New Yorkers, stay warm. (So nuts.)

Apple is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel, says Bloomberg.

The S&P 500 plunged more than 2.5 percent today in the worst start to a second quarter since the Great Depression, and Donald Trump’s recent attacks on Amazon appear to have a hand it it, as the online retailer became the biggest drag on the equity benchmark.

Just read this. Then share it. And then tell every awesome fintech startup and nonprofit you know — and even some you don’t — that they should apply to the Financial Solutions Lab. (Applications are due April 11, so tick-tock.)

82Labs, a year-old, L.A.-based startup that’s made what it calls a better hangover recovery drink, has raised $8 million in new financing from Altos Ventures, Slow Ventures, Strong Ventures and Thunder Road Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Accolade, a 2.5-year-old, Seattle-based on-demand healthcare concierge company, has raised $50 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, Carrick Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group and McKesson Ventures, with participation from Cross Creek Advisors and Madera Technology Partners. More here.

BioConsortia, a four-year-old, Davis, Ca.-based company that makes microbial products meant to enhance plant phenotypes and increase crop yields, has raised $10 million in Series D funding led by Otter Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures. More here.

BitPay, a four-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based blockchain payments startup that’s trying to compete with Coinbase, has raised $40 million in funding, including from Aquiline Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, Capital Nine, G Squared, Nimble Ventures and Delta-v Capital. More here.

Cobalt Robotics, a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based maker of indoor security robots that could conceivably replace security guards as well as facilities managers, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Sequoia Capital led the round, with participation from Founders Fund, Storm Ventures, Promus Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta. CNBC has more here.

Deepgram, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based speech analytics startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from NVIDIA GPU Ventures, the chipmaker’s venture arm. More here.

Ele.me, a nearly 10-year-old, Hangzhou, China-based delivery company that operates an army of people who traverse the country on their motorbikes, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Alibaba Holdings at a $9.5 billion valuation in exchange for a controlling stake in its business. Ele.me is vying for dominance with Meituan Dianping, a startup that’s backed by Alibaba rival Tencent Holdings. Fortune has more here.

FallCall Solutions, a three-year-old, West Hartford, Cn.-based personal emergency assistant app for the elderly, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Connecticut Innovations.

SiFive, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that’s designed to help any company come up with a custom designed chip for their needs, has raised $50.6 million in funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures, Spark Capital, and Osage University Partners. TechCrunch has more here.

Verbit, a year-old Israeli startup that says its transcription offering combines artificial intelligence and human input to create an accurate, fast and affordable service, has raised $11 million in seed money led by Vertex ventures, Oryzn Capital and HV Ventures. The Times of Israel has more here.

Wild Type, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based meat culturing startup, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital, with participation from Root Ventures and Mission Bay Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Sinovation Ventures, a nine-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based venture firm led by Taiwanese VC Kai-Fu Lee (he was the founding president of Google China, among other things), is raising up to $500 million for its fourth fund, shows an SEC filing. The firm had raised $302 million for its third fund in late 2016. More here.

Social Capital, the seven-year-old, firm cofounded by VC Chamath Palihapitiya, is in the process of raising what it hopes will be a $1 billion growth equity fund, shows a new SEC filing.

Unitus Seed Fund, a six-year-old, Seattle-based venture firm focused on India, has raised $12.9 million for its second seed fund, according to an SEC filing.

ReNew Power, a renewable energy company headquartered in Gurgaon, India and backed by Goldman Sachs and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, is acquiring competitor Ostro Energy in one of India’s biggest renewable energy deals. Bloomberg has more here.

Alzheon, a five-year-old, Framingham, Ma.-based biopharmaceutical firm developing therapies for Alzheimer’s disease, has revealed its plans to raise $70 million in a pubic offering of 5 million shares that are priced between $13 to $15 a piece. Nasdaq has more here.

nLight, an 18-year-old, Vancouver, Wa..-based semiconductor and fiber laser maker, has registered its plans to raise up to $86.3 million in an IPO. Nasdaq has more here. for an IPO of up to $86.3 million. Nasdaq has more here.

Pluralsight, a 14-year-old, Farmington, Ut.-based online learning startup for coders, has confidentially filed for an IPO, says TechCrunch. More here.

Spotify, the 12-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based streaming company, will hit the public market tomorrow, and analysts expect it to be valued straightaway at between $20 billion and $25 billion.

Asked recently about Facebook’s privacy crisis last month, Apple CEO Tim Cooksaid he “wouldn’t be in this situation” if he were in the shoes of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Now, Zuckerberg has hit back, calling the comments “extremely glib.”

John Giannandrea, senior vice president of engineering at Google and one of the company’s leading public voices on artificial intelligence issues, is stepping down from his position as head of the search and AI units, reports The Information. Its sources say his job is being split into two parts. They also say he’s staying at Google to be “more hands on with the technology.” More here.

Golden State Warriors star Andre Iguodala earns $16 million a year, and for several years, he’s been using some of those earnings to invest in tech, telling CNBC that he has a particularly close relationship with  Andreessen Horowitz. “They’ve kind of taken me under their wing and … showed me some things in the portfolio and how I can integrate my brand into some of their brands.” More here.

Steven Hu, who worked for the Chinese venture firm Qiming Venture Partners from 2009 through 2013 and had left to cofound a mobile game development company, just rejoined the outfit as a partner.

Elon Musk has taken direct charge of Model 3 production, according to a report in The Information.

CircleUp, the crowdfunding site, is looking to hire a general partner to help lead its discretionary, $125 million CircleUp Growth Partners investment fund. The job is in San Francisco.

Reddit is slowly rolling out a redesign.

LGBTQ dating site Grindr admitted today that it does share some data with third party vendors, including customers’ HIV status, but it says the disclosures are made only when “necessary or appropriate.”

John Krafcik, who runs Alphabet’s self-driving company Waymo, says a Waymo vehicle in a situation similar to that of the self-driving Uber vehicle that two weeks ago killed a pedestrian, would have avoided the same fate. Bloomberg has more here (subscription required).

Every Al Pacino movie, ranked.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is “extremely dangerous to our democracy.” If you haven’t already, watch.

The story of a voice: HAL in “2001” wasn’t always so eerily calm.

The best desk lamps, according to architects.

The FCC has approved SpaceX‘s proposed plan to build a constellation of Internet-beaming satellites to provide global broadband service.

Tesla has issued a voluntary recall for 123,000 of its Model S car – or every one made prior to April 2016. It’s found some evidence that bolts in the steering array were showing “excessive corrosion.”

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10,000 on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com.

6D.ai, a five-month-old, San Francisco-based 3D computer vision startup for spatial computing that sounds hugely ambitious, has raised “a mid seven figure” investment led by General Catalyst. A whole lot of other people also joined the round. Forbes tries to explain the company’s vision here.

Nift, a nearly three-year-old, Boston-based startup that produces special gift cards for business clients to pass on to their own best customers, has raised a pretty big Series A — $16.5 million — from Spark Capital, Foundry Group and Accomplice. TechCrunch has more here.

Tech Valley, an Xiamen, China-based ‘big data’ technology and application service company, has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding co-led by CRRC-Times Fundand Green Pine Colorful Dream. More here.

Wondery, a two-year-old, Los Angeles-based podcasting network, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Greycroft Partners, Lerer Hippeau Venturesand Advancit Capital. Other backers include BAM Ventures, Water Tower Ventures, Fox Networks Group and BDMI. TechCrunch has more here.

Fintech products designed for financially healthy outcomes show you can do good + do well. Learn who’s doing it best at the annual EMERGE Forum! This year’s theme is “FinHealth By Design: Building Toward Better” — join 800+ industry leaders and fintech innovators exploring the role of design in strengthening financial health. Save $150 off registration with code STRICTLYVC. Register today!

Lead Edge Capital, a nine-year-old, New York-based growth equity firm, is raising its fourth fund, shows an SEC filing. More here.

The New York Stock Exchange is in talks to buy the tiny Chicago Stock Exchange after the recent collapse of a two-year acquisition effort by a Chinese-led investor group, says the WSJ. More here.

Walmart is reportedly in early-stage acquisition talks with insurer Humana, a deal that would be the retail giant’s largest by far. Humana currently has a market value of $37 billion. The WSJ has more here.

Volkswagen could take public its trucks and buses division as soon as May 2, says Reuters. Notes the outlet: “Creating a new corporate structure for the division would be a sign the German automaker is making progress on its pledge to become a more focused and nimble company in the wake of its 2015 diesel emissions crisis, after a failed attempt to sell motorcycle brand Ducati last year.”

Farooq Abbasi has joined Costanoa Ventures as a principal. He was previously an associate with Mosiac Ventures.

According to a 2016 staff email authored by longtime Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth and obtained last night by Buzzfeed, neither deaths nor terrorist attacks coordinated on Facebook should get in the way of the company’s mission to connect people.

Dara Khosrowshahi is charged with turning scandal-plagued Uber into a traditional company—without sacrificing what made it successful. In a profile of Khosrowshahi, the New Yorker ballparks his odds of success.

Here’s why Donald Trump went postal on Amazon this week.

