A 49-year-old woman who was crossing a street was killed yesterday by an Uber self-driving SUV in Arizona. It’s the first fatality from a self-driving vehicle, notes Reuters. The National Transportation Safety Board is opening an investigation into the accident, says TechCrunch. Uber has halted its self-driving tests for now, notes the Verge. But you can guess the incident is raising a lot of questions for Uber and other automakers that are focused on self-driving tech — from how this happened exactly, to whether the human in the self-driving car or Uber will be held accountable (or both). For what it’s worth, here’s how Uber’s self-driving cars are supposed to protect pedestrians.

Apple is making its own device displays for the first time, using a secret manufacturing facility near its Cupertino, Ca., headquarters to produce small numbers of the screens for testing purposes, reports Bloomberg.

Hoping to tamp down furor over reports that its user data was improperly acquired by the political consulting and marketing firm Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has hired the digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg to perform an audit on Cambridge, reports TechCrunch. (Facebook’s share price fell 7 percent today.)

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According to a new report from Raleigh, N.C. television affiliate WRAL, Google might have quietly helped local detectives in their pursuit of two gunmen who committed separate crimes roughly one-a-half years apart. How? According to the story, Raleigh police presented the company with warrants not for information about specific suspects but rather data from all the mobile devices that were within a certain distance of the respective crime scenes at the time the crimes were committed.

In one of its homicide cases, Raleigh police reportedly asked Google to provide unique data for anyone within a 17-acre area that includes both homes and businesses. In the other, it asked for user data across “dozens” of apartment units at a particular complex.

As the outlet notes, most modern phones, tablets and laptops have built-in location tracking that pings some combination of GPS, Wi-Fi and mobile networks to determine each device’s position. Users can switch off location tracking, but if they’re using a cellular network or relying on WiFi to connect, their devices are still transmitting their coordinates to third parties.

Google hasn’t responded to a request for more information that we’d sent off yesterday afternoon. But in response to WRAL’s investigation, a company spokesman declined to comment on specific cases or discuss whether Google has fought requests from the Raleigh investigators, saying only that: “We have a long-established process that determines how law enforcement may request data about our users. We carefully review each request and always push back when they are overly broad.”

Either way, the area-based search warrants that Raleigh detectives have sought seem to be a newer trend — one that will undoubtedly concern Fourth Amendment advocates anew.

More here.

Farmstead, a two-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based AI-powered digital micro-grocer, raised $2 million in funding co-led by Resolute Ventures and Social Capital, with participation from SV Angel and Y Combinator. The outfit had separately raised $2.8 million in seed funding back in October. More here.

Kahoot, a six-year-old, Oslo, Norway-based education quiz app, has raised $17 million in funding at a $100 million valuation, including from Datum Invest AS,Northzone, Creandum, and Microsoft Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Phlur, a two-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based direct-to-consumer fragrance company founded by a former president of global e-commerce for Ralph Lauren, is targeting up to $8 million in venture funding, according to an SEC filing that shows it has raised at least $2.4 million toward that end. Among its backers is Austin firm Next Coast Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Promise, a five-month-old, Bay Area-based startup whose technology helps ensure that people who are arrested comply with court orders (versus wind up in jail unnecessarily), has raised $3 million in funding led by First Round Capital, with participation from Jay Z’s Roc Nation, 8VC and Kapor Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Spindrift, an eight-year-old, Newton, Ma.-based sparkling water company that uses real squeezed fruit, raised $20 million in funding. VMG Partners led the round, with participation from Prolog Ventures, KarpReilly and RiverPark Ventures. More here.

twoXAR, a 3.5-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based artificial intelligence-driven biopharmaceutical company, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SoftBank Ventures, a SoftBank Group early-stage venture capital arm. Other participants in the round include Andreessen Horowitz and OS Fund. Xconomy has more here.

Yestock Car Rental Co., a 13-year-old, Shenzhen, China-based car rental company, has raised an undisclosed amount of strategic funding from Didi Chuxing. China Money Network has more here.

ZineOne, a 4.5-year-old, Milpitas, Ca.-based customer engagement startup that helps brands interact with their customers across a variety of channels, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Omidyar Network. More here.

Three years. Three groups of companies selected from more than 1,000 applicants. Today, 26 visionary startups and nonprofits visionary startups and nonprofits have been through the Financial Solutions Lab, and they’ve had an impact on Americans’ financial health. They serve more than 2.5 million Americans, have helped improve thousands of credit scores, and have helped consumers save more than $1 billion. Be part of this impact story. Apply now for the Financial Solutions Lab.

VentureFriends, a two-year-old, Athens, Greece-based venture firm, has closed on €45 million in capital commitments ($55.5 million) for its second fund, says TechCrunch. More here.

Alzheon, a five-year-old, Framingham, Ma.-based biopharmaceutical firm that’s developing an Alzheimer’s drug, has filed to go public. Its biggest outside shareholders include Ally Bridge Group and Aptus Holdings. FierceBiotech has more here.

Homology Medicines, a three-year-old, Bedford, Ma.-based firm that aims to treat rare genetics diseases, has revealed plans to raising up to $100 million in an IPO. The company’s biggest outside shareholders include 5AM Ventures, ARCH Venture, Deerfield, and Novartis. Nasdaq has more here.

Zuora, an 11-year-old, San Mateo, Ca.-based cloud subscription management platform, has filed to raise up to $100 million in a long-awaited IPO. The company’s biggest outside shareholders include Benchmark, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Tenaya Capital and Wellington Management Company. TechCrunch has more here.

And in Chinese-companies-rushing-to-go-public-in-the-U.S. news: Bilibili, a nine-year-old, Shanghai, China-based anime video sharing platform, plans to raise as much as $525 million through an offering of 42 million American depositary shares that are priced between $10.50 to $12.50 apiece. The company’s biggest outside shareholders are Loyal Valley Capital, IDG-Accel China, Legend Capital and Tencent Holdings. Bloomberg has more here.

