stock, or $96.03 per share — a 30 percent premium to yesterday’s closing price. Axios has more here on the deal.

Rolling Stone magazine owner Penske Media has acquired SheKnows Media, a network of female-focused sites and the BlogHer conference business. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but SheKnows is profitable and grew its revenue by 30 percent in the first quarter of 2018 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to its CEO. The company was owned by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners. The WSJ has more here.

Stripe, the $9 billion payments processing startup, has purchased Index, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based startup provides software for in-store payments systems, like the PIN pads that you probably already use to pay with a debit or credit card at your local Target or pharmacy. According to Business Insider, the company’s biggest claim-to-fame is that its software for PIN pads can read a chip card in under a second, making for faster checkouts. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed but Crunchbase shows that Index had raised $26 million from investors, including General Catalyst Partners and Innovation Endeavors.

Airbnb has poached Greg Greeley, formerly Amazon’s VP of Prime & Delivery Experience, Greeley will head up company’s Homes unit, as well as Airbnb Collections. TechCrunch has more here.

Joining the number of early Facebook execs who’ve been publicly acknowledging the platform’s serious downsides, cofounder Chris Hughes acknowledged before a small audience in San Francisco today that Facebook has played a “negative role” in politics. Its “algorithms are not neutral,” he said.

Travis Kalanick, the cofounder and longtime CEO of Uber, is launching a new investment fund called the 10100 Fund. According to an announcement on his Twitter account, the new fund will focus on “large-scale job creation.”

Uber has hired Assaf Ronen, a top Amazon voice exec, as its new head of product. Recode has more here.

Coinbase, the cryptocurrency trading platform, has hired Eric Scro as its VP of finance. Scro joins the company from the NYSE, which he was the head of finance. Business Insider has more here.

Wells Fargo is looking to hire a venture capital associate to work with its healthcare and tech divisions. The job is in Palo Alto, Ca.

A comprehensive new study from MIT looks at a decade of tweets, and finds that not only is the truth slower to spread, but that the threat of bots and the natural network effects of social media are no excuse: we’re doing it to ourselves.

Some early owners of Tesla’s Model 3 are reporting quality problems (though they seem willing to look past these).

The fringe idea of universal basic income could be going mainstream.

New York Times have long been dominated by white men. Now, it’s adding the stories of 15 remarkable women.

The massive prize luring miners to the stars.

#SadBrandon.

Please no one show this to our eight-year-old.

Happy Tuesday, everyone.:)

The NYSE and its sister markets were just fined $14 million by U.S. securities regulators for a series of infractions including missteps in dealing with a three-and-a-half hour trading halt in July 2015 and a wild trading session that roiled exchange-traded funds a month later. Bloomberg has the story here.

LawTrades provides vetted corporate attorneys — each of whom have been General Counsel or senior in-house counsel — to provide on-demand assistance at a remarkably low monthly subscription. The platform provides clear transparent prices with low fixed hourly rates of below $200 per hour, and there is no minimum use requirement. Companies get the benefit of a dedicated project manager to monitor their progress and ability to work with the same LawTrades lawyer over time. For a limited time, you can sign up for one month free. Learn more here.

The buzzy startups Robinhood and Cadre are known for different things. Five-year-old Robinhood has established its reputation by offering commission-free stock trading, while three-year-old Cadre burst onto the scene with a real estate investing platform. Yet both have developed similar ambitions to become financial “superstores,” using the Amazon playbook of starting in one place, and quickly expanding into other terrain.

“If you think about Amazon, they took the book model, built brand equity, trust, credibility, and now they are a superstore for any retail product,” Cadre’s cofounder and CEO Ryan Williams told attendees at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last week. “We’re doing the same for the investments world.”

Robinhood’s cofounder and CEO, Vlad Tenev, speaking at the same event later in the evening, had much the same messaging. “Five years from now,” Tenev told the crowd, Robinhood will be a “full service financial institution” with every product one can find at a “local bank branch and more.”

Whether either startup or both will realize their dream is something we won’t know for years, but certainly both are already being watched closely by competitors, many of which find themselves playing catch-up these days. In fact, throwing the old guard off balance is largely the modus operandi of both companies.