You might assume that Uber had to pay out a fortune to the family of 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was fatally hit by one of its self-driving cars last week, but that may not be the case. Herzberg was homeless, an underreported fact. More, the Arizona lawyer hired by her husband and daughter, who quickly agreed to the settlement, specializes in bankruptcy and debt negotiations. (This is a story of haves and have-nots if ever there was one.) More here.

The Chinese government had talks about possibly financing SoftBank‘s $100 billion Vision Fund, says Recode. According to its report, it isn’t clear if a deal could still materialize, but the Vision Fund was serious enough about China that it had been scouting last year for a new local partner to lead its investing in Chinese companies. More here.

Microsoft just unveiled its biggest reorganization in years. More here.

TV revivals for the #MeToo era.

The last conversation you’ll ever need to have about eating right.

Nineteen years ago today, male supermodel Fabio killed a goose with his face. Esquire remembers the moment.

A 360-degree house.

Donald Trump lashed out at Amazon in a tweet earlier, one day after the company’s stock tanked following a report that said he wants to “go after” the e-commerce giant for alleged antitrust violations. “Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” he wrote on Twitter.

As CNBC notes, Amazon does collect sales tax from consumers in 45 states and Washington, D.C. The WSJ relatedly reports that Amazon spent $13.5 million on federal lobbying last year—more than five times the $2.5 million it spent in 2012.

Meanwhile, the family of the woman killed by an Uber self-driving vehicle in Arizona has reached a settlement with the company, ending a potential legal battle over the first fatality caused by an autonomous vehicle. Terms aren’t being disclosed, as you might imagine. Reuters has more here.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10,000 on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com.

The U.S. IPO market had its best quarter by proceeds in three years, according to the IPO research company Renaissance Capital.

That kind of momentum has seemingly set the stage for some big names in tech to march onto the public market in the second quarter.

Forty-three companies raised a collective $15.6 billion through their IPOs, says Renaissance, though not all were tech deals. One was the IPO of security company ADT, which had been taken private in early 2016 in a $6.9 billion leveraged buyout by the private equity group Apollo Global Management. As MarketWatch noted at the time of ADT’s January IPO, Apollo continues to own a majority of the company’s shares, meaning it’s a “controlled company” where Apollo is still basically in charge.

Another big, non-tech IPO was that of Hudson, operator of the Hudson “travel essentials” and bookstores found at airports across the U.S. and Canada. Hudson is also a controlled company that remains majority owned by a parent company, Dufry AG of Switzerland. In fact, Dufry earmarked all the proceeds from Hudson’s IPO ($750 million) to pay down its own debt.

Neither of their IPOs performed terribly well. Hudson priced at the low end of its proposed range in January and its shares started to sink almost immediately. ADT’s shares are also trading below their offering price.

More here.

BetterUp, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based leadership app that pairs expert coaches with employees at all levels, has raised $26 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from earlier backers DFJ, Freestyle Capital and Crosslink Capital. More here.

Cubigo, a six-year-old, Netherlands-based tech startup aimed at addressing the senior living market, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Urbain Vandeurzen, with participation from Transvision. TechCrunch has more here.

Eco-Site, a six-year-old, Durham, N.C.-based wireless tower and infrastructure platform, has raised $90 million in fresh funding, including $30 million in equity from Atlanta-based MSouth Equity Partners and a $60 million credit facility from an unnamed Chicago-based asset manager. More here.

Electric AI, an 18-month-old, New York-based IT outsourcing startup, has raised $10 million in funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from earlier investors Bowery Capital and Primary Venture Partners. BuiltinNYC has more here.

Flipside Crypto, a nine-month-old, Boston-based startup whose platform will recommend which cryptocurrencies to buy, has raised $3.4 million in funding led by True Ventures, with participation from The Chernin Group, Resolute Ventures,Boston Seed Capital, Converge and Founder Collective. BostInno has more here.

FoodLogiQ, an 11-year-old,  Durham, N.C.-based maker of food safety and traceability software, has raised $19.5 million in new funding from Testo, Tyson Ventures, Pontifax AGTech, Nicola Wealth Management and Greenhouse Capital. Xconomy has more here.

Goop, the 10-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based wellness media and e-commerce company founded by actress Gwyneth Paltrow, has raised $50 million in Series C funding at a $250 million valuation. Investors in the round include New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Felix Capital. The round brings Goop’s total outside investment to $82 million. TechCrunch says home furnishings may be in its future.

Scotty Labs, a new, Menlo Park, Ca.-based startup that’s building software to let humans control cars remotely, has raised a $6 million round led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Horizon Ventures and Hemi Ventures. Company cofounder and CEO Tobenna Arodiogbu was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI International. Bloomberg has more here.

SpyCloud, a two-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based account takeover prevention startup, has raised $5 million in Series A funding from earlier backers Silverton Partnersand March Capital Partners. More here.

Streem, a year-old, Portland, Or.-based startup that connects home service professionals to their customers through intelligent video streaming (you film your broken appliance and the electrician receives all kinds of data about it, for example), has raised $2 million in fresh funding. Investors include Archivist Capital, Oregon Venture Fund, and Portland Seed Fund, as well as earlier backers. The company has now raised $3.7 million altogether. More here.

Tempest Therapeutics, a seven-month-old, San Francisco-based company that’s advancing four small molecule therapeutics, has raised $70 million in Series B funding led by original backer Versant Ventures, with participation from F-Prime Capital, Quan Capital, Lilly Asia Ventures, Foresite Capital and Eight Roads Ventures. Xconomy has more here.

Harry West (frog), Michael Bush (Great Place to Work), Jaqueline Reses (Square Inc.), and, Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace) will all be in one place this June: The annual EMERGE Forum! Join 800+ finserv industry leaders, VCs, and fintech innovators exploring the role of design in strengthening financial health. Save $150 off registration with code STRICTLYVC. Register today!

AngelPad, an eight-year-old, San Francisco- and New York-based accelerator program that has launched more than 140 companies across 11 different “classes,” is raising a new, $50 million venture fund, according to a new SEC filing that shows it has closed on at least $35 million already. TechCrunch has more here.

Breakout Labs, a San Francisco-based program that’s underwritten by renowned investor Peter Thiel and that in 2011 began offering nascent science-focused startups up to $350,000 in funding with no strings attached, is upping its check size. According to a new Medium post, it’s now offering grants of up to $500,000.

Noah Heller, who left his role as the VP of partnerships and emerging tech at Hulu last November to create a seed-stage fund called 3Rodeo, is raising $3 million, shows a new SEC filing. (We don’t think that number is a coincidence, though we also don’t know if that’s all Heller plans to raise for now.) The firm has characterized the capital pool as a private equity fund, not a venture fund. More here.

Ridge Ventures, the 10-year-old, San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm previously known as IDG Ventures USA, is raising its fourth fund shows a new SEC filing that doesn’t list a lot of info. The outfit had closed its third fund with $120 million in 2015. More here.

U.S. Venture Partners, the 37-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based venture fund is raising up to $300 million for its twelfth fund, shows an SEC filing. The firm had raised roughly $280 million for its eleventh fund in 2015. More here.

Warner Music Group has acquired Sodatone, a two-year-old, Toronto, Ontario-based data analytics platform that tracks streaming, social media, touring and play-listing data in order to unearth emerging talent. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. It isn’t clear from a quick online search whether Sodatone ever raised outside funding. Billboard has more here.

Cruise Automation, the self-driving arm of General Motors Co., said CTO A.G. Gangadhar is departing after less than half a year. In an email to Bloomberg, he cited disagreements with Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt as the reason he’s out the door, but Bloomberg notes that his tenure was also dogged by public complaints about his alleged role in fostering a work environment that was inhospitable to women when he worked at Uber.

Lior Ron, co-founder of Otto, the self-driving truck company Uber acquired, is leaving the company, says CNBC. More here.

Snap is laying off around 100 employees within the advertising and sales department, after laying off 100 people from the engineering department earlier this month. TechCrunch has more here.

Twenty-six women of color who are diversifying entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, media, and beyond, in Vanity Fair.

Bumble, the popular dating app, and Match Group, which owns another popular dating app, Tinder, are in the midst of a messy fight: The latest: Bumble filed a lawsuit late yesterday claiming that Match — which tried to buy Bumble late last year — interfered with its business operations. Now it wants $400 million in damages.

Last year, three female software engineers at Uber filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, saying its compensation practices were discriminatory. The suit, which represented a class of 420 employees, was just settled for $10 million, says Recode.

Rocket Internet’s venture arm Global Founders Capital is looking to hire an associate. The job is in San Francisco.

The Saudis and SoftBank are planning the world’s largest solar project.

Amazon may launch a bank account aimed at teens.

The tech industry wants its brain-computer interface projects “to feel like a magic trick” but it’s really a “rigorous and potentially painful scientific process” that involves animal testing, says Gizmodo.

The world’s most expensive painting cost $450 million because two Arab princes bid against each other by mistake.

Crazy that it comes to this again, but thanks, New York Times.

Westworld is coming back in a few weeks, too. (Woot!) Here’s it official season two trailer.

When you like your waffles stuffed.

Donald Trump  isn’t interested cracking down on Facebook, according to a new report in Axios. Instead, “he’s obsessed with Amazon,” says one of its five sources who’ve discussed it with him. His reported obsession is taking a toll of Amazon’s shares today, too.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10,000 on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com.