Related item two: iQiyi, a eight-year-old Beijing-based video streaming service, has filed to raise up to $2.4 billion by offering 125 million American depositary shares at $17 to $19 apiece. the company is predominately owned by Baidu — it controls a 70 percent stake in the company. Xiaomi also owns 8.4 percent of the company. Bloomberg has more here.

Related item three: OneSmart, a 10-year-old, Shanghai, China-based K-12 after-school education provider, said it plans to raise up to $212 million in a stateside IPO by selling 16.3 million American depositary shares at between $11 to $13 apiece. Its biggest outside shareholders include Carlyle Asia Partners and Goldman Sachs. More here.

Correction: Friday, we meant to give you information about Zscaler, a company whose shares began trading that morning. The blurb was mostly right but the market cap we gave you was way off. (Google had taken us to Zillow, which has a similar ticker.) Apologies for the mix-up.

Catherine Hoke, the founder of the nonprofit called Defy Ventures, which works to turn prisoners into entrepreneurs, is battling allegations of sexual harassment and fraud.

The controversial Saudi prince MBS is headed to the White House, then it’s on to Silicon Valley. He’s pushing a development blueprint, but he has some unsavory tactics that will need to be overlooked by his American friends first.

Facebook’s prized security chief, Alex Stamos, is leaving following internal disagreements over how Facebook should handle its role in spreading disinformation.

Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur, the founder of Venture for America, is vying for the Democratic party nomination to run for U.S. President.

Match Group, the online dating company, reportedly wants to buy Bumble, the popular dating app that lets women make the first move. But Match may be trying to push the deal along in an unconventional way, reports Recode: A new patent infringement lawsuit filed late Friday in U.S. District court in Waco, Texas. More here.

Microsoft is looking to hire a new corporate strategy and development analyst. The job is in Redmond, Wa.

Google’s and Facebook’s share of the U.S. ad market could decline for the first time, thanks to Amazon and Snapchat.

YouTube is reportedly introducing your kids to conspiracy theories, too.

Cadre, the real estate investing startup that was co-founded by CEO Ryan Williams and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, was the primary beneficiary of a property-flipping investment that may have been less profitable if Kushner Cos. had fully complied with New York City disclosure rules about rent-regulated tenants, which it did not, reports Bloomberg. The Associated Press, which broke the story, has more here.

IEX Group, the Silicon Valley stock market that wants to nudge investors to think long-term, took a step toward bringing its vision to Wall Street, filing for U.S. regulatory approval today to test a set of listing standards that would favor buy-and-hold investors. Bloomberg has the story here. We wrote last year about the case for tenured voting (i.e., the longer an investor hangs on to his or her shares, the more voting control he or she would amass).

The SEC just announced its highest-ever Dodd-Frank whistleblower award, with two whistleblowers sharing a nearly $50 million award and a third whistleblower receiving more than $33 million. The previous high was a $30 million award in 2014. We interviewed the attorney who led the program from its outset in 2011 until 2016, and he shed a lot of light on how to report wrongdoings to the SEC. It’s worth reading if you’re thinking about reaching out the agency at any point.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

An emotional guide to being ghosted.

Custom-molded hiking boots, at a reasonable price to boot.

No column today. Hope you have a terrific weekend.:)

The IRS is moving to crack down on cryptocurrency scofflaws, collecting data on about 13,000 Coinbase account holders who bought, sold, sent or received digital currency worth $20,000 or more between 2013 and 2015. The WSJ has the story here.

Your parents (and you) are getting older. They’d like to think their money will last the rest of their lives. But who’s really looking out for them? EverSafe enables you to keep an eye on loved ones’ financial lives without taking away their financial independence– so they’re aging with dignity, but not without caution. EverSafe is part of the Financial Solutions Lab, now seeking its next class of startups working to improve Americans’ financial health. Apply now!

180 Health Partners, a two-year-old, Nashville, Tn.-based company that works with pregnant mothers who are battling opioid addiction, has raised $8 million in Series B funding led by Spring Mountain Capital, with participation from Frist Cressey Ventures, Resolute Venture Partners and Altitude Ventures. The Nashville Post has more here.

Andie, a 1.5-year-old, New York-based e-commerce brand for women’s one-piece swimwear, has raised $2 million in seed funding co-led by Two River Capital and Sonostar Ventures, with participation from individual investors, including actress Demi Moore. More here.

Detectify, a 4.5-year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based company that focuses on website vulnerabilities, has raised €5 million (about $6.1 million) in funding led byInsight Venture Partners, with participation from earlier backers Paua Ventures and Inventure. More here.

Drover, a three-year-old, London-based marketplace that gives users access to cars of their choice for a monthly subscription price (its partners include Avis and Budget, among others), just raised £5.5 million ($7 million) in funding. Cherry Ventures, Partech Ventures and BP Ventures led the round, with participation from earlier backers Version One and Forward Partners. More here.

Fortem Technologies, a two-year-old, Salt Lake City, Ut.-based company that sells a miniaturized detect-and-avoid radar system for drones, has raised $15 million in Series A funding. Data Collective led the round, and was joined by investors including Boeing, Mubadala Investment Company, Manifest Growth,New Ground Ventures and Signia Venture Partners. GeekWire has more here.

Hazel Technologies, a three-year-old, Chicago-based startup that designs and manufactures packaging to reduce the spoilage of fruits and vegetables, has raised $3.26 million in Series A funding led by S2G Ventures. More here.

Medinas Health, an eight-month-old, San Francisco-based marketplace that aims to help healthcare organizations buy and sell their surplus and short-date medical supplies and equipment, has raised $1 million in funding, including from Sound Ventures, Rough Draft Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Trammell Ventures and Angels.

PieSync, a six-year-old, Ghent, Belgium-based data synchronization platform for organizations’ apps, has raised $3.5 million in funding. Fortino Capital led the round, with participation from Ark Angels Activator Fund, PMV and Dirk Vermunicht. More here.

