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.

Hope you have a fantastic weekend, everyone.:)

YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former recruiter for the company. The suit could embolden other critics of Google’s efforts to promote workforce diversity. The WSJ has more here.

What do Even, EARN, EarnUp, EverSafe, and Everlance have in common? ALL are alumni of the Financial Solutions Lab virtual accelerator (and ostensibly, all like the letter E), which is now accepting application for its next class. Selected companies get $250,000 plus access to resources that can help them find their way through fintech regs and consumer pain points, helping them to scale and thrive. Check out FinLab’s Impact Report, and apply now.

In November, Uber disclosed that a year earlier, in 2016,  hackers had stolen 57 million driver and rider accounts and that it paid them a $100,000 ransom to delete the information. The breach was reportedly part of Uber’s bug bounty program, wherein it pays hackers to test its software for vulnerabilities. But the amount was exorbitant by typical standards, and the episode has fueled criticism over the bug bounty practice, which is seen by some as funding criminal activity.

At our StrictlyVC event in San Francisco this week, Marten Mickos, the CEO of HackerOne — which runs Uber’s bug bounty program — answered questions about Uber’s hacking, which is now the subject of at least four lawsuits. His interviewer, cybersecurity reporter Kate Conger, also pressed him on the definition of a good versus bad hacker — and whether there’s much of a difference.

Excerpts from their sit-down follow, edited for length.

KC: For those who don’t know, what does HackerOne do?

MM: The simple truth today is that every single system will get hacked. And the only question is, who do you want to get hacked by? People you trust or criminals? If you choose the former, you swallow that pill, you come to us. We have 160,000 ethical hackers in our network who will hack you within 24 hours. They’ll tell you how they broke in and you’ll pay them a lot of money, but it’s much, much less than if you swallow the other pill.

KC: You were in the news recently and maybe not for the most positive reasons: You administered Uber’s bug bounty program and it got wrist-slapped for [losing the data] of 57 million people and paying out $100,000 to the hacker to keep him quiet. Do you think that behavior muddies the water between ethical hackers and bug bounty programs and bribery?

MM: I’m not here to comment on any particular case. I can note, however, that it hasn’t been shown than 57 million records have been lost forever. They might have been lost for a short time only, but we’ll leave that to others to figure out. But it’s clear that in the world of hacking, if there is intrusion and data exfiltration or extortion, it has nothing to do with ethical hacking or bug bounty programs.

The line there is very clear. We’re very fortunate to run Uber’s bug bounty program and many other really large programs [including for the U.S.] Air Force, Army, and Pentagon. So sure, with technology always, it’s the same technology used for good and bad purposes, and technology itself doesn’t have an opinion about what it’s being used for.

KC: So is that the ethical line between a good and bad hacker — data exfiltration? You can break in as long as you don’t take anything?

MM: The difference between the hacker and the criminal is intent. If you’re an ethical hacker and you’re looking for vulnerabilities in order to report them, you must break in. If you have a neighborhood watch and you ask your neighbors to see if they can break into your house, they have to break in to show you that they can do it. Once inside the house, they shouldn’t take anything, though.

The same idea applies [with bounty programs]. [Hackers] have to show that it’s possible to break in. That’s where you get to the question of authorized versus unauthorized conduct, and then again, it’s the owner of the house who decides which is which. When you break into the house, how much do you need to do? Do you need to bring something outside to show it was possible or not? And that’s an individual decision for every customer of ours, who determines what they need as proof. The more proof you need, the deeper the hackers need to go to find it.

KC: In the security industry in particular, a lot of things that are considered best practices seem from the outside sketchy, for lack of a better word.

More here.

Ascent Technologies, a three-year-old, Chicago-based regulatory technology company, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Alsop Louie Partners, with participation from individual investors, including Randall Kroszner, who previously served as a governor of the Federal Reserve. More here.

C2FO, an eight-year-old, Kansas City, Ks.-based online marketplace where buyers – including Amazon, Costco, and Nordstrom — can negotiate with suppliers, has raised a whopping $100 million in fresh capital. Munich-based Allianz X and Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Investment Company co-led the round, with participation from earlier backers Temasek, Union Square Ventures and Mithril Capital. Regional outlets believe it’s the largest venture-backed funding round the region has seen.More here.

Chehaoduo, a Bejing, China-based online car-trading platform, has closed on nearly $820 million(!) in its latest round of fundraising from a consortium led by internet giant Tencent Holdings. Other investors in the Series C round include Sequoia Capital, Yunfeng Capital, ICBC International and IDG Capital. China Money Network has more here.

EnsoData, a three-year-old, Madison, Wi.-based artificial intelligence company that caters to the sleep medicine community, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Colle Capital, with participation from HealthX Ventures, Sternhill Associates, Wisconsin Investment Partners, and M25 Group. More here.

FreshAddress, a 19-year-old, Newton, Ma.-based email marketing database services company, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from TZP Growth Partners. More here.

Finch Therapeutics, a four-year-old, Somerville, Ma.-based microbiome therapeutics company that uses machine learning algorithms to reverse engineer successful fecal transplantations and other clinical datasets, has raised $36 million in Series B financing. Investors included Shumway Capital, Willett Advisors,Morgan Noble and Avenir Growth Capital. More here.

Magazino, a four-year-old, Munich, Germany-based maker of mobile warehouse robots, has raised $24.8 million in funding. Körber Group led the round, with participation from other investors, including Cellcom, Zalando and Fiege Logistics. More here.