You don’t hear of many $2 loans in the United States, where $2 won’t buy you more than a chocolate bar. But in cities like Lagos, Nigeria, and Nairobi, Kenya, $2 has the buying power of roughly $40, making such “micro” loans useful when you’re running a small business. And borrowing $2 from a startup called Branch is a way onto a platform that promises much bigger loans, based on your credit worthiness.

What is Branch and why is it bothering with such small amounts of money? For answers to those questions, we talked this week with its founder and CEO Matt Flannery, who previously cofounded and co-led Kiva, a now 14-year-old micro-lending platform that enables families to make small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Flannery realized while running Kiva that a nonprofit — which Kiva is — can only get so far when it comes to fundraising. Meanwhile, fascinated by the spread of smart phones and digital payment systems in Africa, Flannery knew that if he could raise serious capital, he could make even more loans to small business owners without needing to meet and interview them first.

In service to that idea, what Branch built is an app that analyzes all kinds of information on a user’s phone that determines how to score their credit. For example, in Nigeria, every time you use an ATM, the bank sends you an SMS message with your bank balance. That’s useful information to Branch. In Kenya, every time you pay your energy bill, the receipt comes via SMS. Knowing if you pay it and how big a bill you’re paying is valuable information, too.

Users apparently don’t see the app as invading their privacy — or it’s worth the trade-off to them if they do. Since its 2015 founding, Branch has been downloaded onto more than one million mobile phones in Sub-Saharan Africa, says Flannery.

Based on that momentum, Branch has attracted the kind of financial muscle Flannery was seeking when he left Kiva to start the company. In fact, Branch is announcing today that it has lined up $70 million in Series B funding to expand its financial offerings to additional countries, including India.

More here.

Arraiy, a two-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based startup that’s trying to automate the creation of digital effects for movies, TV and games, just raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Lux Capital and Softbank Ventures, with participation from Dentsu Ventures, Cherry Tree Investments, and earlier backers IDG Capital and CRCM Ventures. The New York Times has more here.

Bigfoot Biomedical, a three-year-old, Milpitas, Ca.-based medical device company that ties smartphones to its automated insulin delivery pump for sufferers of Type 1 diabetics, says it has closed its Series B round with $55 million, including from new investor Abbott. The company, whose other backers include Janus Henderson Investors and Quadrant Capital Advisors, has now raised $90 million altogether. FierceBiotech wrote about Bigfoot in December.

CardUp, a 2.5-year-old, Singapore-based online card payments platform for cash management (it enables any payment made by bank transfer to be shifted to a credit card), has raised $1.7 million in seed funding from Sequoia India andSeedPlus. TechinAsia has more here.

Chia, a months-old, San Francisco-based outfit that claims the cryptocurrency it’s building doesn’t waste electricity like Bitcoin, has raised $3.4 million in seed funding led by AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and others. The company’s cofounder and CEO, Bram Cohen, invented BitTorrent, one of the first modern decentralized network protocols and an inspiration for the Bitcoin protocol. TechCrunch has more here.

Credit Karma, an 11-year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s been evolving from a  simple credit report system into a broader financial assistant, has raised $500 million through a secondary sale of its common shares to Silver Lake. As part of the investment, Credit Karma says it is getting a 23 percent bump in its valuation from its last secondary round, suggesting it’s now valued at roughly $4 billion. TechCrunch has more here.

Flying Whales, a six-year-old, Suresnes, Île-de-France-based company, has raised $246 million in funding to develop a 500-foot blimp designed to lift lumber from deep woodland. Investors include Bpifrance, which injected 25 million euros this month, and AVIC, China’s main producer of warplanes, transport aircraft and helicopters. France’s national forestry office and the Nouvelle Aquitaine region in the southwest of the country are also backing the project. Bloomberg has the story here.

LetsGetChecked, a four-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based startup whose health test kit service allows users to take various common laboratory tests from the comfort of home, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. Optum Ventures, the independent venture fund of health services provider Optum, co-led the round withQiming Venture Partners, the Chinese venture firm. TechCrunch has more here.

Neighbor, a year-old, Salt Lake City, Ut.-based peer-to-peer self storage startup that connects people looking for storage with people who have unused space (in those rare cases where this exists), has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Peak Ventures and Pelion Ventures. More here.

Oscar Health, a six-year-old, New York-based health insurance startup, has raised $165 million in new funding in a round led by Founders Fund, with participation from two branches of Google’s parent company Alphabet: the Capital G growth investment arm, and the Verily life sciences segment. According to CNBC, the company is now valued at $3.2 billion. More here.

Siren, a three-year-old, Copenhagen- and San Francisco-based startup that has developed fabric with embedded micro sensors, just unveiled a sock for people with diabetes, along with $3.4 million in funding from DCM, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. TechCrunch has more here.

You. Us. LA. June. Don’t miss the annual EMERGE Forum! This year’s theme is “FinHealth By Design: Building Toward Better” and there will be 800+ industry leaders and fintech innovators exploring the role of design in strengthening financial health. Join us and save $150 off registration with code STRICTLYVC. Register today!

Cushman & Wakefield, the century-old real estate brokerage giant backed by private equity firm TPG, is interviewing advisers to help take the company public, according to Bloomberg.

Homology Medicines, a three-year-old, Bedford, Ma.-based firm that aims to treat rare genetics diseases, has raised $144 million in its IPO. The company, which had raised $127 million in private funding previously, priced 9 million shares at $16. Its biggest outside shareholders sailing into its IPO include 5AM Ventures, ARCH Venture, Deerfield, and Novartis.

Equifax has appointed former GE exec Mark Begor as CEO, the second change to the position since the credit-reporting company disclosed a massive cyberattack in September.

Crypto’s billionaire trading king — Binance’s Zhao Changpeng — has suddenly run into problems.

Tim Cook explains why “it’s not true” that the iPhone “isn’t built in the United States.”

Docker founder Solomon Hykes today announced that he is leaving the company he started.

Chris Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica  employee turned whistleblower, suggested yesterday that scale of the data leak is substantially larger than has been reported so far.

Turn/River Capital, a tech-focused private equity firm, is looking to bring aboard an investment development analyst to help it source deals. The job is in San Francisco.

The average Wall Street bonus hit $184,220 last year, or “pre-crisis level,” as Quartz reports. The median household income in the U.S., by way of comparison, was $59,039 in 2016.

Last month, the board of SoftBank Group launched an investigation into who was behind a shareholder campaign that sought the ouster of two of its executives—Nikesh Arora and Alok Sama –and whether that effort had any connections to current company insiders, according to the WSJ. The piece suggests t the effort was meant to strengthen the career prospects of Rajeev Misra, now the head of Softbank’s $100 billion Vision Fund. Find the story — which is pretty fascinating — here. (H/T: Axios for flagging.)

Facebook has made its privacy and deletion settings easier to find, amid escalating criticism of the company.

Uber, after suspending its self-driving car operations in all markets following a fatal crash, has decided not to re-apply for its self-driving car permit in California. Uber’s current permit expires at the end of this month.

Slack is developing tools to tell if you treat men and women differently.

Hulu’s newest trailer for the second season of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which premiers April 28(!)

An American could become the next world chess champion. (Watch out, Magnus Carlsen.)

Robbie Frei’s father lost part of his arm serving in Iraq, so Robbie designed him a new one. He’s 18.

A 1,000-square-foot home that’s designed to function like one twice its size. (Also, it’s in Maui, so do you really care how big it is?)

Uh oh. Tech stocks are tumbling again in a wave of afternoon sell-offs.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10,000 on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com.

Just a day after General Catalyst, the 18-year-old venture firm, revealed plans in an SEC filing to raise a record $1.375 billion in capital, another firm that we’d said was likely to file any second has done just that.

According to a fresh SEC filing, Lightspeed Venture Partners, also 18 years old, is raising a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments from its investors, just two years after raising what was then a record for the firm: $1.2 billion in funding across two funds (one early stage and the other for “select” companies in its portfolio that had garnered traction).

Still on our watch list: news of bigger-and-better-than-ever funds from other firms that announced their latest funds roughly two years ago, including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Accel Partners.

The supersizing of venture firms isn’t a shock, as we wrote yesterday — though it’s also not necessarily good for returns, as we also noted. Right now, venture firms are reacting in part to the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, which SoftBank has hinted is merely the first of more gigantic funds it plans to raise, including from investors in the Middle East who’d like to plug more money into Silicon Valley than they’ve been able to do historically.

The game, as ever, has also changed, these firms could argue. For one thing, the size of rounds has soared in recent years, making it easy for venture firms to convince themselves that to “stay in the game,” they need to have more cash at their disposal.

Further, so-called limited partners from universities, pension funds and elsewhere, want to plug more money into venture capital, given the lackluster performance some other asset classes have produced. When they want to write bigger checks to the funds in which they are already investors, the funds often try accommodating them out of loyalty.

More here.

Adagene, a seven-year-old, Suzhou, China-based antibody discovery and development company, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital China, with participation from New World TMT, AVIC Trust, King Star Capital and Gopher Asset Management. China Money Network has more here.

Canopy, a nearly four-year-old, Lehi, Ut.-based maker of cloud software for tax and accounting practice management, has raised $30 million in new funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Wells Fargo Strategic Capital,Pelion Ventures, University Growth Fund and EPIC Ventures. Crowdfund Insider has more here.