SeamlessDocs, a seven-year-old, New York-based e-signature engine built for all levels of government, has raised $7.5 million in funding. SJF Ventures led the round. Other participants include Motorola Solutions, Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator, NY State Innovation Ventures and CapRock. More here.

Serious Factory, a six-year-old, Suresnes, France-based company whose authoring tool aims to help design virtual reality simulations, has raised €3 million ($3.7 million) in its second round of funding, which comes from Odyssée Venture and earlier backers, including the Paris Region Venture Fund. More here.

Strix Leviathan, a new Seattle, Wa.-based company that’s building a crypto-trading platform for enterprises and institutions, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding led by Liquid 2 Ventures, with participation from Founders’ Co-op,Future\Perfect Ventures and 9Mile Labs. GeekWire has more here.

Virtuos, a 13-year-old, Shanghai, China-based game developer with more than 1,200 employees, has raised $15 million in new funding led by 3D Capital Partners. DealStreetAsia has more here.

Age 1, a newly established accelerator established by The Longevity Fund and backed by Marc Andreessen, Felicis Ventures, and others, is launching today. The program will connect startups committed to addressing late-onset medical conditions related to Alzheimer’s, heart disease, diabetes and more, to key investors, prominent scientists, and tech entrepreneurs at the forefront of life extension. The four-month-long accelerator program will invest $500,000 in each startup. You can apply to the accelerator here. And if you’re interested in learning more about The Longevity Fund, we’d interviewed its brainiac founder Laura Demming back in August.

Village Global, a seed and pre-seed early stage venture capital fund looking to connect entrepreneurs to both cash and all-star mentors, says it has officially closed on $100 million in capital commitments, including from Fidelity’s Abigail Johnson, Activision’s Bobby Kotick, 23andme’s Anne Wojcicki, and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert. The outfit — cofounded by early Product Hunt employee Erik Torenberg — says that founders can tap such mentors as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and many others. More here and here and here.

The first post-billion, big tech IPO of the year just opened with a bang. Zscaler, a security startup that confidentially filed for an IPO last year, started trading this morning at $27.50 per share — a leap of 71.9  percent over its opening price of $16. As of this writing, in fact, it’s trading at around $58, giving it a market cap (for now) of $7.4 billion. TechCrunch notes that it’s a bullish moment for security startups and potentially public listings for tech companies in general.

Cosmetics giant L’Oreal said today that it’s acquiring ModiFace, a 12-year-old, Toronto, Canada-based beauty technology company, as L’Oreal looks to roll out more digital services like virtual make-up tests. ModiFace got its start in 1999 at Stanford, where founder Parham Aarabi was conducting research on automatic face analysis. We can’t figure out how much ModiFace might have raised from investors over the years, beyond $500,000 in seed funding from the publicly traded pharmaceutical giant Allergan. (It looks like not much if any.) Either way, terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Reuters has more here.

Here we go again. Media company Meredith has hired advisers to explore a sale of its Time, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated magazines, just two months after shelling out $1.84 billion acquisition to acquire Time Inc. According to Reuters, Meredith sees the titles as not playing to its core strength in women’s magazines. More here.

Alex Bell, a computer scientist living in Harlem, is doing what he can to make life better in the bike lane.

Adrian Lamo, a well-known hacker, has passed away at age 37. He was best known for high-profile hacks of companies like Microsoft, and later for turning in Chelsea Manning to the FBI after receiving leaked documents from her.

Vanity Fair profiles Janet Pierson, the brains behind the South by Southwest Festival. (“We’re not like other places,” she says.)

Lyft is looking to hire a corporate development manager. The job is in San Francisco.

Lyft is testing a Netflix-style monthly subscription plan, says the Verge.

Traders who look for future price direction in chart patterns are finding more indicators suggesting Bitcoin may have further to fall, reports Bloomberg. From its report “Bitcoin’s 50-day moving average has dropped to the closest proximity to its 200-day moving average in nine months. Crossing below that level — something it hasn’t done since 2015 — signals fresh weakness to come for technical traders who would dub such a move a ‘death cross.’” More here.

In its race to catch Amazon, Walmart issued misleading e-commerce results and fired a former corporate development executive who complained the company was breaking the law, shows a  a whistle-blower lawsuit, reports Bloomberg. Walmart is dismissing the claims as unfounded, calling the exec a “disgruntled former associate,” who was let go as part of a broader workforce restructuring. More here.

China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year.

A guide to which Trump staffer is getting fired next.

Should some species be allowed to die?

My life in eavesdropping.

Sushi art. (You can make it, too, with a little help.)

According to a new report in the WSJ, Robinhood, the zero-fee stock-trading app, is set to be valued at an astronomic $5.6 billion in a new, $350 million funding round led by DST Global, which also led Robinhood’s last funding a year ago. (As regular readers know, we talked with Robinhood’s cofounder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev at our StrictlyVC event in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and he shared the company’s ambitions to be much more than a trading app.)

Morgan Conbere loves public transit and values elegant UX. Conbere and his co-founders — alums of Google, Apple, and other giants — depend on public transit day-to-day. It bugged them that there was no modern, simple interface to pay for and ride the bus. So Token Transit was born, and it has been operating at high speed ever since. Of course it’s a FinLab company, today’s sponsor. Know of a fintech or nonprofit that could benefit from some added speed and access? Apply now for FinLab’s next class.

Lightning Labs, a young, Bay Area-based startup, is trying to make it easier for users to send bitcoin and litecoin to each other without the costly and time consuming process of settling their transactions on the blockchain.

It has investors excited about its work, too. The company is announcing today that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to date from a kind of list of big names in payments and beyond, including Square and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey,  Square exec Jacqueline Reses, serial-founder-turned investor David Sacks, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, Eventbrite cofounder Kevin Hartz, BitGo CTO Ben Davenport, and Robinhood cofounder Vlad Tenev, along with The Hive, Digital Currency Group, and others.