NestAway, a nearly four-year-old, Bengaluru, India-based home rental startup, has raised $51 million in Series D funding from Goldman Sachs and UC-RNT Fund. Earlier investors IDG India and Tiger Global Management also participated in the round. The Hindu has more here.

Saturas, a nearly five-year-old, Israel-based agricultural startup whose sensing system collects real-time data and transmits it to farmers’ automated irrigation control systems, has raised $4 million in funding. Investors include Hubei Forbon Technology Co., Gefen Capital and the Israeli collective farm Ramat Magshimim. AgFunder News has more here.

Scalefast, a four-year-old, Manhattan Beach, Ca.-based direct-to-consumer digital commerce platform that helps lifestyle brands with everything from design to customer service to back-office accounting, has raised $8 million in Series A funding. BGV led the round; other participants included Adara Ventures, B&Y, French Partners and CIC Capital. More here.

Tagnos, an eight-year-old, Irvine, Ca.-based company whose SaaS platform analyzes data from clinical systems to facilitate patient flow through the hospital, has raised $5 million in funding, including from Benhamou Global Ventures, Morpheus Ventures and Zebra Ventures. More here.

TickX, a three-year-old, Manchester, U.K.-based startup behind a search engine and discovery platform for events and other “attractions” tickets, has raised £3 million ($4.1 million) in Series A funding. BGF Ventures led the round, with participation from earlier backers Ministry of Sound and 24Haymarket. TechCrunch has more here.

Trizic, a 5.5-year-old, San Francisco-based cloud based platform that enables its wealth management clients to interact with financial firms, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. Sorenson Ventures led the round, and was joined by investorsFIS, Freestyle Capital, Broadhaven Capital Partners, PEAK6 and Commerce Ventures. More here.

ABC News and The Atlantic are among several finalists interested in purchasing Nate Silver’s statistics and data analysis blog FiveThirtyEight from ESPN, says the WSJ.

An investor group led by former Obama official Maria Contreras-Sweet and billionaire Ron Burkle has agreed to an eleventh-hour $500 million takeover of The Weinstein Co. More here.

Publicly traded storage company Box fell 23 percent yesterday, after giving weak revenue guidance for the coming year. Its decline could dampen the prospects for competitor Dropbox, which is right now planning its IPO, says Seeking Alpha.

Garrett Camp, best known for being a co-founder of Uber and founder of the accelerator and venture fund Expa, is launching his own cryptocurrency.

Industry Ventures has promoted Lindsay Sharma and Ira Simkhovitch to principals on its secondaries investment team. Sharma joined the firm three-and-a-half years ago after working in corporate development at Intuit. Simkhovitch joined around the same time after working as an associate with the Carlyle Group.

Uber cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick is joining the board of his friend’s medical office software company, Kareo.

Brian Koo’s offshoot of Formation 8 is done investing out of its debut fund and doesn’t plan new fundraising.

China is using a recent tweet from Elon Musk as a propaganda tool to promote its infrastructure development.

Terminator-style artificial intelligence scenarios are just “one to two decades away,” former Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt told a terrified audience at a security conference in Munich this week.

Zenreach, a WiFi marketing startup that has raised $80 million from high-profile investors, including Joe Lonsdale, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, just laid off 20 percent of its employees. Its CEO has also been replaced.

Touchdown Ventures, the nearly four-year-old outfit that partners with corporations and helps them manage their own venture capital platforms, is hiring a venture capital analyst in Philadelphia and an associate in San Francisco. It’s also looking for an MBA intern to help it out this spring and summer. (That role is in San Francisco, too.)

Instagram might add video and voice calling.

Ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft are delivering pitiful levels of take-home pay to the hundreds of thousands of U.S. independent contractors, according to an MIT CEEPR study.

Last week, three-year-old social network Vero had fewer than 150,000 downloads. Now it has nearly 3 million. But as the app has grown in popularity, the company and its founder have come under scrutiny.

Seth Meyer takes a closer look at Jared Kushner.

EcoCamp.

We also have photos from the event coming soon and some coverage below, with much more on the way. Hope you’re having a good Tuesday.

U.S. stocks plunged today after Donald Trump promised to impose substantial tariffs on foreign metals.

DoorDash has gotten the Softbank Vision Fund treatment. The San Francisco-based food delivery company just sealed up $535 million in Series D funding at a whopping $1.4 billion post-money valuation, says TechCrunch. (Recode says it was only looking for a measly $200 million.) Along with Softbank, earlier backers Sequoia Capital, GIC and Wellcome Trust also joined the round.

Here’s where else Softbank has invested its $100 billion fund so far.

Fintech startups, how does $250K sound? What about unparalleled access to the banking, financial services, and nonprofit areas where your customers are? Yes? Then be sure to apply for the next class of the Financial Solutions Lab. This highly influential virtual accelerator (today’s StrictlyVC sponsor) has helped the likes of Dave.com, Point, EarnUp, Nova Credit and more to scale their products and navigate the complicated side of fintech. Apply now!

Ten years ago, not long after Yahoo had acquired Flickr,  its cofounder, Caterina Fake, bounded up and down Sand Hill Road taking meetings with venture firms that were interested in hiring her. She knew most of them. In fact, she already knew a lot of investors at that point. Flickr was created out of a photo-sharing feature for another product that Fake and cofounder Stewart Butterfield had been working on that she calls “an abysmal failure.” And “when you have a failed pitch,” says Fake, “you meet many more venture capitalists than you really want to.”