Circular Wave Drive, a Columbus, Oh.-based technology company that makes compact speed-reducing gears for robotics and applications, has raised $2 million in seed funding led by regional investor Ikove Venture Partners. Crunchbase News has more here.

Dandelion, an 11-month-old, New York-based clean energy startup that’s selling ageothermal heating and cooling system for homes and was originally incubated inside Google parent Alphabet, has raised $4.5 million led by New Enterprise Associates. Other backers in the deal include BoxGroup, Daniel Yates, Ground Up, and previous investors Borealis Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and ZhenFund. Dandelion has now raised $6.5 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

Intercom, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based company that sells a suite of messaging-first products aimed to help sales teams accelerate business, has raised a $125 million in Series D funding at a post-money valuation of $1.275 billion, reports TechCrunch. Kleiner Perkins led the round; earlier backers to participate include Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. TechCrunch has more here.

Kloudless, a seven-year-old, Berkeley, Ca.-based company that makes it easier for developers to connect their applications to a variety of third-party tools for file storage, customer management, and other services through a unified API, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Aspect Ventures. Other participants in the round include Bow Capital, Alibaba Taiwan Entrepreneurs Fund, Heavybit, and Ajay Shah. Kloudless had raised its seed funding from investors David Sacks and Tim Draper. TechCrunch has more here.

Mydream+, a three-year-old, Beijing-based co-working space company, has raised $48 million in Series B funding led by Ocean Link, with participation from earlier backers Joy Capital and M31 Management Fund. China Money Network has more here.

Opentrons, a four-year-old, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup whose robots help biologists automate lab experiments that would otherwise be done by hand, has raised $10 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. Other participants in the round include Lerer Hippeau, YC Continuity Fund and Jeff Kindler. More here.

PreVeil, a three-year-old, Boston-based startup that sells end-to-end encryption software to protect email and files for businesses, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Spark Capital. More here.

Relativity, a two-year-old, L.A.-based company that’s developing an automated, 3D printing process meant to design rockets quickly and with reduced complexity, has raised $35 million in Series B funding led by Playground Global. Earlier backers Social Capital, Y Combinator Continuity and Mark Cuban also joined the round. TechCrunch has more here.

Remesh, a five-year-old, New York-based software company using AI to help organizations conduct research (they engage with customers, employees, or their target market via a chat interface that can analyze and segment their responses), has raised $10 million in Series A funding. General Catalyst led the round, with participation from earlier investor LionBird Ventures. More here.

Root Insurance, a three-year-old, Columbus, Oh.-based startup selling personalized car insurance, has raised $51 million in Series C funding led byRedpoint Ventures, with participation from Scale Venture Partners, Ribbit Capital and Silicon Valley Bank Capital Partners. More here.

Sentieo, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based financial research platform, has raised $6 million in funding co-led by Clocktower Ventures and Long Focus Capital, with participation from individual investors, including Howard Lindzon and Scott Belsky. More here.

Spring Labs, a year-old, Marina del Ray, Ca.-based blockchain-based data exchange network, has raised $14.75 million in seed funding. August Capital led the round, with participation from Victory Park Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Multicoin Capital, Wavemaker Genesis andJump Capital. VentureBeat has more here.

Harry West (frog), Michael Bush (Great Place to Work), Jaqueline Reses (Square Inc.), and, Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace) will all be in one place this June: The annual EMERGE Forum! Join 800+ finserv industry leaders, VCs, and fintech innovators exploring the role of design in strengthening financial health. Save $150 off registration with code STRICTLYVC. Register today!

Bedrock Capital, cofounded last year by Geoff Lewis, formerly of Founders Fund, has raised $135 million for its debut fund. You can read all about the outfit, which is based in New York, here.

Harrison Metal, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based seed-stage venture fund, has closed its fifth vehicle with $68 million, founder Michael Dearing tweeted out yesterday. TechCrunch has more here.

Rackspace, a cloud-computing company that was taken private in a $4.3 billion deal in August 2016 by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, is in consideration for an IPO by the firm, says Bloomberg. More here.

Forget what was said about 2019. Saudi Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, is back on track for an IPO in the second half of 2018, according to its CEO. Bloomberg has more here.

Shyp, a nearly five-year-old, San Francisco-based shipping services startup, is shutting down after raising $62 million from investors, including Homebrew, Sherpa Capital, Slow Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, among others. Fast Company has more on its rise and fall.

A unit of Foxconn Technology Group has agreed to buy smartphone and electronics accessories maker Belkin International or $866 million. More here.

Google is acquiring Tenor, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that powers a variety of GIF keyboards on phones and messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger. Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand within Google, says TechCrunch. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed; Tenor had raised$32 million from investors, including Cowboy Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures, among others. More here.

MariaDB is best known as a drop-in replacement for the popular MySQL database. But the MariaDB Corporation has its sights set on a bigger market, announcing today that it’s acquiring MammothDB, a big data business analytics service based in Bulgaria. TechCrunch has more here.

So much for being accountable? Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has declined a summons from a UK parliamentary committee that’s investigating how social media data is being used, and, as recent revelations suggest, misused, for political ad targeting. He says he will testify before Congress, however.

The U.S. is still a tech innovation hub, but other regions are on the rise, according to KPMG’s annual survey of tech leaders. While Silicon Valley and San Francisco are together viewed as the top hub, Shanghai ranks as the biggest rival when it comes to innovation. More here.

Nvidia, which supplies chips for Uber’s self-driving cars, said it’s temporarily suspending all of its self-driving tests on public roads to learn more about last week’s crash in Arizona. The state itself separately suspended Uber’s ability to test and operate autonomous vehicles on Arizona’s public roadways.

In separate but related news, the United States National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation into a fatal car crash involving a Tesla Model X car on Friday. It isn’t yet clear if Tesla’s automated control system, Autopilot, was active at the time of the accident.

Waymo and Jaguar say they’re building a fleet of all-electric self-driving cars for customers who’d like a little pizzazz in their autonomous ride.

Apple is looking to bite into Google’s stranglehold on the education market. How: with a cheaper new iPad and pencil.

HODL on to your artwork. An American couple bought a sculpture directly from the artist in 1955 for $5,000. Christie’s estimates the piece will fetch more than $70 million.

Also, quick mention: our phone is borked right now after being unceremoniously dropped on the road. With the screen cracked, no one can hear us, we’re discovering, so don’t call unless you want to hear, “______________.”

We’re mostly online today, fwiw.:)

Shares of Facebook cratered as much as 6 percent today after the Federal Trade Commission announced that it’s investigating the company’s data practices in the wake of that Cambridge Analytica leak of 50 million users’ information. CNBC has more here.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10,000 on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com.

It happened in 2016, and it’s happening like clockwork again in 2018: venture firms are closing new funds with more money than they ever have before, just two years after closing their most recent funds with more money than they’d ever raised.

Last week, you may have caught wind that Khosla Ventures is raising up to $1.4 billion across an early-stage fund and gigantic seed fund. Battery Ventures also recently upped the ante, raising a fresh $1.25 billion across two funds. Meanwhile, Sequoia Capital is reportedly looking to raise $12 billion across a series of funds. (As the second-largest shareholder of newly public Dropbox, that pursuit just became easier, we’d imagine.)

Don’t expect the announcements to stop any time soon. Just today, the SEC processed paperwork showing that 18-year-old General Catalyst has closed a$1.375 billion fund, a vehicle that seemingly combines both the firm’s early- and growth-stage investments. That’s a huge leap over the capital commitments that General Catalyst circled in early 2016, when it closed a pair of funds with $845 million.

We’d expect a host of firms that closed their most recent funds around the same window in 2016 to be trotting out their own mega funds in short order. (Think Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Founders Fund, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others.)

Whether the trend is a reflection of the natural evolution of venture capital, or a race off a cliff, will play out over time.

More here.

Calm, a 5.5-year-old, London-based meditation app that Apple recognized last year as “app of the year,” is reportedly raising $25 million in new funding at a $250 million valuation led by Insight Venture Partners. The startup has raised just $1.5 million in seed funding to date. CNBC has the story here.

Candex, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based company whose collaboration apps manage payments between companies and their vendors, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding from Edenred Capital Partners, Partech Ventures,Advisors.Fund, Camp One Ventures, NFX, Tekton Ventures, Big Sur Ventures and Mark Goines, an executive at Personal Capital. More here.

Manbang Group, an Uber-like truck-hailing company that was created last November after China’s top two truck-calling apps Huochebang and Yunmanman merged, is reportedly looking to raise between $500 million and $1 billion in fresh funding, and SoftBank is (ahem) kicking the tires. Reuters has the story here.

Myriota, a three-year-old, Adelaide, Australia-based company that aims to create an internet-of-things communications network by developing a number of projects across a diverse range of sectors, from black box-type recorders for soldiers to water tank monitors for farmers, has raised $15 million in Series A funding. Main Sequence Ventures and Blue Sky Venture Capital co-led the round, with participation from Boeing HorizonX Ventures, Singtel Innov8 and Right Click Capital. More here.

Nebanan, a nearly three-year-old, Berlin, Germany-based social network for neighborhoods, has raised €16 million ($19.8 million) in Series A funding led by BurdaPrincipal, with participation from Lakestar, Deutsche Telemedien, NWZ, and pd ventures. More here.