In an enthusiastic tweet earlier today, Sacks characterized the company as “one of the most important projects in crypto overall.”

Why is it notable, exactly? For starters, Lightning Labs works off Lightning Network, a protocol that’s sometimes called the second layer of bitcoin. (Think of it a little like HTTP.) Champions of this newer layer, including Lightning Labs, see it as a way to exponentially boost the number and speed of transactions of the bitcoin blockchain without increasing the size of blocks — batches of transactions that are confirmed and subsequently shared on bitcoin’s public ledger.

It’s all a little confusing to people still trying to get a handle on how the blockchain works, but the Lightning protocol essentially aims to let two or more people — and eventually machines — create instant, high-volume transactions that still use the underlying blockchain for security.

Here’s how it works.

More here.

Airtable, a nearly six-year-old, Bay Area-based startup that’s trying to turn normal spreadsheets into robust database tools, has raised $52 million in funding co-led byCRV and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Freestyle Ventures and Slow Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Blue Vision Labs, a seven-year-old, London-based augmented reality startup that says it’ll be the first to bring collaboration to the AR experience (imagine multiple users seeing the same virtual objects), has raised $17 million in seed and Series A funding, it says. GV led its $14.5 million Series A round; it was joined by the company’s seed investors, including Accel Partners, Horizons Ventures, and SV Angel. TechCrunch has more here.

Foxtrot, a nearly five-year-old, Chicago-based corner store franchise that features beer, wine, food and everyday essentials, all of which can also be ordered on-demand, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Fifth Wall Ventures led the deal. Built in Chicago has more here.

SambaNova Systems , a five-month-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based startup that was founded by Stanford professors and a former chip company exec and is building new hardware to supercharge AI-centric operation, has raised a massive $56 million in Series A funding. GV and Walden International co-led the round, with participation from Redline Capital and Atlantic Bridge Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

The Skimm, a six-year-old, New York-based media company whose newsletters target millennial women, has raised $12 million in fresh funding led by GV, with participation from Spanx founder Sara Blakely, as well as earlier backers that include RRE Ventures and Homebrew. The company has now raised $28 million altogether. TechCrunch has more here.

Another day, another new European firm is announcing the close of its debut fund.  This time is Five Seasons Ventures, a Paris-based outfit that’s backed by the European Investment Fund, Nestlé, Fondo Italiano d’Investimento, and Bpifrance, and which plans to invest its roughly $74 million in fresh capital commitments in European food and agtech startups. TechCrunch has more here.

Concerned that allegations of his harassing women would reach the media, Rami Beracha — the head of Pitango Venture Capital, Israel’s biggest venture capital fund — reportedly hired private investigators to thwart news stories about him and asked them covertly enter closed online forums of high-tech women to see if he name was being mentioned. #OhNo. Haaretz has more here.

Someone at Snap was fired today (pretty sure).

Billionaire Peter Thiel suggested during an appearance today at the Economic Club of New York that bitcoin will only grow in importance — as ethereum and other new currencies lose momentum. (As Bloomberg notes, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, has been buying bitcoin since 2012.)

Where did venture capitalists go to college? Click to find out here!

Bose, the audio giant, is looking to hire a corporate development associate to help source and evaluate M&A opportunities. The job is in Framingham, Ma.

Ride-hail apps officially became more popular than New York City’s iconic yellow cabs as of the beginning of 2017. Recode has more here.

How Amazon‘s bottomless appetite became corporate America’s nightmare.

Bitcoin mania has passed — for now, notes Bloomberg. Its price has stalled between $8,000 and $11,300 for the last month. More telling, perhaps, online searches for “bitcoin” fell 82 percent from December, according to Google Trends.

Beleaguered Blue Apron is about to begin selling its meal kits in stores, says TechCrunch. Though it’s not saying which stores.

A fond farewell to our favorite third wheel.

Toddler feelings helpline.

The man who has helped Elon Musk, Tom Brady, and Ari Emanuel get dressed.

A retro classic keyboard after our own hearts.

In June, Google will begin ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising, including about initial coin offerings, wallets, and trading advice. “We don’t have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it’s an area that we want to approach with extreme caution,” Google’s director of sustainable adds, Scott Spencer, tells CNBC.

WiseBanyan is on a mission to help more Americans achieve their dreams, whether those dreams include an emergency fund, a bike, a car, a baby, a Househunters International-style escape from the rat race, or retirement. And it’s free. It’s also an alum of the Financial Solutions Lab, which is looking for its next class of fintech innovators who can help Americans achieve financial health. Want to get $250K and a seat in this CFSI and JPMorgan-backed rocketship that helps startups and nonprofits scale? Apply now!

Years after it was reported that the SEC was looking into improprieties at the once high-flying  blood-testing company Theranos, its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and the company’s former president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani,” have been formally charged with massive fraud by the agency.

The charge, more precisely: that the two raised more than $700 million from investors through an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”

Theranos  and Holmes have agreed to resolve the charges against them, says the SEC, though neither admitted nor denied the allegations in the SEC’s complaint.

For her part, Holmes has agreed to: pay a $500,000 penalty; be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years; return the remaining 18.9 million shares that she obtained during the fraud; and relinquish her voting control of Theranos by converting her super-majority Theranos Class B Common shares to Class A Common shares.  This way, if Theranos is acquired or otherwise liquidated, Holmes won’t profit until more than $750 million is first returned to Theranos’s shareholders.

As for Balwani, the SEC says it will litigate its claims against him in federal district court.

Theranos first came under scrutiny in October 2015, when the two-time Pulitzer-prize winning WSJ journalist John Carreyrou published an explosive investigative piece, suggesting that the company — then valued by investors at a stunning $9 billion — had greatly exaggerated its abilities to quickly process an expansive range of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood.

In reality, former employees told Carreyrou, the lab instrument Theranos had developed handled just a small fraction of the tests sold to consumers, with the rest being done with traditional machines from companies like Siemens. (Famed attorney David Boies, who represented Theranos at the time, acknowledged to the WSJ that Theranos wasn’t using its device for all the tests it offered, calling the transition a “journey.”)