It’s something they share in common with the company they are most trying to emulate — yet could ultimately find themselves competing against. As the WSJ reported just yesterday, Amazon is now in talks with big banks, including JPMorgan Chase, about building a checking-account-like product.

You can guess it would be just the first of many financial products to come.

More here.

The Athletic, a two-year-old, Bay Area-based subscription-based sports media startup, has raised $20 million led by Evolution Media, the growth-stage investment company founded by TPG Growth and Creative Artists Agency. Before this round, the Athletic raised $10 million in two rounds led by Courtside Ventures. The WSJ has more here.

Automox, a three-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based patch management and cybersecurity company whose cloud-based platform aims to help its customers gain more control and visibility into their client and server infrastructures, has raised $2 million led by Blue Note Ventures, with participation from individual investors. More here.

Corvus, a year-old, Boston-based commercial insurance startup, has raised $4 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. The Boston Globe has more here.

Grabr, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based peer-to-peer community marketplace for travelers needing extra storage space in others’ luggage (it’s all explained here), has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Foundation Capital, with participation from individual investors, including Square’s engineering lead, Gokul Rajaram.

HQ, the nearly three-year-old, New York-based live trivia game-show app, has raised $15 million in new  funding at a $100 million valuation led by Founders Fund and joined by earlier investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

Kr Space, a four-year-old, Beijing, China-based co-working space company, has raised $94.6 million in funding from undisclosed investors. DealStreetAsia has more here.

Mighty, a New York-based outfit that makes software for personal injury litigation finance companies, says it has raised $114 million in funding. It isn’t naming its investors. More here.

Nubank, a nearly five-year-old, São Paulo, Brazil-based digital finance company that received regulatory approval to become a bank last month, has raised $150 million in Series E funding led by DST Global, with participation from Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital, QED Investors, and Dragoneer. Reuters has a bit more here.

Snyk, a three-year-old, London-based based company whose product aims to help developers and enterprise security to continuously find and fix vulnerable dependencies without slowing down, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led byBoldstart Ventures and Canaan Partners, with participation from Heavybit,FundFire, and individual investors. The company has now raised $10 million to date. More here.

TeraPore Technologies, a five-year-old, South San Francisco, Ca.-based developer of advanced nanofiltration membrane systems for bioprocess and other applications, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Anzu Partners, with participation from RA Capital Management and Artiman Ventures, as well asWilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. More here.

UiPath, a 13-year-old, New York-based maker of robotic process automation software, has raised $120 million in Series B funding, including from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers. TechCrunch has more here.

Upskill, an eight-year-old, Herndon, Va.-based company that makes enterprise augmented reality software, has raised $17.2 million in funding from Accentureand Cisco Investments, as well as earlier backers Boeing HorizonX, GE Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and other unnamed investors. Technical.ly DC has more here.

Wecash, a four-year-old, Beijing, China, and Freemont, Ca.-based online credit rating platform, has raised $160 million in Series D funding co-led by ORIX Asia Capital and SEA Group, with participation from Sagamore Investments, SIG Asia, Forebright Capital, Lingfeng Capital and Hongdao Capital. DealStreetAsia has more here.

Whoop, a Boston-based maker of a fitness tracker for serious athletes, has raised $25 million in Series C funding led by UAE71 Capital, with participation from theNational Football League Players Association, (Kevin) Durant Company,Thursday Ventures, and earlier backers. The latter includes Two Sigma Ventures, Accomplice, Mousse Partners, Promus Ventures and NextView Ventures. Bloomberg has more here.

Liquid 2 Ventures, a three-year-old, seed-stage firm that was cofounded former football great Joe Montana, is raising up to $50 million for its second fund, shows an SEC filing that states fundraising began last year. More here.

Co-working juggernaut WeWork is acquiring Conductor, a 13-year-old, New York-based company that’s best known for search engine optimization. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed but reportedly, Conductor is a longtime customer of WeWork and its founder, Seth Besmertnik, went to college with WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. TechCrunch has more here.