Valohai, a two-year-old, Turku, Finland-based machine learning platform-as-a-service company, has raised $1.8 million in funding led by Superhero Capital, with participation from Reaktor Ventures and Business Finland. More here.

Wizeline, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based company that designs digital products for its customers, has raised $43 million in Series B funding led by Apax Digital. More here.

You. Us. LA. June. Don’t miss the annual EMERGE Forum! This year’s theme is “FinHealth By Design: Building Toward Better” and there will be 800+ industry leaders and fintech innovators exploring the role of design in strengthening financial health. Join us and save $150 off registration with code STRICTLYVC. Register today!

Quona Capital, a New Delhi, India-based venture firm that’s right now investing out of its $142 million second fund, is marketing a third fund that it hopes to close with up to $200 million, a founding partner tells the Economic Times. Accion, the global non-profit that’s focused on fintech, is one of Quona’s anchor investors and will remain an anchor investor its next fund, says the report. More here.

Smartsheet, a 13-year-old, Seattle-area company that helps Fortune 500 customers manage and automate key work processes — including the ability of employees to collaborate on projects across sales, marketing, and other corporate functions — filed to raise as much as $100 million through an IPO. It’s the first filing for an IPO for a tech company in the Seattle region this year. GeekWire has more here.

Spotify goes public next week. Today, it told Wall Street how it expects to do for 2018.

Cake Technologies, a 2.5-year-old U.K.-based fintech startup that wanted to make it more convenient to pay your restaurant or bar bill, was quietly acquired late last year for $13.3 million by American Express, reports TechCrunch. The young startup had raised a total of £4.5 million in equity and £1.4 million in debt, according to its sources. More here.

Coinbase may be on the verge of its biggest acquisition yet, though it wouldn’t be a great outcome for investors in the company being gobbled up. According to Coindesk, Coinbase, which has raised more than $225 million in venture funding to date, is in talks to acquire five-year-old, Earn.com, formerly known as 21.co, for $30 million in cash (says one source) or (says another source) closer to $120 million, when factoring in cash, cryptocurrency, stock and an earn-out. Headed by Balaji Srinivasan, Earn.com invites users to earn digital currency for replying to emails and completing tasks and has raised at least $121 million, including from Founders Fund, Data Collective, Pantera Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, where Srinivasan worked briefly as a general partner.

Six months after going public, Roku shares are trading at more than double their listing price and tomorrow presents the first chance for directors, executive officers and some other large holders to sell their stakes in the video-streaming pioneer.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on the Cambridge Analytica scandal and why Facebook didn’t take action years ago: “We didn’t realize the gravity of the issue sooner.”

Nathan Sanders, who joined Technology Crossover Ventures in 2014 after spending seven years with Bain Capital, has been named COO of the firm in a newly created position in which Sanders will oversee TCV’s finance, marketing, HR and IT functions.

Online advertisers are expected to outspend TV advertisers by $40 billion this year.

Twitter is the latest social service to boot out cryptocurrency advertisers.

Uber is selling its Southeast Asia business to rival Grab in Singapore in exchange for 27.5 percent of Grab’s business — and that’s a win for Uber, not a defeat, says TechCrunch.

Lerer Hippeau Ventures, the New York-based early-stage venture firm, is taking over the $125 million debut fund created by Binary Capital. More here.

The toxic Superfund sites of Silicon Valley.

The Sunday Times of London talks with Elon Musk’s mysterious estranged father, including about the baby he recently fathered with his, gulp, stepdaughter.

How to make your own Wes Anderson soundtrack.

The politics of waxing.

How to make enemies and offend people. (Upside: you might outlive them.)

Hope you have a restful couple of days, everyone. See you back here Monday.:)

Good news, hungry tech investors. Dropbox‘s shares closed at $28.42 today, up more than 35 percent in their first day of trading as investors proved eager to buy into the biggest tech IPO since Snap. The company has come a long way, as you can see from this demo video in 2008 (it’s pretty charming, actually).

Meanwhile, the rest of the market tumbled again today, sending the S&P 500 Index to its biggest weekly loss in more than two years. Investors are scared of a trade war and fearful that higher borrowing rates could throttle global growth.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10,000 on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com.

Earlier this week, at the expansive Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Ca., Y Combinator introduced an exhaustive (and exhausting) 141 startups to investors who gathered to hear quick pitches about how each of the teams plan to disrupt their predecessors.

Roughly 3,000 miles away, in New York, another accelerator, AngelPad was busy blowing up its own demo day. Though in recent years, the eight-year-old outfit has similarly packed rooms with invite-only crowds of investors to hear startup pitches in rapid-fire succession, AngelPad — which has hosted demo days in both New York and San Francisco — thinks investors have had enough of the construct, says cofounder Thomas Korte.

“Demo days are great ways for accelerators to expose a large number of companies to a lot of investors, but we don’t think it is the most productive way,” he says, so AngelPad is introducing the idea of investor “preview” days instead. The idea: to pair founders with only the most relevant investors for same-day, one-on-one meetings.

It makes sense, particularly for an outfit like AngelPad that has always kept its focus on far smaller “batches” of founding teams. AngelPad’s newest class of 10 startups had more than 200 meetings in one day, but investors were able to get the founders’ undivided attention — and vice versa.

The feedback from both sides was “overwhelming positive,” too, says Korte. “Founders had their first 20-plus investor meetings, and the investors spent two productive hours with founders rather than sit through a quick show-and-tell presentation.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the recent graduates — they join 130 companies that AngelPad has now worked with altogether, including the delivery service Postmates — check out the slideshow. Some of our favorites include Meemo and Quoteapro, but you should decide for yourself which you think are the most promising.

More here.

Ansarada, a 12-year-old, Sydney, Australia-based virtual data room provider, has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Ellerston Capital, with participation from Tempus Partners, Belay Capital and Australian Ethical Investments. More here.

Dracen Pharmaceuticals, a new, Baltimore-based immuno-metabolism startup that was spun out of Johns Hopkins University, has raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Deerfield Management. Technical.ly has more here.

Insly, a 17-year-old, London-based cloud-based insurance platform, has raised €2.2 million ($2.7 million), including from Concentric and Black Pearls VC. More here.

Knowledge Officer, a year-old, London-based startup that has built a personalized online teaching app, just raised £600,000 ($848,000) in seed funding led by Kuwaiti investor Abdullah AlShaheen and former Fox Interactive Media VP Ian Hurlock. UKTN has more here.

ServiceTitan, a five-year-old, Glendale, Ca.-based company that makes workflow and field service management software for home-service businesses, has raised $62 million in Series C funding from Battery Ventures, as well as earlier backers Bessemer Venture Partners and ICONIQ Capital. More here.

Shift, a San Francisco-based startup that’s aiming to facilitate military-to-civilian career transitions, has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Tim Ferriss, Structure Capital, Expa, Gelt Venture Capital and BoxGroup. More here.

Tourlane, a two-year-old, Berlin-based online travel company that creates adventures for its customers, has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led bySpark Capital, with participation from Holtzbrinck Ventures and DN Capital.More here. (Also, sign us up!)

Let’s keep this short: If you’re a startup or nonprofit that offers a solution that could improve financial health — even if early stage —  you should apply to the Financial Solutions Lab before April 11. More: Lab Impact Report, Launch Blog, Challenge Details, Application.

Pivotal, the business software and cloud company that spun out of DellEMC and VMware, filed for an IPO today to raise $100 million. (It’s good to be a cloud company right now.) Fortune has more here.

Also: Alibaba Group is reportedly planning a mainland listing via depositary receipts that could come as early as the middle of this year. As Reuters notes, China has been looking for ways to lure home its offshore-listed tech giants to give Chinese investors more access to them. More here.

Sudip Chakrabarti has joined Madrona Venture Group as a partner. Chakrabarti was previously a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and before that at Andreessen Horowitz. GeekWire has more here.

Josh Hannah has quietly stepped down as a general partner with Matrix Partners, which he joined in 2009, says Axios. Neither Matrix nor Hannah (on LinkedIn) have updated online media about the move. He will reportedly maintain his Matrix board seats, but won’t be making any new investments.

Real estate investor and Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik has expanded his relationship with Dreamit Ventures through a new $12 million investment into the early stage fund and accelerator, announced earlier this week. The deal will also see Vinik joining Dreamit as a Partner and a member of the Board of Directors. TechCrunch has more here.

America’s 100 richest places.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’d “love to see” regulation on ad transparency. But that’s not the company’s message to lawmakers, as Quartz has discovered.

Meanwhile, you probably know this already, but it’s . . . time to buy Facebook. The reason: despite outrage over its failed privacy policies and despite its falling share price and despite the numerous shareholder lawsuits it’s now facing, pretty much no one deleted it this week, save for one of WhatsApp’s founders and Elon Musk. (He was dared to on Twitter, so.)

The best thing we’ve read to date on the Uber accident. The Times also takes a look at Uber’s struggles, explaining why its autonomous cars were never ready for prime time in the first place.

A fascinating look inside Spike Jonze’s equally fascinating Apple ad.

This Omaha man “liked” a tweet. Then he lost his dream job.

At last, Matt Damon breaks his silence on Ben Affleck’s alarming back tattoo.