More here.

BioLumic, a 5.5-year-old, Palmerston North, New Zealand-based company that has developed an ultraviolet crop yield enhancement system, just raised $5 million in Series A funding co-led by Finistere Ventures and the Radicle Growth acceleration fund, with Rabobank’s recently launched Food & Agri Innovation Fund and earlier investors also joining the round. VentureBeat has more here.

Escalier Biosciences, a two-year-old, Netherlands-based biopharmaceutical company that’s developing topical and oral drug candidates for psoriasis, has raised $19 million in Series B funding led by Forbion, with participation from earlier backers New Science Ventures and BioGeneration Ventures. More here.

EVelozcity, a new, L.A.-based startup that was founded by three BMW veterans who also worked for Faraday Future and are planning a line of three sub-$50,000 electric vehicles, says it has raised a stunning $1 billion from a “group of financially oriented investors” from China, Europe and the U.S. Forbes has much more here.

Figo Pet Insurance, a five-year-old, Chicago-based insurtech startup catering to pet owners, has raised $4 million in new funding led by HCS Capital Partners of Miami. More here.

Gavelytics, a two-year-old, Santa Monica, Ca.-based judicial analytics company, has raised $3.2 million in funding, including from serial founder Brian Lee. Law.com has more here.

Luminate Security, a year-old, Palo Alto, Ca., and Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup that provides access to corporate applications in hybrid clouds, has raised $14 million in combined seed and Series A funding. Investors include U.S. Venture Partners, Aleph, and the ScaleUp program of Microsoft for startups. More here.

MyPadi, a two-year-old, Abuja, Nigeria-based online platform that helps university students find housing, including at hostels and via shared rooms, has raised pre-seed funding of an undisclosed amount, including from EchoVC. More here.

OpenBazaar, a two-year-old, Washington, D.C.-area company that’s creating a decentralized marketplace — meaning it connects people directly to each other via a peer-to-peer network rather than through a centralized site as with Amazon or eBay — has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by OMERS Ventures. Other participants in the round include Bitmain, Digital Currency Group, BlueYard Capital, Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Yahoo Finance has more here.

Outdoor Voices, a four-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based maker of athletic apparel, has raised $34 million in Series C funding led by GV. The company, whose other backers include General Catalyst and Forerunner Ventures, has now raised $57 million altogether. CNBC has more here.

Pilot, a year-old, San Francisco-based maker of advanced bookkeeping tech, has raised $15 million in funding led by Index Ventures, along with a long list of high-profile founders, including Patrick and John Collison of Stripe, and Drew Houston of Dropbox. TechCrunch has more here.

Pray.com, a two-year-old, L.A.-based interfaith social networking app for members of religious communities, has raised a $14 million in Series A funding led by TPG Growth. Previous investors Science Inc. and Greylock Partners also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $16 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Skilljar, a 5.5-year-old, Seattle, Wa.-based online training platform, has raised $16.4 million in Series A funding from Mayfield and Shasta Ventures, along with earlier backer Trilogy Equity Partners. Forbes has more here.

Skyroam, a 10-year-old, San Francisco-based WiFi provider, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by JAFCO Asia, with participation from Vickers Venture,GSR Ventures, China Broadband Capital, and Delta Electronics Capital. More here.

Solebit, a four-year-old, Herzliya, Israel-based cybersecurity company, has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by ClearSky Security, with participation fromMassMutual Ventures and Glilot Capital Partners. More here.

Tech Will Save Us, a 4.5-year-old, London-based startup that makes a range of hackable toys for kids, has raised $4.2 million in Series A funding led by Initial Capital, with participation from Backed VC, SaatchInvest, All Bright, Unltd-inc,Leaf VC, and numerous individual investors. TechCrunch has more here.

Zum, a 3.5-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based childcare and transportation platform (a newer Uber for kids), has raised $19 million in Series B funding led bySpark Capital, with participation from earlier backer Sequoia Capital. Forbes has more here.

A new early-stage venture fund targeting tech startups in the Nordics is officially launching today. Founded by serial entrepreneur and Slush Chairman Ilkka Kivimäki​, and former F-Secure and startup executive Pirkka Palomäki​, Helsinki-based Maki.vc will invest in nascent and burgeoning companies in the region, both at seed and Series A stage. TechCrunch has more here.

A Boston-based staffing software firm called Bullhorn has acquired two San Francisco-based companies — Talent Rover and Job Science — to help it serve potential customers who run their businesses on Salesforce’s CRM platform. Five-year-old Talent Rover had raised $12.5 million from investors; 19-year-old JobScience appears to have been bootstrapped. Terms of the transactions aren’t being shared. Bullhorn is owned by Insight Venture Partners, which bought the company from the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners last October. The Boston Business Journal has more here (sub required).

Investor Josh Elman will join the commission-free trading platform Robinhood as its VP of product. He’ll also retain a venture partner role with the firm Greylock Partners, which Elman joined as a full-time partner in 2013.

RIP, Stephen Hawking.

Axios spoke with Box founder and CEO Aaron Levie about what surprised him in the Dropbox numbers, how the market should view Dropbox vis-à-vis Box, and what he makes of Salesforce buying into the IPO.

Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk has doubled down on his dire warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence, warning an audience at the South by Southwest conference earlier this week to “mark my words — A.I. is far more dangerous than nukes.”

Jun Ying, a former Equifax exec who was reportedly next in line to be the company’s global CIO, has been charged with insider trading by the SEC. The agency says he knew that Equifax had been hacked and that he sold his company shares before the public was notified.

IAC is looking to hire an associate director to help evaluate and execute M&A transactions and investments. The job is in New York.