When Flickr was acquired — as Fake told an audience of founders and investors at a StrictlyVC event earlier this week —  “I figured I’d have a sniff around and see, Is this my world? Would I like it? Is venture for me? I never really considered this as a career opportunity.” The answer became apparent pretty quickly. “I’d go in and it was like, ‘One of these things is not like the other.’ I’d look around at all of these dudes and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is for me. I’m feeling like this is not my place. . .  I don’t dress like ya’ll. I have an English degree.’ I just kind of didn’t fit in.”

It’s because “everything has changed since then — everything,” she says, that Fake, who has cofounded four companies altogether, is now jumping into the venture game full time. As we reported in January, after years of investing as an individual —  including in Etsy  (whose board she chaired for many years), Kickstarter, and Coursera  — Fake and partner Jyri Engeström are currently raising up to $50 million from institutions and family offices, including that of Nokia’s chairman Risto Siilasmaa.

She has largely been inspired by the growing numbers of women in both entrepreneurship and venture capital, suggested Fake. But her interest in turning pro, so to speak, seems even more rooted in the faith that Fake has in her own instincts. It paid off with Etsy, for example, which she recognized early as part of a burgeoning social movement toward craftsmanship and away from big-box retail, whereas “people in the Valley” that she introduced to the deal “were like, ‘So this is a bunch of people knitting and selling scarves?’”

Right now, Fake said she sees an opportunity to get in front of the next parade.

More here.

Astranis, a nearly three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s building wine-cooler-size satellites that are capable of delivering broadband internet services around the globe, has raised $13.5 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other participants in the round include Y Combinator, Refactor Capital, Indicator Fund, and Fifty Years. Forbes has more here.

Blueprint Income, a four-year-old, New York-based fintech startup that’s building a way for consumers to more easily buy what has notoriously been a hard sell — annuity contracts, has raised $2.75 million in seed funding co-led by NextView Ventures and Green Visor Capital. Other participants in the deal include the Center for Financial Services Innovation FinLab, Core Innovation Capital,Kairos Ventures, Jean Chatzky, and Plug ’n Play. More here.

Bugcrowd, a 5.5-year-old, San Francisco-based bug bounty platform, has raised $26 million in Series C funding led by Triangle Peak Partners. Other investors in the round include Hostplus, First State Super and earlier backers Blackbird Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group,Rally Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Stanford. TechCrunch has more here.

Coalition, a year-old, San Francisco-based cyber insurance startup, has raised $10 million in Series A funding, including from Vy Capital, Ribbit Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman. More here.

Cota, a New York City-based oncology-focused startup that relies on real-world evidence to deliver precision medicine, has closed on $40 million in Series C funding led by IQVIA. Other participants included EW Healthcare Partners, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Boston Millennia Partners, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Hackensack Meridian Health and Atoc Holdings. MedCity News has more here.

Credy, a year-old, Bengaluru, India-based online lending platform that graduated from Y Combinator’s winter class last year, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from YC, Khosla Ventures, Vy Capital and numerous individual investors. Inc. 42 has more here.

Helix, a three-year-old, San Carlos, Ca.-based startup focused on personal genomics, has raised $200 million in Series B financing led by DFJ Growth, with participation from other investors that include Illumina, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayo Clinic, Sutter Hill Ventures and Warburg Pincus. More here.

Hi Guides, a three-year-old, China-based ride-hailing and tour-guide company, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital China, with participation from Concord Investments and Matrix Partners China. China Money Network has more here.

Perfect Day, a four-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based animal-free dairy, has raised $24.7 million in new funding led by Temasek, with participation from Continental Grain, Iconiq Capital, Horizons Ventures, Lion Ventures and Verus International. Forbes has more here.

Rubius Therapeutics, a four-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based biotech that’s trying to turn our own red blood cells into new medicines, has raised $100 million in new funding from unnamed mutual funds and institutional investors. The company had raised $120 million last summer, with only Flagship Pioneering — which incubated the company —  as its only disclosed investor. Business Insider has more here.

Smartcar, a 4.5-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based under-the-radar connected car platform, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, which had previously given the company $2 million in seed funding. VentureBeat has more here.

TCGplayer, a 19-year-old, Syracuse, N.Y.-based online marketplace for collectible gaming items (rare Pokemon and Magic cards, etc.), has raised $10 million from Radian Capital. More here.

Virtualitics, a 1.5-year-old Pasadena, Ca.-based company that’s developing data visualization and analytics tools for AR/VR developers, has raised $7 million in Series B funding led by Centricus, with participation from earlier investor The VR Fund. TechCrunch has more here.

Woebot Labs, a year-old, San Francisco-based startup whose chatbot who helps monitor moods, has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from the AI Fund. More here.

Zomato, a 10-year-old, Gurgaon, India-based food delivery company, has raised $150 million from Alibaba at a valuation north of $1 billion. Your Story has more here.

German carmaker Daimler has been steadily investing in a stream of new transportation services as it positions itself for the next generation of car ownership and travel, reports TechCrunch. Today, it consolidated its position in one of those business, paying €70 million ($85 million) to buy the remaining 25 percent of car-sharing company car2Go that it didn’t already own. The deal values car2Go at €280 million ($342.5 million). More here.

LittleThings, a 4.5-year-old, New York-based digital publisher focused on inspirational and how-to content for women, shut down yesterday, a move it traces to an algorithm change at Facebook. The startup had raised an undisclosed amount of debt funding from City National Bank. TechCrunch has more here.

Venture-backed Reputation.com has acquired for undisclosed terms a Chicago-based company called SIM Partners that specializes in location marketing technology. SIM Partners’s backers included River Cities Capital Funds and Jump Capital. Reputation, which tries to track and improve online reviews, social media and more for its clients, is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, August Capital, and Icon Ventures, among others. More here.