A floor mat for your favorite beep-boop-boop nerd.

Stocks nosedived today, with investors fretting over an escalating trade war with China.

Dropbox just raised $750 million ahead of its opening day of trading tomorrow, with investors acquiring shares at $21 a pop. The long-awaited IPO will be watched closely to gauge the health of the tech economy.

YouTube has banned firearms demo videos, entering the gun control debate. In the face of intense criticism for hosting videos about guns, bombs, and other deadly weapons, YouTube says it will also prohibit videos with instructions on how to assemble firearms. More here (sub required).

Reddit, the popular link-sharing site, has also waded into the debate, removing several popular firearms-related communities yesterday after an update to the company’s policies. Bloomberg has more here.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10,000 on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com.

AdStage, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based reporting and automation platform for paid marketers, has raised $3 million in funding from Forté Ventures, HubSpot . and Verizon Ventures. More here.

Amper Music, a 3.5-year-old, New York-based AI-driven music creation platform that says it can quickly produce unique music, has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Horizons Ventures. Other backers in the round include Two Sigma Ventures, Advancit Capital, Foundry Group and Kiwi Venture Partners. More here.

ArcherDX, a three-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based company that creates custom next-generation sequencing assays meant to identify mutations and gene fusions from clinical sample types, has raised $35 million in Series A  funding co-led by Boulder Ventures and PBM Capital Group. More here.

Bestmile, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco- and Lausanne, Switzerland-based autonomous vehicle fleet management platform company, has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Road Ventures. Other participants in the deal include Partech Ventures, Groupe ADP, Airbus Ventures, Serena Capital and the Mobility Fund. More here.

Blade, a three-year-old, New York-based short-distance aviation company often called an “Uber for helicopters,” has raised $38 million in Series B funding co-led byColony NorthStar and Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Airbus Helicopters and LionTree Ventures. Business Insider has more here.

BioIQ, a nearly 13-year-old,  Santa Barbara, Ca.-based company whose software configures and manages all aspects of a health testing program, has raised $26.5 million in funding led by HealthQuest Capital, with participation from Arboretum Ventures and select (unnamed) insiders. More here.

Burrow, a nearly two-year-old, New York-based maker of modular sofas, has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Correlation Ventures and earlier investors Red & Blue Ventures and YC Continuity. TechCrunch has more here.

Everledger, a three-year-old, London-based startup that tracks the provenance of high-value assets on a global digital ledger, has raised $10.4 million in in Series A funding round led by Fidelity Investments, with participation from Vickers Ventures Partners, Graphene Venture Capital, and earlier investors FPV,Fenbushi, Bloomberg Beta and Rakuten. More here.

eToro, an 11-year-old, London-based social trading and investment platform, has raised a whopping $100 million in Series E funding led by China Minsheng Financial, with participation from SBI Group, Korea Investment Partners and World Wide Invest. China Money Network has more here.

Matillion, a 7.5-year-old, U.K.-based the maker of cloud data integration tools, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from Scale Venture Partners and earlier backer YFM Equity Partners. More here.

Rheos Medicines, a year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based immuno-metabolism startup, has launched with $60 million in funding from Third Rock Ventures. FierceBiotech has much more here.

Sift Science, a 6.5-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of fraud prevention and risk management software, has raised $53 million in Series D funding led byStripes Group, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Insight Venture Partners and Spark Capital. More here.

Skyline AI, a year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel- based startup that uses machine learning to help real estate investors identify promising properties, has raised $3 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

SteadyMD, a two-year-old, St. Louis, Ms.-based company that offers continuous, dedicated primary care online, has secured $2.5 million in funding led by Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from CrossCut Ventures, M25 Group,Service Provider Capital and Hyde Park Venture Partners. More here.

Vangst, a three-year-old, Denver, Co.-based employment platform for the cannabis industry, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Casa Verde Capital. More here.

Just read this. Then share it. And then tell every awesome fintech startup and nonprofit you know — and even some you don’t — that they should apply to the Financial Solutions Lab. (Applications are due April 11.)

ATX Seed Ventures, a nearly four-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based seed-stage venture outfit, is looking to raise up to $75 million for a second fund, according to an SEC filing that shows it has secured at least $17.8 million from investors thus far. More here.

Blockchain Capital, a nearly five-year-old, venture capital firm focused exclusively on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, says it has closed its fourth fund with $150 million in capital commitments — its biggest fund so far. The company has backed 72 companies to date, including Coinbase, Ripple, Circle, Ethereum, 0x and Kraken. It also just promoted its head of research, Spencer Bogart, to partner. Bogart had joined the firm from Needham & Company, where he was a VP. Coindesk has more here.

Pioneer Fund, a year-old, Toronto, Canada-based seed-stage fund that was created by Y Combinator alumni to back other YC alumni, has held an initial close on its debut fund. It’s not saying publicly how much it has raised, but it’s targeting $20 million in commitments altogether. Axios has more here.

Qiming Venture Partners, a 12-year-old, Shanghai, China-based venture capital firm, has set out to raise a $900 million sixth venture fund, according to an SEC filing. The outfit closed its previous fund with $648 million roughly two years ago.

Spero Ventures, an early-stage, Redwood City, Ca.-based venture firm that was just spun out of Omidyar Network, has launched with $100 million for its debut fund. Forbes has more here.

Tenable Network Security, a 15-year-old, Columbia, Md.-based cysecurity software maker, has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to lead an IPO as early as this fall, says Reuters. Last week, another venture-backed cybersecurity company, Zscaler, hit the public market and it’s reception so far has been promising.

Balderton Capital, the London-based venture firm, has brought aboard three new hires: Isabel Bescos, Cayetana Hurtado and Diane Albouy. Bescos was previously the head of corporate strategy at BlaBlaCar. Hurtado and Albouy previously worked at Goldman Sachs.

Speaking of Goldman Sachs, at an event earlier today, CEO Lloyd Blankfein gave a rare compliment to Donald Trump today for his skill at disintermediating the press using Twitter. Blankfein said he would himself be better at Twitter if he weren’t still leading the bank. “The ones I don’t send are really terrific,” he joked.

Catherine Hoke, the founder of the nonprofit called Defy Ventures, which works to turn prisoners into entrepreneurs, resigned yesterday after it was reported that she’s been facing allegations of sexual harassment and fraud. Hoke denied any impropriety on her way out the door.

Magazine publisher Meredith announced it will lay off 1,200 employees from Time Inc., and formally announced its efforts to sell Time, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated. Axios has more here.

Semil Shah, a seed-stage investor who runs his own seed-stage venture firm, Haystack, and was previously a venture partner with the cross-border firm GGV Capital, has joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a venture partner. More here.

Billionaire Peter Thiel is reportedly among the chief investors in a new football league called the Alliance of American Football that will play its games during the NFL’s offseason. Fox Business has more here.

After days of silence about the Cambridge Analytica controversy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence last night, speaking with numerous outlets, including Wired. Among things worth noting, he said Facebook has already suspended its planned audit of thousands of apps in response to the “breach of trust” created by Cambridge Analytica, which he’d announced on his Facebook page earlier in the day. The reason: Facebook, he said, wants to temporarily “cede to the UK regulator, the ICO [Information Commissioner’s Office], so that they can do a government investigation—I think it might be a criminal investigation, but it’s a government investigation at a minimum.” Zuckerberg also said that he would be “happy” to testify before Congress about Facebook’s legal compliance issues were he the most informed person on the topic at FB, which he says he is not. More here (sub required).

That didn’t take long enough. The power players behind Cambridge Analytica have set up a new company — and the daughters of conservative billionaire Robert Mercer have just joined as directors. Alexander Nix, the suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, is a director, too. The Daily Mail has more here.

South African media company Naspers is cashing in on one of the greatest venture-capital investments ever, selling $10.6 billion of shares in Tencent  — equal to 2 percent of the company’s shares. Naspers had bought its stake in the company in 2001 for just $32 million. Fortune has more here.

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“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform.” So wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook a bit ago in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that broke on Friday. Though Zuckerberg didn’t say what’s taken Facebook so long to better protect its users’ privacy, he laid out a slate of changes Facebook will make to prevent past and future abuses of user data by app developers. More here.

Google is working on blockchain-related technology to support its cloud business and head off competition from emerging startups that use the heavily-hyped technology.

Uber just rescinded a job offer it made to Amazon’s top voice-shopping VP, Assaf Ronen, to become its top product exec, after it discovered a discrepancy related to Ronen’s tenure at the e-commerce giant.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 3,700 investments in 95+ companies. For as little as $10K on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like Coinbase, Postmates, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com

Last August, we told you about Laura Deming, a New Zealand native who was home schooled before moving halfway around the world as a 12-year-old to work alongside Cynthia Kenyon, a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging.

She didn’t stay long. At age 14, Deming began her college career at MIT. When she turned 16, she dropped out to join Peter Thiel’s  two-year-old Thiel Fellowship program, which gives $100,000 to young people “who want to build new things.” By last August, when we profiled Deming, she had closed on $22 million in commitments for her second venture fund, which supports aging-related startups. She was 23.

Because Deming has always had an intriguing relationship with time, we weren’t all that surprised when she reached out to us late last week to let us know her San Francisco-based venture firm, The Longevity Fund, has now established a new accelerator program — one with backing from famed investor Marc Andreessen, the early-stage venture firm Felicis Ventures and other, unnamed investors.