E-cigs breed more smokers than they stop, according to a study published today by researchers at Dartmouth. From a Bloomberg write-up of the study: “Using 2014 census data, published literature and surveys on e-cigarette usage to build a model, the scientists were able to estimate that about 2,070 cigarette-smoking adults in America quit in 2015 with the help of the electronic devices. However—and perhaps more alarming—the model estimated that, at the same time, an additional 168,000 adolescents and young adults who had never smoked cigarettes began smoking and eventually became daily cigarette smokers after first using e-cigarettes.”

Twitter is reportedly working on a camera-first feature that could threaten Snap.

It’s a matter of when, not if, the Bitcoin bubble will pop, says Allianz Global Investors, which manages almost 500 billion euro. According to an overlooked, six-day post that just caught the attention of Bloomberg, the firm argues that Bitcoin is worthless, even if blockchain technology is able to bring significant benefits to investors.

It’s Pi Day again. Here’s why it matters.

Damien Hirst’s post-Venice, post-truth world.

The newest travel trend: pop-up luxury hotels.

Imperial Walker Bed. (When you really want to win at parenting.)

Perhaps you’ve heard? U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired today. On Twitter. Shortly afterward, the State Department’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Steve Goldstein, who’d tweeted that Tillerson “did not speak to the President and is unaware of the reason” for his firing today, was himself fired today. “It was chaos . . . it was a ‘W.T.F.’ moment,” a current state department staffer tells Vanity Fair of the episode.

Trump is separately seeking to impose tariffs on $60 billion of Chinese imports and will target the technology and telecommunications sectors, a source who discussed the issue with the White House told Reuters earlier today. More here.

Today’s sponsor, the Financial Solutions Lab, knows that when it comes to fintech, finding solutions that reflect the diversity of populations who need them most is easier said than done. This virtual accelerator program — where selected companies receive $250K plus access to unparalleled resources — strives to remove selection bias from its process of identifying solutions that can help improve Americans’ financial health. Apply now and share with all the fintechs you know!

Snoop Dogg, the rapper, entertainer, and businessman, can claim another small victory in a long string of career highlights. The venture firm that he cofounded a couple of years ago, Casa Verde Capital, has closed its debut fund with $45 million.

The money was raised in earnest last year, says managing partner Karan Wadhera, an alum of both Goldman Sachs and Nomura Securities who joined the outfit in the summer of 2016 to take over the process of securing capital — as well as investing it along with fellow managing director Evan Eneman.

We talked with Wadhera yesterday to get a better handle on the firm, which makes seed and Series A bets on ancillary businesses in the cannabis industry. Our chat has been edited for length.

You have what seems like a pretty traditional banking background. How did you wind up at Snoop Dogg’s venture firm?

I did have a traditional path, joining Goldman out of school and working in San Francisco, Hong Kong and later India for 11 years, where I ran trading desks [for numerous investment firms]. But I’m also an avid musician and fan. In college [at Babson in Wellesley, Ma.], I worked on a site and radio show about U2 that kind of got me connected to U2’s management and label and I soon started coming out to L.A. as a consultant working on projects for artists and labels. And Snoop was one of the first people I started working with. I was helping out on the new media side and helping a small team of people sort of run the Snoop show — not just his label but his clothing line, film, TV projects…

That sounds very entrepreneurial for a college student. Did you head to Goldman to make your family happy?

Exactly. [Laughs.] But that career path did take me around the world, which was super exciting. In India, too, I was able to dig into some of those interests. I helped start the sort of Us Weekly of India called Miss Malini. I kept on doing entertainment stuff. In 2008, I helped put Snoop in a big Bollywood movie. So we kept our relationship going.

Then you moved to L.A. to run this fund.

When I left the institutional finance world, I knew I wanted to focus more on the private end of things. And as I started to dig in and understand the work that Snoop and [firm partner Ted Chung] and Evan — who I’ve known for 20 years — were laying out for the cannabis industry, I realized it was a huge white space and that not enough people were focusing on it. Of course, that’s changing.

How many investments has the firm made so far?

We’ve made eight, with a couple of new investments to be announced in the next few weeks. We’re very active. If we aren’t leading a deal, then we’re co-leading and taking board seats or board advisory roles. we have a lot of access and touch points into this industry.

But you aren’t investing in just any cannabis startup, correct? Explain what you’re looking to fund and what size checks you’re writing.

We’re writing seed-stage to Series A-size checks, so $1 million plus, with roughly half our fund reserved for follow-on investments, where we can write another $3 million to $5 million [to a limited number of breakout companies]. And we’re only focused on the ancillary part of the cannabis industry, so we won’t invest in companies that touch the plants.

More here.

Airspace Systems, a three-year-old, Bay Area-based counter drone technology company, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Singtel Innov8 withs28 Capital, Shasta Ventures and Granite Hill Capital Partners also participating. The startup has now raised $25 million to date. TechCrunch has the story here.

Artland, a 1.5-year-old, Copenhagen-based mobile art app that connects art collectors and galleries worldwide, has raised $1 million in seed funding from individual investors. TechCrunch has more here.

Blast, a year-old, Newport Beach, Ca.-based fintech app that employs gamification to help users save money, has raised $5 million in seed funding from the Forbesand Roth families, Core Innovation Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Snowmass Private Equity and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. More here.

Carbon Lighthouse, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based company that sells software and strategies to help buildings reshape their energy supply-and-demand profile, has raised $27 million in growth equity funding led by GRC SinoGreen, with participation from JCI Ventures, Ulupono Initiative, WV Tech Ventures,Radicle Impact Partners and Ekistic Ventures. More here.

Imply, a three-year-old, Millbrae, Ca.-based event analytics platform, has raised $13.3 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Khosla Ventures, among others. More here.

Moogsoft, a nearly six-year-old, San Francisco-based tech startup whose machine learning algorithms aim to help developer teams quickly remediate issues, has raised $40 million in Series D funding. Goldman Sachs Growth Equity led the round, with participation from earlier backers HCL, Northgate Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Singtel Innov8, STTelemedia and Wing VC. More here.