ARTIS Ventures has named Vasudev (Vas) Bailey as its newest partner. He was formerly a senior VP at the software company Quid. It also promoted Austin Walne, who has been a venture partner with the firm for three years, to partner.

Sarah Cannon has joined Index Ventures as a partner. Previously, Cannon spent three-and-a-half years as a principal with CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity fund.

How Uber spent $10.7 million in nine years.

Traditional VC rounds — convertible notes seed, angel, Series A, Series B, etc. — now pale in comparison to ICOs in terms of dollar volume.

Facebook‘s political nightmare is about to get worse.

When to report a cyberattack? For companies, that’s still a dilemma.

How to be lazy.

A complete guide to protein powder supplements.

The Cyclone V10. It’ll spiral around your house effortlessly, they say.

U.S. stocks rose today and Treasuries fell as investors decided that President Donald Trump’s tough tariff talk probably won’t translate into severe protectionist policies after all. The market appears to be responding to House Speaker Paul Ryan, who broke with Trump over his decision to impose tariffs on imported aluminum and steel products, and who issued an implicit warning to the White House today to drop the plan.

LawTrades provides vetted corporate attorneys — each of whom have been General Counsel or senior in-house counsel — to provide on-demand assistance at a remarkably low monthly subscription. The platform provides clear transparent prices with low fixed hourly rates of below $200 per hour, and there is no minimum use requirement. Companies get the benefit of a dedicated project manager to monitor their progress and ability to work with the same LawTrades lawyer over time. For a limited time, you can sign up for one month free. Learn more here.

Brandless is an usual company. A direct-to-consumer purveyor of food, beauty, and personal care products, it says that every item it makes is non-genetically modified, kosher, fair-trade, gluten-free, often organic and, in the case of cleaning supplies, EPA “Safer Choice” certified. They are also priced at $3 across the board. The idea, says cofounder and CEO Tina Sharkey, is to “democratize better.” She believes that Brandless — which is very much a brand — is selling items to people, often with dietary restrictions, who “couldn’t shop their values” before Brandless.

That’s no small thing to Sharkey, who cares very much about Brandless’s customers, as anyone who has seen her speak publicly can attest. In fact, Sharkey, appearing at a StrictlyVC event last week, spoke about the importance of shared principles in sweeping language that elicited fervor in many of the gathered listeners — and some fatigue in others.

She talked of Brandless users who didn’t have access before to affordable gluten-free and organic products or “who had to drive 100 miles round trip” or who “didn’t know things existed like tree-free toilet paper, made with sugar cane and bamboo grasses.” (This last product was news to us, too.)

Sharkey — who has led a number of consumer-facing companies in her career, including cofounding iVillage and later serving as president and CEO of BabyCenter — said she sees in Brandless users “all of America,” not just those who “live in such a frickin’ bubble on the coasts.” Elites in East and West Coast cities are “not our country” alone, she said. “Our country is filled with extraordinary people, and we have bifurcated and sliced and diced and segmented people to such a degree that we’ve forgotten that we’re all awesome Americans, and American deserve better, no matter your politics.”

If it was hard to remember at times that she was talking about a company that sells nearly 300 household items, from maple syrup to fluoride-free toothpaste, the crowd didn’t seem to notice, nodding along in agreement.

More here.

Jscrambler, a three-year-old, Lisbon, Portugal-based web security startup, has raised roughly $2.3 million in Series A funding from Sonae IM and Portugal Ventures. More here.

Luminoso, a nearly eight-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based natural language company that helps its customers discover value in their unstructured text data (think product reviews, call center and chatbot transcripts), has raised $12.6 million in Series A1 funding led by SD Porter Holdings and Raptor Holdco. More here.

Owlstone Medical, a 14-year-old, Cambridge, England-based diagnostics company that’s developing a breathalyzer to detect disease, has raised $15 million in funding co-led by Horizons Ventures and earlier backer Aviva Ventures. More here.

Paro, a nearly three-year-old, Chicago-based platform that matches businesses with freelance bookkeepers, accountants, financial analysts, and CFOs who provide on-demand, hourly support, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led byRevolution Ventures, with participation from Global Founders Capital and Tom Williams, a prolific venture investor. TechCrunch has more here.

