Google gets Twitter tools. Netflix’s record growth. Rocket Internet raises.
Hola,
Today was a historic day as the US inaugurated a new president. What will the next 4 years be like? The truth is no one including the punditocracy knows anything about how this will play out, or what will happen to the economy or business as a result.
One area to watch though is infrastructure, where stocks have been rallying in anticipation of a potentially major boom.
But Trump also enters office at a time when excitement is growing around government at the local level, and making cities smarter. Companies from Uber to Alphabet are now working proactively with cities, while a host of startups are working across local transit, water management, constituent services, and more.
Our next briefing will dive into trends, investments, and how specific companies are making inroads in the smart cities and GovTech space. It’s next Thursday, so be sure to check it out.
$100M: Zoom Video Communications raised $100M in Series D financing from investors including Sequoia Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and AME cloud ventures. The cloud video conferencing company was one of two companies to enter the unicorn club this week, and one of three private companies to enter the unicorn club so far in 2017, according to our global unicorn analysis. The list of worldwide unicorns can be found on our real-time unicorn tracker.
3: This week Google acquired Twitter’s suite of developer tools including Fabric, a product specifically aimed at mobile developers, and Fabric’s crash reporting service Crashlytics, which was acquired by Twitter in 2013. Fabric will be integrated with Google’s Developer Product Group, and work with the Firebase team, Google’s backend SaaS platform. This move puts Google at 3 acquisitions within the first three weeks of 2017. For real-time updates, check out our Google Acquisition tracker.
2: Microsoft acquired Simplygon, a developer of automatic 3D data-optimization solutions. This is the company’s second acquisition of the year — per our Microsoft Acquisitions Tracker — following last week’s acquisition of Maluuba, an AI company that uses deep learning to create “literate” machines through natural language processing.
$2.17M: As highlighted in our Seed/Angel Watch from yesterday’s newsletter, GovInvest — a company that helps governments visualize and understand actuarial data — raised $2.17M in seed funding from Govtech Fund. Government technology startups will be a focus of our upcoming briefing covering trends in the govtech and smart cities space. Sign up for the briefing here.
12: There are more than a dozen Facebook employees that help manage Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook communications, from writing posts to deleting “harassing” comments and/or spam on his page. The company has recently been in the news for its handling of “fake news,” and under pressure to admit it is in fact a media company as it handles so much content. Zuckerberg, for one, clearly runs a personal media/content team.
5.12 million: Netflix added 7.05 million subscribers during the fiscal fourth quarter, the largest-ever quarter for subscriber growth in its history. Nearly 73%, or 5.12 million, of those memberships came from outside of the US. Some of the movies featured on our list of must-see tech films are available on Netflix.
$11 USD: The estimated monthly cost of Deliveroo’s new subscription service, Deliveroo Plus, which is being rolled out in the UK. This is an alternative to the existing model which charges customers a ~$3 USD delivery fee on top of their food orders. Users can choose an annual subscription which would translate to ~$110 USD per year. In both cases, delivery fees are waived. Deliveroo was the third most well-funded meal delivery startup in late 2016, according to our research.
$1B: Berlin-based Rocket Internet has raised a new $1B fund, according to this report, claiming to be Europe’s largest early-stage and growth capital fund focused on the internet sector. Rocket Internet has seen a series of downrounds recently, including Global Fashion Group, Home24, and Hellofresh — all in 2016. See a full list of companies’ downrounds on our downround tracker.
$7.84M: The amount raised by Fig, a platform for crowdfunding and investing in games, in a Series A round. The company raised from Draft Ventures, Greycroft Partners, NextView Ventures, Resolute.vc, and Spark Capital, making it a notable raise for the crowdfunding landscape.
930,000: The approximate number of documents released online by the CIA to the public. The CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) collection covers topics from war history to scientific abstracts to foreign translations, and more. Previously only accessible in person, the initiative aims to increase the accessibility of declassified records to the public.