Deming isn’t disclosing how much money will be invested through the accelerator, called Age 1, but she does say the pool of capital is distinct from the money she’s investing with Longevity Fund. She also says that Andreessen, Felicis and her other backers will serve as mentors to the companies that pass through the program.

Other notable details about Age 1: Deming says that she and her advisors — including serial entrepreneur Elad Gil, who most recently co-founded the genomics testing company Color Genomics — will be “quite flexible” when it comes to the stage of applicants. She says the bigger idea is to help them get to a significant “value inflection point” within four months, which is how long the program runs.

Instead of accepting startups serially, Age 1 will work with small batches of startups — between three and five at a time — and it’s accepting them right now on a rolling basis, with plans to present them to an invite-only group of investors on October 5 in the Bay Area. (Startups can apply here.)

More here.

17Zuoye, a seven-year-old, Beijing, China-based online education platform, has raised $250 million in new Series E funding led by Temasek, with participation fromCITIC and earlier investor Shunwei Capital. More here.

AllyO, a two-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based AI-driven recruiting startup, has raised $14 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation fromCervin Ventures, Gradient Ventures and Randstad Innovation Fund.

Averon, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based developer of an automated mobile security platform, has raised $5 million in Series A1 funding co-led by Avalon Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. More here.

CareWorx, a 12-year-old, Ontario, Canada-based company that sells hardware, cloud products and related services to senior care facilities, has raised $17 million in funding, including from Kayne Partners. More here.

Chargebee, a seven-year-old, Walnut, Ca.-based maker of SaaS subscription management and recurring billing software, has raised $18 million in Series C funding led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Accel Partnersand Tiger Global Management. More here.

Clari, a six-year-old, Sunnyvale, Ca.-based maker of sales software, has raised $35 million in new funding led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from Thomvest Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures and earlier backers Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Northgate Capital. More here.

CoEdition, a six-month-old, New York-based online clothing marketplace for women who are size 10 and above, has raised $4 million in seed funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from General Catalyst, Primary Venture Partners, and BBG Ventures. More here.

CommonBond, a six-year-old, New York-based online student lender, has raised $50 million in Series D funding led by Fifth Third Capital Holdings, with participation from First Republic Bank, Columbia Seligman Investments, Neuberger Berman, August Capital, Nyca Partners, former Citigroup CEOVikram Pandit, and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer. More here.

CryptoKitties, a year-old, Vancouver-based virtual collectible kitten game that turned into a viral sensation, has raised $12 million in funding co-led byAndreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. TechCrunch explains the likely attraction here.

DJI, a 12-year-old, Shenzhen, China-based consumer drone-maker, is raising between $500 million and $1 billion at a $15 billion valuation, says The Information. DJI’s most recent round, closed in 2015, valued the company at $10 billion. More here.

Eden Health, a three-year-old, New York-based personal health platform, raised $4 million in seed funding led by Greycroft Partners, with participation from PJC,Max Ventures and 645 Ventures. More here.

Fauna, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based NoSQL database for mission-critical data, has raised $25 million in Series A funding from Capital One Growth Ventures, GV, Point72 Ventures, Afore Capital and Costanoa Ventures. More here.

HomeCaptain, a New York-based real estate platform that aims to help mortgage lenders increase their funding rates on pre-qualified/pre-approved home buying customers, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding led by Spring Mountain Capital. More here.

Pairwise Plants, a gene-editing, San Diego-based agricultural company cofounded by a professor of chemistry and biology at Harvard, has raised $25 million in Series A funding co-led by Deerfield Management and Monsanto Growth Ventures.More here.

Virsec, a five-year-old, San Jose, Ca.-based cybersecurity company focused on advanced memory-based attacks, has raised $24 million in Series B funding led by BlueIO, with participation from Artiman Ventures, Amity Ventures, Raj Singh, and Boston Seed Capital. More here.

Let’s keep this short: If you’re a startup or nonprofit that offers a solution that could improve financial health — even if early stage —  you should apply to the Financial Solutions Lab before April 11. More: Lab Impact Report, Launch Blog, Challenge Details, Application.

Anterra Capital, a Boston and Amsterdam-based venture capital firm that funds startups focused on the global food system, says it has raised $200 million in capital commitments. The outfit is backed by Rabobank and Eight Roads (a Fidelity backed outfit that itself closed a new fund yesterday). More here.

Elephant, a three-year-old, Boston-based, early-stage venture firm led by Warby Parker cofounder Andy Hunt and Jeremiah Daly, formerly an investor with both Accel Partners and Highland Capital Partners, has raised $250 million for its second fund, reports Axios. Elephant’s debut fund closed with $156 million in 2015. More here.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures is raising up to $1 billion for its sixth fund, and a separate $400 million for a seed fund, show SEC filings flagged earlier by Axios. Giant seed funds are apparently a thing now, though this one is really a doozy. You might remember that Sequoia closed a $180 million seed fund in January.

Dropbox, the 11-year-old, San Francisco-based cloud storage and collaboration platform, today raised the proposed deal size for its upcoming IPO. It now plans to raise $684 million by offering 36 million shares at between $18 to $20, up from an original range of $16 to $18. At the high end of that revised range, Dropbox will command a fully diluted market value of $9 billion, an 18 percent increase from its original midpoint. Renaissance Capital has slightly more here.

Google is acquiring Lytro, a 12-year-old imaging startup that began as a ground-breaking camera company for consumers before pivoting to use its depth-data, light-field technology in VR. The price tag, say TechCrunch sources: $40 million, far less than the $215 million that investors had poured into the company. More here.

HelloFresh, the Berlin-based meal-kit delivery company that went public in Europe last fall, has agreed to acquire Green Chef, a 3.5-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based meal kit company that had raised $70 million from investors, including TA Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Global Venture Capital, Greenspring Associates and TriplePoint Venture Growth. The Denver Post has more here.

Pandora says it’s acquiring digital audio ad technology firm AdsWizz for $145 million, with at least half that paid in cash. AdsWizz’s software handles a range of things, from dynamic ad insertion to ad campaign monitoring and will be used to upgrade Pandora’s own ad tech capabilities. TechCrunch has more here.

Brian Acton, the co-founder of messaging service WhatsApp — which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion — joining the chorus of the #deletefacebook movement yesterday in a tweet that left jaws hanging. “It is time,” he wrote. More here. (Incidentally, if you want to delete Facebook, here’s how.)

Twitter’s chief information security officer, Michael Coates, is leaving the company to start his own company, says The Verge.

Ousted Uber cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick is back — not just with a new investment vehicle, but as a CEO, too. His new company is focused on redeveloping distressed real estate. More here.

Tesla shareholders just approved what may be the largest compensation deal in history CEO Elon Musk. If successful, the award could end up being worth more than $50 billion — enough to keep Musk from moving to Mars any time soon, speculates Bloomberg.

Zagster, a bike-share startup that raised a $15 million round last month, has laid off some employees, TechCrunch has learned. CEO Tim Ericson attributes the downsizing to Zagster’s recent shift from docked to dockless bikes. More here.

Correlation Ventures in San Francisco is hiring a venture associate. This is a pre-MBA role, it says.

YouTube just became the top-grossing iPhone app in the U.S. for the first time today, after flirting with the top spot a number of times over the years, but never reaching higher than No. 3. More here.

For one brief shining moment, Yahoo was the king of all it surveyed. Then everything went to hell.

The story of a little gay bunny who belongs to Vice President Mike Pence is the best-selling book on Amazon right now.

It’s now easier for your boss to read your Slack DMs.

America’s 60 best day hikes.

Here’s your jeans should fit in 2018 if you are a dude. (We aren’t judging. We’re just relaying what we’ve heard/read.)

Amazon just passed Alphabet in market value.

Facebook has meanwhile lost $60 billion in market value over the last two days.

EquityZen. We operate a secondary market for company-approved transactions in pre-IPO stock. Founded in 2013, EquityZen has already closed more than 2,500 investments in 75+ companies. For as little as $10K on your first investment, you can gain access to proven private companies like DocuSign, 23andMe, and more! Join for free and begin investing in the private markets: equityzen.com

It’s not every day that Oracle’s billionaire founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison launches a new business, but such is the case today. That new company? Sensei, a new L.A.-based wellness brand that will focus first on developing hydroponic farms and later . . . well, details are scant, but they’re coming soon, we’re told.

Ellison, who we presume is funding the effort, co-founded the company with his longtime friend, David Agus, a prolific author and professor of medicine at USC where he is, notably, the founding director of the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine.

According to Sensei’s president, Dan Gruneberg, Ellison and Agus came up with the idea of starting a wellness company when a close mutual friend of the two was dying and they were spending more time together. In fact, as they watched their friend’s health deteriorate, they decided there was more they could, and should, do about it.

Step one, apparently, involves building a hydroponic farm of undisclosed size on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which Ellison acquired for $300 million back in 2012.  There, says Gruneberg, the Sensei team will be focusing not on yield per acre but nutrition per acre, a selling point for the fruits and vegetables it plans to hawk to restaurants and retailers under the brand Sensei Farms.