Ofo, the 3.5-year-old, Beijing-based bike-sharing startup, has raised $866 million in new financing led by Alibaba Group to fuel its expensive competition with Mobike, which is backed by Alibaba rival Tencent. TechCrunch has more here.

RapidAPI, a 3.5-year-old, San Francisco-based company that currently offers a directory of some 8,000 APIs, has raised $9 million in Series A funding led byAndreessen Horowitz, which also led the startup’s $3.5 million seed round. Other participants in the round include SV Angel,  Green Bay Capital and Tony Jamous, the co-founder and CEO of Nexmo. TechCrunch has more here.

TAE Life Sciences, a year-old, Foothill Ranch, Ca.-based med tech company that’s dedicated to advancing the potential of Boron Neutron Capture Therapy, has raised $40 million in Series A funding led by ARTIS Ventures. More here.

Wefarm, a three-year-old, London- and San Francisco-based startup whose mobile-phone platform connects rural farmers, including in Africa and Latin America, so they can ask and answer questions about agriculture, has raised $5 million in fresh funding. True Ventures led the round, with participation from Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Blue Bottle Coffee CEO Bryan Meehan, and the Norrsken Foundation, as well as earlier backers LocalGlobe and Accelerated Digital Ventures. More here.

Yogome, a nearly six-year-old, Mexico-based company that makes educational digital games for children, has raised $26.9 million in Series B funding led byExceed Capital Partners, with participation from Seeya Ventures, Insight Venture Partners and Variv Capital. More here.

Not a new fund exactly, but payments company Ripple says it plans to invest in startups and technology companies to develop more uses for XRP, its cryptocurrency that is currently the third largest digital token behind bitcoin and Ethereum based on total market cap. TechCrunch has the story here.

Publicly traded MindBody, a maker of business management software for wellness companies, is paying $150 million in cash to acquire Booker Software, a seven-year-old, New York-based business management platform for salons and spas. According to Crunchbase, Booker had raised $77 million from investors, including Medina Capital, Revolution, and Bain Capital Ventures. The San Luis Obispo Tribune has more here.

Salesforce is set to buy CloudCraze, a nine-year-old, Chicago-based enterprise e-commerce software company that’s built on its cloud-based customer relationship management platform. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.

Tandem, a London-based challenger bank co-founded by fintech veteran Ricky Knox, is on a shopping spree. After purchasing Harrods Bank, the banking arm of the famous luxury British department store, the company is now acquiring Pariti, a 3.5-year-old, London-based money management app that has garnered 95,000 users and looks to have raised less than $1 million from investors. Pariti’s CEO and CTO are joining Tandem as part of the deal. TechCrunch has more here.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, long a favorite in tech circles, is reportedly still under armed guard after being abducted along with 200 other people last November and seemingly fleeced as part of an anti-corruption campaign. The prince, who was released in January, also no longer has final say over how his investment firm, Kingdom Holding — which has backed Twitter, Lyft, and many other companies — puts its capital to work.

Women at Microsoft, working in U.S.-based technical jobs, filed 238 internal complaints about gender discrimination or sexual harassment between 2010 and 2016, according to court filings made public yesterday. The figure was cited by plaintiffs suing Microsoft, says Reuters, adding that their attorneys are pushing to proceed as a class-action lawsuit.

The Winklevoss twins have a new plan to police cryptocurrency trading.

Point72 Ventures, the early-stage venture capital firm funded exclusively by hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, is looking to hire a VP of operations. The job is in Palo Alto, Ca.

Per SEC filings, WeWork has raised more than $400 million to buy its own properties, reports Crunchbase. (Our sources say it’s much more.)

Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk has finally taken the wraps off its Cora aircraft, a hybrid vertical take-off and landing design that can take off like a helicopter but fly like a plane. (Maybe we’re impossible, but we were expecting . . . more.)

Qualcomm, national security, and patents: an explainer.

The valuation of Apple — which today announced the dates for its annual developers conference — could reach $1 trillion, soon.

Tom Brady eats a strawberry at long last.

No! We were just about to figure out who these two people are.

Boaty McBoatface is back from its most perilous mission yet.

Mirrored shades, knee-high socks, embroidered mocknecks: bad jock style is secretly high fashion, says GQ. Take note!

Lyft said today that its revenue is growing nearly three times faster than that of Uber.

A better electric toothbrush. Quip was created by dentists and designers to guide the good habits that matter — starting at $25. Brush heads ($5) are delivered for an automatic refresh every three months. Get your first refill free.

BioCatch, a seven-year-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based behavioral biometrics company, has raised $30 million in funding led by Maverick Ventures, with participation from American Express Ventures, NexStar Partners, Kreos Capital, CreditEase,OurCrowd, and JANVEST Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Epsagon, an eight-month-old, Tel Aviv, Israel-based company that sells automated end-to-end performance monitoring tech for serverless architectures, has raised $4.1 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, StageOne Ventures and Stratoscale founder Ariel Maislos. Tech.eu has more here.

Gousto, a nearly six-year-old, London-based online meal kit company, has raised £28.5 million ($39.6 million) in new funding, including from Hargreave Hale,Angel CoFund, MMC Ventures and BGF Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to date to £56.5 million. More here.

KIXEYE, a nine-year-old, San Francisco-based developer of online combat strategy games, has raised $20 million in funding led by Icon Ventures, with participation from Ridge Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

NSLComm, a six-year-old, Israel-based startup whose antennas aim to optimize currently available satellite communications technologies, has raised $6.25 million in Series B funding, including from Jerusalem Venture Partners, Liberty,OurCrowd, Hawk GF, and Cockpit Innovation. SatNews has more here.

Rent the Runway, a nine-year-old, New York-based company that enables women to rent apparel and accessories, has raised $20 million in strategic funding fromBlue Pool Capital, a financial firm that principally invests the wealth of Alibaba founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai. According to Recode, Blue Pool invested on the same terms as the company’s Series E investors, at a post-money valuation of between $750 million and $800 million. More here.

