French tech financing. Airbnb's latest patent. Tech's best laugh.
Bracket racket
Hi there,
We just released our 38-page French Tech Report in partnership with La French Tech, covering emerging trends, investments, and active investors in France.
Robinhood is fintech’s newest unicorn (valuation $1.3B) having raised a massive $110M financing yesterday led by Yuri Milner’s DST (whose managing partner will also be speaking at the event).
Robinhood, which offers a zero-fee stock trading app, has 2 million users and is a fintech company that some say is growing like an internet company. The company is adding 140,000 accounts per month and per TechCrunch, that is more new accounts than E-Trade had in all of 2016.
In addition to Robinhood, the other fintech unicorn founders now speaking at The Future of Fintech include Paytm, Credit Karma, Palantir, Oscar, Transferwise, and Kabbage. The entire speaker lineup is just insanely amazing.
The first 7 people that use the code Robinhood get $1000 off a Future of Fintech ticket. Go here.
You can also get group tickets (3 for the price of 2) here.
Is this the widescale voter fraud you speak of?
Our most innovative consumer product bracket is being discussed on Reddit’s Tesla Motors board with the group asking members to vote for the Tesla.
Ballot stuffing aside, it’s Reddit — so it’s really the comments that are gold. We’ve shared some below. Check out The Industry Standard for the full Reddit thread.
A lot of folks object to the Macbook Air being in the final 4.
This comment about the Amazon Dash button is like every comment ever on Hacker News. There is a special group of engineers that can build every product in a couple of hours with the spare parts in their desks or with a few lines of code.
Are you someone important? Do you like to eat?
Join us in New York on May 16th as we host a dinner for senior VC, corporate M&A, and strategy folks to discuss the state of AI. Request an invite here.
French tech highs
Financing to private French tech companies in 2017 is set to potentially outpace 2016, based on the Q1’17 deals and dollars run rate. Deal and dollar activity had already reached a 5-year high in 2016, growing 109% and 63%, respectively, over full-year 2015.
And then we asked our readers who has the best laugh in tech and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos dominated Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, and Elon Musk.
Reddit gold
Gotta admit that when this happened in Round 1, we chuckled as well.
I learned that the UK doesn’t have cronuts. Again, the impact of Brexit has been worse than I’d imagined.
Airbnb’s patent activity
Using our patents search engine, we identified a newly-published patent application from Airbnb, which was originally filed in October 2016. The patent application, titled “Beam Device Architecture,” describes a system to compress cellular data, allowing people to more easily go online in areas of limited internet connectivity.
The Street. Annie Palmer writes about Amazon’s reported work on self-driving vehicles and quotes CB Insights tech industry analyst Nick Pappageorge (@npappag) on the company’s patent activity.
Chipin. A look at the impact of the voice tech revolution on banking and fintech with a reference to CB Insights investment data.