China wants one of its biggest tech unicorns to go public at home, says the WSJ. Authorities have reportedly asked smartphone maker Xiaomi, which is already planning a Hong Kong IPO, to list its shares on the mainland, too. More here.

With some smartphone models pushing $1,000, people aren’t upgrading their phones nearly as quickly as they once did. “Smartphones now resemble the car industry very closely,” a spokesman for B-Stock Solutions, the world’s largest platform for trade-in and overstock phones, tells the WSJ. “I still want to drive a Mercedes, but I’ll wait a couple of years to buy the older model. Same mentality.”

The SEC “has issued dozens of subpoenas and information requests to technology companies and advisers involved in the red-hot market for cryptocurrencies,”reports the WSJ. Digital tokens are rising in price anyway.

Uber just launched a new business line called Uber Health to provide ride-hailing services specifically to healthcare providers wanting to more easily assign rides for their patients and clients from a centralized dashboard, whether or not these rider have the Uber app or even a smartphone, says TechCrunch.

Morale at Snap isn’t so great, reports Bloomberg.

Cable TV at its finest.

How you wind up with a $1,635.93 Uber fare.

What the world’s largest family tree tells us about marriage and death in the West.

Porsche 911s. (Skiers not included.)

We’re still playing catch-up but we’ll have coverage and photos for you soon. In the meantime, because we usually run out of StrictlyVC T-shirts at these things, we doubled the order and have about 20 sitting in a box at our feet. If you’d like one, let us know and we’ll ship it your way. (U.S. readers only please, unless you don’t mind paying for international shipping, in which case, we’re happy to send you a shirt, too.) First come, first served; just write us back at this address.:)

Amazon is buying the Santa Monica, Ca.-based smart doorbell company Ring for more than $1 billion in its continuing effort to make inroads into our homes. Here’s more on the deal and what motivated it. Meanwhile, here’s who is “ringing” the register this morning, thanks to the tie-up. (Had to.)

Grail, a two-year-old Menlo Park, Ca-based cancer detection startup that’s very well-funded and competing against a number of other, similarly well-funded rivals, may seek an IPO of up to $500 million in Hong Kong, says Bloomberg. The outlet observes that Grail could become one of the first companies to benefit from proposed new listing rules aimed at attracting early stage biotechnology firms to the Hong Kong bourse.

Music streaming service Spotify is going public, and it just revealed its S-1. Here’s much more about what it tells us.

Fintech startups, how does $250K sound? What about unparalleled access to the banking, financial services, and nonprofit areas where your customers are? Yes? Then be sure to apply for the next class of the Financial Solutions Lab. This highly influential virtual accelerator has helped the likes of Digit, Even, EarnUp, Nova Credit and more to scale their products and navigate the complicated side of fintech. Apply now (or before April 11, 2018).

Triplebyte is a three-year-old, 25-person, San Francisco-based hiring platform that says it makes recruiting and technical screening for tech companies more efficient. It’s hardly alone in making this claim, of course. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a tech recruiting platform that claims to improve on the ways that companies identify and recruit talented engineers. Still, Triplebyte  makes a persuasive case for why hiring companies should give it a shot.

One of its biggest differentiators, it says, is that its process is “background blind,” meaning it’s ostensibly able to get engineers in front of companies that might not otherwise be interested in them based on their past employers or education. How? By operating like an applied research company, insists cofounder and CEO Harj Taggar — who, before launching Triplebyte, spent the previous five years as a partner with Y Combinator.

Triplebyte’s first steps involved extensively interviewing engineers in the YC alumni network, capturing every data point possible before applying machine learning to better understand both automated assessment tests and human technical reviews (which typically involve an engineer interviewing an engineering candidate).

Because it was limited to Y Combinator companies, that data set was fairly small to start, but it was enough to create an adaptive multiple-choice automated assessment test that began producing results. Over time, companies that aren’t affiliated with YC — including Apple, Stripe, Dropbox and Instacart — began trying out Triplebyte for their hiring needs.

Triplebyte smartly used the development to entice a broader pool of engineers to the platform, which broadened the data points it was collecting, making the platform smarter still. Now,  Taggar says, the company’s automated assessment test is so good that Triplebyte makes companies agree that the Triplebyte candidates with whom they engage will be fast-tracked through the application process and not given further phone screens or coding challenges.

It’s a bold demand and one that could presumably backfire on Triplebyte should it rack up enough unhappy customers.

More here.

Aurora, the nearly two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based self-driving startup cofounded by Chris Urmson (formerly the chief technology officer of Alphabet’s self-driving arm), has raised a whopping $90 million in Series A funding co-led by Greylock Partners and Index Ventures. Indeed, Urmson tells TechCrunch the most crucial part of the deal are the two, high-profile new board members now joining Aurora’s board: Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, who formerly foundedLinkedIn, and Index’s Mike Volpi, who previously ran Cisco’s routing business. More here.

ByteCubed, a 7.5-year-old, Arlington, Va.-based tech consultancy for commercial and federal government customers, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Enlightenment Capital. More here.

Collective Health, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based developer of a workforce health management system, has raised $110 million in new funding from Sun Life Financial, Mubadala Ventures and earlier investors NEA, Founders Fund, GV and Maverick Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Edgybees, a nearly two-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based startup whose technology enables augmented reality on high-speed platforms like drones and cars, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding, including from Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, Verizon Ventures, 8VC, NFX, Aspect Ventures and Israeli crowdfunding platform OurCrowd. TechCrunch has more here.