Redeam, a three-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based company whose technology enables tours and activities companies to more easily do business with third parties that resell their tickets, has raised $7.7 million in Series A funding led by Vertical Venture Partners, with participation from Thayer Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Tallwave Capital and Peninsula Ventures. More here.

RedDoorz, a three-year-old, Singapore-based budget hotel startup focused on Southeast Asia, has raised $11 million in new funding to expand its presence. Investors include DeepSky Capital, FengHe Group and Hendale Capital, along with earlier backers Sushquehanna International Group , IFC, InnoVen Capitaland Jungle Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Starcity, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s building community-based housing akin to dorm rooms to make cities more affordable, has raised $16.45 million in Series A funding from Bullpen Capital, Y Combinator, Invest AG, Alrai Capital and a number of earlier investors. The New York Times takes alook here.

Google, which acquired Zagat for $151 million nearly seven years ago, is now selling the company to The Infatuation, an upstart restaurant review company that has “harnessed smartphone apps, an Instagram hashtag and a texting recommendation service as parts of its path to growth,” says the New York Times. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

Amazon has confirmed its acquisition of the U.K.- and Ireland-based cloud gaming platform GameSparks, a “backend as a service” for game developers to build various features like leaderboards into games and then manage them, all in the cloud. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.

Europe is on course for its busiest start to the year for IPOs since 2015 but a jump in stock market volatility and a few IPO flops have made investors more discerning of where they put their cash.

Bilibili, China’s leading video streaming platform specializing in animation, is headed for a North American share sale, shows a new SEC filing. The company aims to raise some $400 million in fresh capital, says Variety. The disclosure comes only days after iQIYI, one of China’s leading video streamers, revealed details of its IPO on the NASDAQ.

Homology Medicines, a three-year-old, Bedford, Ma.-based venture-backed biotech startup that’s developing a gene therapy delivery platform for rare diseases, has filed with the SEC to raise up to $100 million in an IPO. FierceBiotech has more here.

Zscaler, a 10-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based venture-backed company that sells a cloud-based network security service to enterprises, announced terms for its IPO today, revealing plans to raise $110 million by offering 10 million shares at a price range of $10 to $12. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Zscaler would command a fully diluted market value of $1.4 billion. More here.

Emilie Choi, who did more than 40 deals at LinkedIn as its head of mergers and acquisitions for eight years, has joined the digital currency exchange Coinbase as its VP of corporate and business development. Recode takes a look at what Coinbase might buy.

David Fialkow is a Boston-based cofounder and managing director of General Catalyst. He also helped produce “Icarus,” a documentary that uncovered proof of widespread doping at the Olympic level by the Russian government, and which won the Oscar last night for best documentary feature.

Ilya Fushman, a former Dropbox executive who headed to Index Ventures as a general partner in the summer of 2015, is now joining Kleiner Perkins as a general partner and managing member. Fushman joins another notable industry exec who’s trying to restore Kleiner’s reputation as a top venture firm; as readers might recall, Mamoon Hamid left Social Capital for Kleiner last August.

Kairos VC is looking to bring aboard an associate with a strong physical sciences background. The job is in Pasadena, Ca.

Coastal elites are catching the heartland bug, says a new report in the New York Times, which says that in the last three months of 2017, San Francisco lost more residents to outward migration than any other city in the country. More here.

Apple‘s AirPods earphones have been a surprise hit. Now, the company is planning a push into the high end of the market, says Bloomberg. (Interestingly, it notes, they’re likely to compete with Beats, a company Apple acquired just a few years ago.)

Watch out, Apple and Samsung? Xiaomi could sell smartphones in the U.S. as early as this year, extending the Chinese company’s Western expansion as it plans a highly anticipated IPO.

WTF, Facebook.

The best looks from last night’s Oscars and, of course, all the rest of the red carpet looks, too.

The 30 most outrageous, scandalous, and memorable moments in Oscars history.

How to raise a boy.

Carpe F**king Diem notebook, because everyone needs a plan.