Hydroponic farms — in which plants are grown in water rather than soil —  aren’t necessarily known for cultivating fruits and vegetables that are any less nutritious than their conventional counterparts. But by increasing the concentration of nutrients, growers can increase the nutritional content of their vegetables. That seems to be the strategy here.

Another aspect of the business that Sensei will undoubtedly be marketing is sustainability.

More here.

CaliberMind, a two-year-old, Boulder, Co.-based maker of B2B marketing software, has raised $3.2 million in seed funding co-led by Newark Venture Partners and Buran VC. More here.

Cheddar, a two-year-old, New York-based live video news network, has raised $22 million in Series D financing led by Raine Ventures, with participation from Liberty Global, Goldman Sachs, Antenna Group, 7 Global Capital, Dentsu Venturesand the family office of Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher. Earlier investors also participated, including AT&T, Amazon, Altice USA, the NYSE, Lorne Michaels’Broadway Video, Comcast Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Ribbit Capital. Variety has more here.

Desktop Metal, a three-year-old, Burlington, Ma.-based company at work on 3D tech that can print products in stainless steel and other metals, has raised yet more funding: $65 million led by the Ford Motor Company. (The company closed a Series D round last summer.) The WSJ has more here.

Digital Reasoning, an 18-year-old, Nashville, Tn.-based cognitive computing platform that tries to surface what’s valuable and what’s not in the data of its enterprise clients, has raised raised $30 million in new funding led by the European bank BNP Paribas. Other participants in the round include Barclays, Square Capital and previous investors Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, Lemhi Ventures, HCA, and the Partnership Fund for New York City. More here.

Green Tank Technologies, a two-year-old, Toronto, Canada-based maker of “high-performance” vaporization hardware, has raised $3.35 million in seed funding led by Green Acre Capital and Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital, along withAlan and Lorne Gertner, founders of Canadian lifestyle brand Tokyo Smoke (now HIKU Brands). More here.

KeepTruckin, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based electronic logs and fleet management platform for the trucking industry, has raised $50 million in Series C financing led by IVP. Other participants in the round — which brings the company’s total funding to $78 million — include Scale Venture Partners, Index Ventures, and Google Ventures. More here.

Made.com, an eight-year-old, London-based online furniture shopping site, has raised $56 million in new funding. An undisclosed investor led the round, with participation from earlier backers Partech Ventures, Level Equity and Eight Roads Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Mark43, a six-year-old, New York-based company that makes cloud-based software for law enforcement agencies around the country, has raised $38 million in Series C funding led by General Catalyst and Breyer Capital. Earlier backers also joined the round, including Spark Capital, Sound Ventures, Bezos Expeditions,Goldman Sachs, General David Petraeus, Amplo, Innovation Endeavors, and Govtech Fund. The company has now raised $77.8 million altogether. More here.

Mythic, a six-year-old,  Austin, Tex.-based AI chip company, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Ventures, with participation from DFJ, Lux Capital, Data Collective, AME Cloud Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures and Andy Bechtolsheim. The Austin American-Statesman has more here.

N26, a three-year-old, Berlin, Germany-based startup that’s building a retail bank from scratch, has raised $160 million in Series C Funding round co-led by Allianz X, the digital investment unit of Allianz Group, and Tencent Holdings. The funding represents the largest non-IPO equity financing round in Germany, says the company, which has now raised $215 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

Neurotrack, a six-year-old, Richmond, Va.-based maker of non-invasive cognitive health assessment tools, has raised $13.7 million in Series B funding led by Sozo Ventures, with participation from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Social Capital, AME Cloud Partners and Rethink Impact. More here.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a 13-year-old, U.K.-based developer of nanopore-based electronic systems for analysis of single molecules, has raised $140 million from investors, including GIC, China Construction Bank International, and Hostplus. The company is a spin-out of the University of Oxford and has been credited with potentially revolutionizing the way we’re able to sequence entire genomes. More here.

Riveter, a two-year-old, Seattle, Wa.-based co-working office space that’s “female forward” but not limited to women, has raised $4.75 million in seed funding. Madrona Venture Group led the round, and was joined by investors including X Factor Ventures, Brilliant Ventures, The Helm, PLG Ventures, Portland Seed Fund, Founders’ Co-Op, and Start It Labs. More here.

Skycision, a three-year-old, Watsonville, Ca.-based data platform that takes aerial imagery from drones and determines what part of a farmer’s fields need extra attention, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Innova Memphis led the round, with participation from Scurich Berry Farms and AgLaunch. Forbes has more here.

Unity Biotechnology, a nine-year-old, Brisbane, Ca.-based developer of treatments that focus on diseases of aging, has raised $55 million in Series C funding. Investors include EcoR1 Capital Fund, 6 Dimensions Capital, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Partner Fund Management, Pivotal Alpha Limited, Invus Opportunities, ARCH Venture Partners, Venrock, Founders Fund and the Longevity Fund. More here.

UpKeep Maintenance Management, a four-year-old, Encino, Ca.-based group collaboration and maintenance application for facility management teams, raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital. The company also counts Bain Capital, Battery Ventures and Y Combinator as investors. Forbes has more here.

Financial Solutions Lab startups are doing extraordinary things in fintech for the benefit of Americans’ financial health. Digit has helped people save $1 billion-plus, despite that the average user income is $40,000. Even has partnered with Walmart to provide financial tools to millions of associates nationwide. Dave has helped people avoid more than $15 million in overdraft fees. Nonprofit EARN has helped thousands establish a savings habit. Want to count your visionary startup among them and receive $250,000, plus access to unparalleled resources that can help you scale? Apply for the next FinLab class.

Eight Roads, an arm of Fidelity Growth Partners, has raised $375 million to fund late-stage startups in Europe. The fund is Eight Roads’s biggest yet. TechCrunch has more here.

S Capital, an Israeli VC firm led by former Sequoia Capital partner Haim Sadger, has raised $94 million from 31 investors for its debut fund, shows an SEC filing. We can’t find a site, but the filing and Sadger’s LinkedIn suggest the firm was formed recently.

Fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, founded 17 years ago, has “jump-started its idled plan” to go public, according to the WSJ, which says Bloom may attempt a listing as soon as May. The company was last known to be valued at $2.9 billion in 2011. It has also raised $2 billion in debt and equity. More here.

DocuSign, the 15-year-old, San Francisco-based company that’s largely credited with pioneering the e-signature, is finally gearing up to go public, sources tell TechCrunch. Indeed, the company has already filed confidentially, says TC. More here.

Looking beyond its offerings in customer relationship management software,Salesforce is acquiring the publicly traded software maker MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in stock and cash. The deal marks Salesforce’s biggest acquisition to date. Axios has a bit more here.

DataSift, a London-based company that pulls data from conversations across social, news and blog platforms, anonymizes it, and then parses it for insights for third party organizations, is being acquired by Meltwater, a company that sells business intelligence services like media monitoring and AI analytics about internal business communications. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but DataSift had raised roughly $72 million from investors. TechCrunch has more here.

Sunny Balwani was the president of Theranos and the boyfriend of founder Elizabeth Holmes. He’s also a virtual ghost, reports STAT in a fascinating new piece.

Michael Ferro, a renowned Chicago entrepreneur and non-executive chair of Tronc, the third largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., stepped down abruptly yesterday. A spokesman for the company says Ferro wanted to leave at the top of his game. though we’re thinking this detailed expose published yesterday by Fortune about Ferro’s highly inappropriate behavior with female founders was maybe also a factor.

Andrew Nix, the CEO of the London-based voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica — which harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission to analyze their behavior — has been suspended from his job. In an announcement posted to the company’s cite, the board said the suspension was effective immediately.

Mark Selcow has been named general partner at Costanoa Ventures, where he has spent most of the last three years. Previously, Selcow was a partner with Merced Partners.

Latham & Watkins chairman William Voge abruptly stepped down today over what the law firm said was inappropriate “communication of a sexual nature” with a woman who had no connection to the firm or any client. Voge is retiring from the firm, it said in a statement.

Muzzammil Zaveri has joined Gradient Ventures, Google’s new AI-focused venture capital program, reports Axios. “MZ” as he is known, was previously an investor in the digital practice of Kleiner Perkins. For what it’s worth, we interviewed Anna Patterson, the head of Gradient, last month at a Startup Grind event. We never had a chance to write about it, but you can check it out here if you’re looking to learn more.

GMG Ventures, the Guardian’s new venture fund, is looking to bring aboard an investment analyst. The job is in London.

Facebook employees gathered today to discuss the widening scandal over the 2016 election. But company chiefs Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were nowhere to be found. Maybe they were focused instead on a new Federal Trade Commission investigation into whether Facebook violated an agreement with the agency over data.

Seeing an opening, Google has separately made a $300 million commitment to supporting news organizations.

Bumble has replied to Match Group‘s lawsuit in a full letter that it ran online and in media outlets today and is pretty clever as press offensives go. “We swipe left on you. We swipe left on your multiple attempts to buy us, copy us, and, now, to intimidate us,” it starts. More here.

Police say a video from the Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman on Sunday shows her moving in front of it suddenly. “It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” Tempe, Arizona police chief Sylvia Moir tells the San Francisco Chronicle.

Thirteen reasons to believe in UFOs.

The true story of Gianni Versace’s murder.

How to close a deal using business terms overheard in airports.

Sock-like sneakers and where to buy them.