Eko Devices, a 4.5-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based maker of an “intelligent” digital stethoscope that was cleared by the FDA nine months ago, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Artis Ventures, with participation from Strategic Partners, Dreamlt Ventures, 1812 Ventures and Founder.org. More here.

Gaana, a Noida, India-based music streaming app, has raised $115 million from Tencent and controlling shareholder Times Internet. (Tencent also backed India-based Flipkart and Ola last year.) Bloomberg has more here.

Inscripta, a three-year-old, Boulder, Colo.-based gene editing technology company, has raised $55.5 million in Series C funding co-led by Mérieux Développement and Paladin Capital Group. The Denver Post has more here on the company, which raised $23 million in Series B funding just last year.

Mist, a nearly four-year-old, Cupertino, Ca-based startup that’s designing self-learning wireless networks, has raised $46 million in Series C funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Other participants in the round include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, GV, NTT DOCOMO Ventures and Dimension Data. SiliconAngle has more here.

Nomad Health, a three-year-old, New York-based online marketplace for healthcare jobs, has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Polaris Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, RRE Ventures and .406 Ventures. More here.

Quentis Therapeutics, a two-year-old, New York-based biotech company that focuses on treating cancer patients, has raised $48 million in Series A funding, including from Versant Ventures, Polaris Partners, AbbVie Ventures, Taiho Pharmaceutical, Yonghua Capital, Alexandria Venture Investments and New York Ventures, the investment arm of Empire State Development. More here.

Viela Bio, a new Gaithersburg, Md.-based AstraZeneca spin-out that’s focused on inflammation and autoimmune diseases, has raised $250 million in Series A funding from Boyu Capital, 6 Dimensions Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Temasek and Sirona Capital. FierceBiotech has more here.

Heuristic Capital, a 1.5-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based early-stage, hardware-focused venture firm, has raised $34 million for its debut fund, shows an SEC filing.

Kindred Capital, a new European-focused venture capital firm, has closed one of Europe’s largest-ever seed funds with £80 million ($110 million). Kindred is also operating what it’s calling an “equitable venture” model, in which every entrepreneur in its portfolio will also receive a stake in the fund. (It’s the same model or very similar to that employed in the U.S. by the venture firm Upside Partnership, which gives every founding team that it backs a piece of its own carry.) More here.

Sante Ventures, a 12-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based venture firm that invests in early-stage life sciences and healthcare companies, is looking to raise up to $200 million for its third fund, shows an SEC filing. More here.

Chorus, a year-old, San Francisco-based social fitness startup founded by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, is shutting down. It had raised $9 million in venture funding, including from Index Ventures, where Costolo serves as a mentor. Business Insider talked with Costolo about what went wrong.

iQiyi, a nearly eight-year-old, Netflix-style service in China that was created and is still largely owned (70 percent) by Baidu, has filed for a $1.5 billion IPO. It plans to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker IQ. Variety has more here.

NIO, the Shanghai, China-based electric car maker formerly known as NextEv, has hired eight banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, to work on a planned U.S. stock market listing this year worth up to $2 billion, reports Reuters.

Gun-control activists are demanding that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos do something he has carefully avoided: pick a side in a hot-button political debate

Frances Frei, who was hired to fix what ailed Uber’s broken culture and put its controversial CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick on the right path, is leaving the company, says Recode.

Asif Giga has joined Ericsson Ventures as an investment director. Giga was previously a director with Experian Ventures and, before that, an investor with Singtel.

Lindsey Maule, who became the head of cryptocurrency research at Precursor Ventures back in August, has left to focus full time on Luna Capital, a cryptocurrency-focused hedge fund where her title is CEO and general partner. Before joining Precursor, Maule was a growth strategist at the custom apparel startup Teespring.

Nick Nash is leaving his role as group president of Sea, the Singapore-based games and e-commerce company that went public in the U.S. last year, to start his own startup fund. Sea announced that Nash will exit the company at the end of 2018, giving it plenty of time to transition and find a replacement. TechCrunch has the story here.

Rodolfo Rosini, a U.K.-based serial entrepreneur, is becoming a venture capitalist, having joined the Hong Kong-based AI and machine learning-focused accelerator Zeroth.ai as a partner, says TechCrunch.

Google has brought Hangouts Chat, its Slack competitor, out of beta.

Twitter is finally rolling out a “save for later” feature called Bookmarks.

LinkedIn wasn’t built for low-skilled job seekers, so Facebook is barging in.

Everything you never knew about “Sesame Street.”

This real-life Ray Donovan protects spurned lovers in high-profile divorces.

“My Own Way,” sung by a teenage Amy Winehouse.

Transparent Speaker(s).

Amazon is reportedly on track to become a $1 trillion company in 18 months.

Today, StrictlyVC is sponsored by the Financial Solutions Lab at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, which will unveil its 2018 class of startups at EMERGE in Los Angeles this June. Want to see who they’ll be — and mingle with all kinds of fintech and finserv influencers? Register now for EMERGE and save $150 off current rates with code: STRICTLYVC.

Citadel Defense Company, a two-year-old, San Diego-based drone system developer, has raised $12 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners (alone). More here.

Current, a 2.5-year-old, New York-based startup behind an app-controlled debit card aimed at tweens and teens, has added $1 million in funding to its Series A round. The newest investor is Fifth Third Capital, a direct equity investment subsidiary of Fifth Third Bancorp. The company had previously raised $5 million in Series A funding in October from QED Investors and Cota Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

CyberX, a nearly-five-year-old, Boston-based industrial control system security company, has raised $18 million in Series B funding in a round that brings its total funding to $30 million. Norwest Venture Partners led the financing, with participation from earlier investors Glilot Capital Partners, Flint Capital, ff Venture Capital, and OurCrowd. (For what it’s worth, the company’s first check came from UpWest Labs, which we profiled last week.) More here.

