Search Results for: startup

No VC: Facebook is not making any direct investments to African tech startups

Editor
Facebook’s to invest $57 Billion in Africa’s Economy in next five years

Facebook has been scaling up its operations in Africa and engaging more intently with tech startups on the continent, but the company has decided it will not be making any direct investments, Disrupt Africa reports That is according to Julien Decot, director of platform partnerships for EMEA at Facebook, who was speaking at last week’s MEST Africa Summit in Cape Town. He said the decision not to become an investor had come straight from Zuckerberg himself. “That was a Zuckerberg decision. The way Mark thought about it was – “this…

BitPesa, Kenyan Bitcoin Payments Startup, Acquires European Money Transfer Platform

Dianne Jacobs

BitPesa, Kenyan bitcoin payments startup, has acquired TransferZero, Spain-based online money transfer platform, in a bid to further accelerate its growth across the world. BitPesa, which raised two funding rounds last year to take its total secured investment to around the US$10 million mark, launched in Kenya in 2013 and also operates in Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, the DRC, the UK and Senegal. TransferZero was founded in 2016 and was the first fintech company licensed by the Bank of Spain as an authorized payment institution. The company is a partner of…

New startup that helps you scan, send and print yourself

Dianne Jacobs

Kat Kinkead and Peter Weijmarshausen met at their old company, Shapeways. Weijmarshausen recently stepped down as CEO and was looking for something cool to do when he and Kinkead realized that the most popular application of 3D scanning and printing was in 3D figurines. These tiny action-figure-like representations were wildly popular print subjects back at Shapeways but they were notoriously difficult to capture and print. Now, thanks to improvements in scanning, color printing, and software, they’re surprisingly easy. Thus Beheld was born. Kinkead, the CEO, has an MFA in industrial…

LinkedIn loses legal right to block startup from public profile data

A Judge on Monday ruled that an analytics company has the right to scrape data from LinkedIn . HiQ, the data gatherer, has been processing publicly available data from LinkedIn and using it to train AI models, until May when LinkedIn demanded it stop.  U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction request brought by hiQ Labs, and ordered LinkedIn to remove within 24 hours any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public profiles in a test of how much control a social media site can wield…

Microsoft launching a new AI startup program in Paris

Dianne Jacobs

Microsoft is making efforts to give space for the new start-up ventures that are going make changes for the coming years. The Tech giant is set to focus on artificial intelligence. More and more startups are trying to grasp the AI field and most are new startups. This will certainly create a major impact on the AI startups. This may lead to Microsoft to start their new program for AI at the Station F. Microsoft has had a startup accelerator in the Sentier neighborhood for a few years now. When…

In 2017, 17% of startups have a female founders

The percentage of startups that have at least one female founder was flat in the first quarter of 2017. From 2009 to 2012, the percent of venture-funded companies with women founders increased by nearly 8 percent; however, the percentage of women-founded venture-backed companies has plateaued at approximately 17 percent since 2012. And as we look at Q1 2017 data, that percent doesn’t appear to have changed. For those who are keeping track, that’s nearly five years with no percentage growth in women-founded venture-backed startups. The absolute number of companies (along…

IT Security remains a Top Concern for Tech Startups

Dianne Jacobs
Kaspersky

The increase in the amount of data breaches and cyber attacks have resulted in a rise in the number of conversations surrounding IT security for small businesses. While the resulting conversation is an important one, all too often small businesses simply don’t have the time to research and understand the onslaught of technological solutions that are available to them. This widespread lack of education is growing as cybersecurity solutions continue to be developed and released at unprecedented levels. With these challenges in mind, the increase in IT security conversations has…

A Startup Has Developed An Artificial Intelligence That Can compete with Google

artificial intelligence

There is something familiar about fears that new machines will takeover human activities. Today, the machinery question is back with a vengeance. The entire tech industry has fallen hard for a branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning. The AI involves throwing massive amounts of data at a neural network to train the system to understand things like speech and images.The deep learning allows systems to learn and improve by crunching lots of examples rather than being explicitly programmed. Acording to Forbes, a new startup coming out of stealth called Gamalon , claims…

The Internet of Things has Inspired a New Startup Niche

Staff Writer
Internet

The Internet of Things has hugely expanded the number of home security products on the market reports The Entrepreneur. Computers were pretty much the only devices that connected to the internet some years back. These days, that idea is a fairytale. The reality is an incredible number of products are now connected to the web, from refrigerators to watches, clothing, cars, thermostats, light bulbs, and alarm systems. By 2020, an estimated 20-plus billion items will belong to the so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT). The Internet of Things has made possible unprecedented innovations in home…

21% of British startups plan to open a European office due to Brexit

The vote to leave the EU left some start ups questioning where their future lies, particularly if they’re confronted with issues around employing foreign staff. Currently, One in every five UK start ups intends to open a European office due to Brexit, according to survey results published Tuesday by Silicon Valley Bank. It found that 21% of UK startups are planning to open up a new office in cities such as Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm, which are all trying to take on London’s Tech City. The survey also found that around…