Scout Exchange, a five-year-old, Boston, Ma.-based platform for marketplace recruiting, has raised a whopping $100 million in funding — all from TRI Ventures, the investment vehicle of staffing industry veteran John Chuang. Xconomy has  more here.

TurnKey, a nearly five-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based full-service vacation rental property management company, has raised $31 million in Series D funding led by current investor Adams Street Partners, with participation from Altos Ventures(also a previous backer) and two new, unnamed institutional investors. The company has now raised $72 million altogether. More here.

Unearth, a two-year-old, Seattle, Wa.-based software startup that uses drones and aerial images to create interactive site maps for large-scale commercial and civil construction projects, has raised $3 million in funding led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Vulcan Capital. GeekWire has more here.

Voci Technologies, a 10-year-old, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based startup that sells speech-to-text transcription and analytics to  companies, has raised $8 million in Series B funding co-led by Grotech Ventures and Harbert Growth Partners.

Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures is raising a $100 million third fund to continue investing in Southeast Asia’s burgeoning market for e-commerce, payments and mobile apps, according to Bloomberg. More here.

Math Venture Partners, a Chicago-based early-stage firm, is raising upwards of $39 million for its second fund, according to an SEC filing first flagged by Axios. The two-partner outfit had closed its debut fund with $28 million in 2015.

Sofinnova Partners, the 46-year-old Paris-based venture capital firm that specializes in life sciences, has closed a new, €125 million ($154 million) fund to back industrial biotechnologies, with a focus on startups in Europe and North America.

Ah, retirement. The Golden Years of Seemingly Unanswerable Questions. Are you saving enough? Will you outlive your money? Turns out that Matt Carey has given this a lot of thought. His company, Blueprint Income, calls itself the “first digital retirement plan that guarantees you won’t run out of money.” As it happens, Blueprint Income was part of the Financial Solutions Lab’s 2017 class. Want your startup to be the next Answerer of Seemingly Unanswerable Questions? Apply todayto be part of FinLab’s next class — selected companies get $250K+ more.

Apple is making an acquisition that could help it lay out a position as a purveyor of trusted information; it’s acquiring nine-year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based Next Issue Media, whose app Texture is a virtual magazine newsstand that offers readers access to around 200 magazines for a monthly fee of $9.99. TechCrunch has more here.

Publicly traded Nutanix is acquiring Netsil, a San Francisco-based application discovery and operations management company that had raised $5.7 million, including from Mayfield Fund, Plug and Play, Moment Ventures andEngineering Capital. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. ZDNet has more here.

Dropbox disclosed in a filing today that it will sell new shares in its IPO at between $16 and $18 a share, meaning it will be valued at  $7 billion at the high end of the range — $3 billion less than the valuation the storage company was assigned when it raised its last round of private funding in 2014. More here.

Jeff Bezos may be plugging more into space travel than previously imagined.  “I’m in the process of converting my Amazon lottery winnings into a much lower price of admission so we can go explore the solar system,” Bezos said Saturday night in New York, accepting the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner. Notes Bloomberg of the appearance: “Bezos previously said he’s funding [his reusable] rocket company Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year through the sale of Amazon stock. His comments at the event suggest that may be only the start of his financial commitment to the project . . .”

Matt Brennan has joined General Catalyst as a partner. Brennan, based in New York, had spent the previous five years as a principal with Bain Capital Ventures and the three years before that with Insight Venture Partners.

Paige Craig, founder of the L.A.-based seed-stage venture firm Arena Ventures, has joined Bird, the L.A.-based scooter company that just raised $100 million in fresh funding, as its head of U.S. city operations. Craig told Fortune in January that Arena Ventures was hitting the pause button. It sounds now like he has closed up shop entirely to focus full-time on his new gig.

Change is coming to Vice Media, where cable giant Nancy Dubuc is in “advanced talks” to assume the CEO role from co-founder Shane Smith, says Variety. More here.

Venture capitalist and lifelong Democrat Josh Kushner has quietly donated $50,000 to March for Our Lives, Axios reported over the weekend. (More here on March for Our Lives, a student-organized rally for gun control that’s taking place in Washington on March 24.) Kushner’s older brother Jared is, of course, Donald Trumps’s son-in-law and for now a White House senior advisor.

Jon Miller, a longtime digital media exec, is working with the private equity fund TPG to gobble up digital media properties, ostensibly making them more valuable by consolidating their sales and back-office operations. Recode has more here.

Vincent Ramos, the founder and CEO of Canada-based Phantom, has been charged and arrested by the FBI with racketeering conspiracy. According to the agency, his company removed the microphones and cameras of Blackberry and Android devices as part of a sales process to violent international criminal organizations. Gizmodo has more here.

Goldman Sachs said this morning that co-president Harvey Schwartz would retire, potentially clearing the way for his fellow president and co-chief operating officer,David Solomon — who moonlights as D.J. D-Sol — to become the company’s next chief executive when CEO Lloyd Blankfein leaves the bank. Dealbook has more here.

Wave Capital, started by veterans of Airbnb, is looking to invest in their former colleagues.

SoftBank is positioning itself to invade Wall Street’s turf, too.

YouTube thinks you want extremist content, so that’s what it’s giving you.

Reddit and the quest to de-toxify the internet.

John Oliver explains Bitcoin the way that only John Oliver can explain things.

Why you don’t see people-sized salmon any more.

Famed former spy Christopher Steele uses one of these, a “pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric, designed to block signal detection.” Should you need something like it for your own phone(s).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lucrative art of chicken sexing.

The Sopranos are coming back.

A college student explains modern dating to his mother.

No. Sorry. This should be illegal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The massive prize luring miners to the stars.

#SadBrandon.

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

Happy Tuesday, everyone.:)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Uber spent $10.7 million in nine years.

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

Facebook‘s political nightmare is about to get worse.

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

How to be lazy.

A complete guide to protein powder supplements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WTF, Facebook.

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

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

How to raise a boy.

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