Industrious, a five-year-old, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company that pitches itself as a premium alternative to WeWork and is aggressively chasing the same business customers, has raised $80 million in Series C funding co-led by Riverwood Capital and Fifth Wall Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Niche, a four-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based platform that tries to make choosing a college, K-12 school, or place to live a more transparent process, has raised $6.6 million in Series B funding from Allen & Company and Grit Capital. More here and here.

Peakon, a nearly two-year-old, London- and Copenhagen-based online employee engagement platform, has raised $22 million in funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from earlier investors EQT Ventures, Idinvest Partners, and Sunstone. TechCrunch has more here.

Senti Biosciences, a two-year-old, South San Francisco, Ca.-based startup that says it has pioneered new technology platforms to design synthetic gene circuits for adaptive cell and gene therapies, just raised $53 million in Series A funding. NEAled the deal, and it was joined by 8VC, Amgen Ventures, Pear Ventures, Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Allen & Company, Nest.Bio, Omega Funds,Goodman Capital, and LifeForce Capital. Business Insider has more here.

Blossom Capital, a new London-based venture firm cofounded by Ophelia Brown (formerly of LocalGlobe and Index Ventures), is in the process of raising between $75 million and $100 million for its debut fund. The capital will reportedly be used to fund European startups. TechCrunch has more here.

PhishMe, a seven-year-old startup that helps companies train employees to avoid phishing scams, announced today that it has been purchased by private equity firms BlackRock and Pamplona Capital Management for undisclosed terms, though a company spokesperson said the company was valued in the deal at $400 million. TechCrunch tries to parse what that means exactly here.

The job review website Glassdoor could go public in 2018, according to Bloomberg, which says the company is currently interviewing banks to advise on an IPO. Glassdoor has raised more than $200 million in venture capital, with its newest round (in 2016) done at a valuation north of $1 billion. More here.

Pinterest has hired its first COO: Francoise Brougher, who was most recently business lead at Square and, prior to that, VP of SMB global sales and operations at Google.

Trump just named Brad Parscale his campaign manager for 2020. We’d written about an interview with Parscale late last year, where he outlined how Facebook helped Trump win his 2016 campaign.

A look at gun-slinger Masayoshi Son and Softbank’s broader spending spree.

Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed inventor of bitcoin, is accused of swindling more than $5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency and other assets from the estate of a computer-security expert.

Here’s who owns everything in “big media” right now. (Graph.)

Google’s Bay Area real estate empire is reportedly equivalent to 14 Salesforce towers.

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, is looking to add an investment associate to its corporate development team. The job is in San Mateo, Ca.

Speaking of Rakuten, it’s planning a new cryptocurrency called Rakuten Coin — built on blockchain technology and the company’s existing loyalty program, Rakuten Super Points — that it plans to use to encourage loyalty services globally and to help customers to buy goods across different Rakuten services and markets. TechCrunch has more here.

Earlier this month, Amazon began offering one- and two-hour Whole Foodsdeliveries through its Prime Now service. Now, Walmart fighting back. Its membership warehouse club, Sam’s Club, announced today a partnership with Instacart that allows shoppers to order groceries and other household goods for same-day delivery. More here.

Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles on a wild frontier: virtual currencies.

The afterlife of Pablo Escobar.

Barbra Streisand cloned her dog. Twice.

Twelve ways to kill your upstairs neighbors with their own bongos.

Ours, too.

Apple is planning to release the largest iPhone ever later this year.

Facebook has agreed to pay $35 million to settle claims that its officers and directors misled investors in the company’s 2012 initial public offering. Facebook didn’t admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, whose court filing was made public today.

Today, StrictlyVC is sponsored by the Financial Solutions Lab at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, which will unveil its 2018 class of startups at EMERGE in Los Angeles this June. Want to see who they’ll be — and mingle with all kinds of fintech and finserv influencers? Register now for EMERGE and save $150 off current rates with code: STRICTLYVC.

Danke Apartment, a three-year-old, Beijing, China-based online apartment rental platform, has raised $100 million in Series B funding led by CMC Capital and Banyan Capital, with participation from Bertelsmann Asia Investments, Vision Plus Capital, Youjin Capital, and Joy Capital. The company reportedly raised $14 million in Series A funding last year. China Money Network has more here.

Food by Rail, a 10-month-old, Orlando, Fl.-based maker of refrigerated boxcars for moving food and beverages by rail, has raised $5 million in Series A funding from undisclosed investors. More here.

Joberate, a nearly four-year-old, Nashua, N.H.-based startup whose software as a service aims to help companies find and recruit talent faster and more cost effectively, has raised $1.2 million in fresh seed funding led by Falmouth Ventures. More here.

Kaliti, a seven-year-old, Paris-based property development and renovation project management tool provider, has raised €4 million ($4.9 million) in funding, including from Entrepreneur Venture and Capital & Dirigeants Partenaires.

May Mobility, a year-old, Ann Arbor, Mi.-based autonomous vehicle company at work on self-driving micro-shuttles, has raised $11.5 million in seed funding co-led by BMW iVentures and Toyota AI Ventures. Other investors in the company include Maven Ventures, SV Angel, Tandem Ventures, Trucks Ventures, and Y Combinator. More here.

PawnGuru, a three-year-old, Ann Arbor, Mi.-based online marketplace connecting pawn shops and consumers, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding co-led by Impact America Fund and Invest Detroit Ventures, with participation from angel investors. More here.

Prodsmart, a nearly six-year-old, San Francisco-based real-time process tracking platform for production lines and job shops, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding, including from Join Capital, Caixa Capital, Innovation Nest, and numerous Portuguese angel investors. More here.

ZEDEDA, a two-year-old, Santa Clara, Ca.-based startup that’s aiming to make it easier for companies to deploy and run real-time edge apps at “hyperscale,” has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Wild West Capital, with participation from Almaz Capital, Barton Capital, and former Motorola CEO Ed Zander. More here.

ZenBusiness, a three-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based startup that provides free business formation services, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Greycroft, Slow Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest fund and Founders Fund. More here.

Causeway Media Partners, a Boston-based growth equity firm that focuses on sports media and sports tech-related companies, says it has closed its second fund with $211.3 million in capital commitments, exceeding its $175 million target. We’d talked with firm cofounder Bob Higgins about the firm when it first hit the scene in 2014. More on what it’s up to now here.

East Ventures, an Indonesia and South East Asia-focused venture capital firm that’s been active in the region since 2010, is planning a $100 million seventh fund that it will begin raising this year, according to DealStreetAsia. If successful, the vehicle will be more than three times as big as the outfit’s last fund, which it closed with $30 million last fall.

MPM Capital, the 22-year-old, Boston-based early-stage life sciences investment firm, is looking to raise a new $400 million venture fund, according an SEC filing.More here.

RRE Ventures, the 24-year-old, New York-based venture firm, has raised $218.75 million for its seventh fund, shows a new SEC filing that lists $250 million as the fund’s target. The firm had closed its sixth fund with $280 million in 2014. Steve Schlafman, a younger partner who joined the firm in 2013, announced last fall that he was leaving, though he hasn’t yet disclosed publicly what’s next.

500px, a photo-sharing site that was once poised to take on Flickr and Getty, has been acquired by Visual China Group, a strategic investor in 500px via previous financings. Publicly traded VCG, which is sort of like China’s Getty, bought Corbis in 2016 and is now the world’s third-largest visual content provider. TechCrunch has much more here.

Circle, a cryptocurrency-focused financial-services firm, announced today that it is buying crypto exchange Poloniex—a move that “immediately makes Circle one of the largest and most influential companies in the industry,” says Fortune. More here.

Nokia is acquiring Unium, a 16-year-old, Seattle, Wa-based software company that specializes in solving complex wireless networking problems for use in mission-critical and residential Wi-Fi applications. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed but according to Crunchbase, Unium had raised roughly $27 million from investors. TechCrunch has more here.

A bit afield but still notable: Weinstein Co. is planning to file for bankruptcy following the collapse of sales talks with an investor group, says Dealbook.

You may soon be able to “own Aston Martin” even if you can’t afford to own anAston Martin. The British luxury brand said today that it’s considering an IPO after turning its first profit since 2010.

Sunlands Online Education Group, a 15-year-old, China-based online education service, has filed to raise up to $300 million in an IPO on the NYSE. China Money Network has more here.

Changes are afoot at BGF Ventures, the young, London-based early-stage venture fund of BGF, with three partners leaving the outfit, says TechCrunch.

CNBC caught Ravjeev Misra, the CEO of the SoftBank Vision Fund, at Mobile World Congress today and asked him about Uber’s global domination plans. Misra suggested that he supports them, despite earlier hints that Softbank would prefer that Uber to steer clear of Asia. Video here.

Reports last month that rapper 50 Cent had forgotten about $7 million or so in bitcoin he owned have been given the lie by the man himself, who declares in court documents that he “has never owned, and does not now own, a bitcoin account or any bitcoin.” TechCrunch has the story here.

G2VP, a new fund led by four partners (Ben Kortlang, Brook Porter, David Mount, Daniel Oros) who have worked together for the last ten years as partners at Kleiner Perkins’s $1 billion Green Growth Fund, are looking to hire an analyst or associate. The job is in Menlo Park, Ca.

A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it’s relying on Google’s public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services.

The success or failure of Dropbox will likely reflect on Y Combinator and its status as a Silicon Valley kingmaker.

How to raise more grateful children.

Where the world’s highest-paid expats live.

Monica Lewinsky in the age of #MeToo.

Eleven pre-made Easter baskets. (Never fear, Easter Bunny. We won’t tell anyone.)

Dropbox has finally filed for its long-awaited S-1. You can start learning about what’s what here.

In the meantime, more here on the biggest winners, including: cofounder and CEO Drew Houston (he owns 25.3 percent), Sequoia Capital (it owns 23.2 percent), cofounder and CTO Arash Ferdowski (he owns 10.3 percent), Accel Partners (it owns 5 percent), and T. Rowe Price (it holds 3.5 percent).

Interestingly, Dropbox will be the first Y Combinator company to go public.

Today’s StrictlyVC is sponsored by Siftery Track. As a reader, get free early access to Track and easily optimize your team’s software expenditures. Simply sync your credit card or accounting system, and Siftery Track will automatically create beautiful visualizations of your historic and forecasted spend. You’ll also get alerts for new products, duplicate charges, unexpected increases in spend, and more.

A little less than two years ago, we reported on Jeremy Fiance, a then 24-year-old recent UC Berkeley graduate who’d just taken the wraps off his new firm, The House Fund. It had secured $6 million in capital commitments from an array of individual investors, many of them venture capitalists, to fund startups coming out of UC Berkeley.

At the time, Fiance argued persuasively that the school — known for its academic rigor —  has largely and unwisely been overlooked by angel investors and VCs alike, sometimes owing simply to proximity. (Many investors live in communities that are closer to Stanford, roughly 40 miles away.)

He further sold himself on his own unique abilities to spot talent at UC Berkeley, including because as a freshman, in 2010, he’d brought to campus Kairos Society, a now 11-year-old organization that encourages budding entrepreneurs to tackle global-scale social challenges.

His salesmanship may be paying off. According to a three-month-old SEC filing spied earlier today by Axios, Fiance’s ambitions have already grown eightfold. At least, according to the filing, the House Fund is now raising upwards of $50 million for its second fund. (We’ve reached out Fiance for more information and will update this post if we hear more.)

Whether he can gather as much in capital commitments remains to be seen, but the diverse portfolio he has assembled suggests that Fiance — who counts VC and Cal alum Jeff Brody of Redpoint Ventures among his advisors — has made connections across the startup industry.

More here.

Amino Payments, a year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based payments company that says it combines technologies from blockchain, payments, and advertising to bring transparency to online advertising, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. First Round Capital led the round and was joined by investors You & Mr Jones Brandtech Ventures, Nyca Investment Fund, and Tessera Capital Partners, among others. The Philadelphia Inquirer has more here.

Anchor Labs, a stealthy startup planning to provide digital asset custody services to institutional investors, has raised an undisclosed amount of money from Andreessen Horowitz, says Axios’s Kia Kokalitcheva. AH is also an early investor in the digital currency exchange Coinbase and according Kokalitcheva, Coinbase held acquisition talks with Anchor Labs before unveiling its own plans to provide a similar custody service to institutions late last year.

Complai, a 16-month-old, Austin, Tex.-based maker of a travel-spend tracking tool, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from other investors, including Capital Factory. More here.

Eventcore, a 33-year-old, Seattle, Wa.-based company maker of event planning and management software, has raised $4.1 million in funding led by East Seattle Partners. GeekWire has more here.

Feature Labs, a three-year-old, Boston-based company that automates feature engineering for machine learning and AI applications, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Flybridge Capital Partners, with participation from First Star Ventures and 122 West Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

LegUp Computing, a nearly three-year-old, Toronto, Ontario-based cloud platform that enables software developers to program, deploy, and manage FPGA devices, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by Intel Capital. More here.

Ordermark, a year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based startup that simplifies online order management for restaurants, has raised $2.35 million from TenOneTen, Act One, and Mucker. More here.

PROCEPT BioRobotics, a nine-year-old, Redwood Shores, Ca.-based surgical robotics company, has raised $118 million in funding led by Viking Global Investors, with participation from Perceptive Advisors and CPMG. More here.

QuasarDB, a 10-year-old, Paris-based developer of technologies to handle real-time data primarily for financial markets, raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Partech Ventures, with participation from other investors, including Orolia. More here.

RecargaPay, an eight-year-old, Sao Paulo, Brazil-based mobile payments platform and wallet, has raised $22 million in Series B funding, including from IFC, TheVentureCity, and Ventech. More here.

Serial Box, a three-year-old, New York-based digital publisher of serial fiction, has raised $1.65 million in seed funding led by Boat Rocker Media.

Split, a nearly three-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based maker of tools for testing software features, has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel Partners and Harmony Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

Correction: Earlier this week, we told you about a $1.3 million seed round for Intello, a SaaS optimization startup. We also told you it was some months old and based in Queensland, Australia, but that’s another Intello. The newly seed-funded Intello is based in New York and it’s a year old. Apologies to cofounder Barak Kaufman, who received many confused emails from friends.:)

SkyDeck, a startup accelerator program at UC Berkeley, has just closed a $24 million fund, more than twice its original target $10 million, it said in a release issued yesterday. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Alibaba Holdings, and alumni through various investment vehicles. More here.

Eden, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based office management and tech support platform that has raised $15 million from investors, has acquired OrgOrg, an eight-year-old, social network for office managers to recommend, discuss, and review vendors and products. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.

Momo, a Chinese location-based social networking app, has acquired Tantan, a Chinese dating app, for $600.9 million in an all-cash deal that may help the two outfits better compete with WeChat. TechCrunch has much more here.

Elizabeth Cain has been promoted to partner at OpenView, where she was previously a VP.

Famous VC Vinod Khosla is now trying to persuade the Supreme Court to take up his case against surfers and other beachgoers who want public access to the beach outside his beachfront property.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is poised to become one of the highest-paid U.S. executives for 2017, thanks to a $636.6 million stock grant he received when Snap company went public.

Playground Global, the early-stage venture firm cofounded by Android’s co-creator Andy Rubin, is looking to hire a full-time associate. The job is in Palo Alto, Ca.

Secretive data-analytics company Palantir must turn over internal files to one its early investors who has accused it of improperly blocking his efforts to sell his shares. The judge presiding over the battle said this week that “Palantir’s serial failure to convene annual stockholder meetings is problematic’’ because it raises questions about whether shareholders are getting information about the private firm’s operations. Bloomberg has more here.

The National Venture Capital Association announced yesterday that it has released a set of model documents and resources aimed at addressing sexual harassment in the industry.

The myth of the “hacker proof” voting machine.

Some of those instant pots that terrify people could be recalled. (They’re melting.)

Where top chefs go to eat out in London.

What you need to get into the 1 percent.

Beer bong syringe. (Submitted without comment.)