In January we featured FlipBand, a no-tech wearable that was designed to help wearers stick to their New Year’s resolutions. The simple bracelet rejected apps and data in lieu of a physical reminder, but now a new product called MOTI posits that consumers don’t have to choose between real world objects and online intelligence — instead combining them both in a cute, smart object that helps users to form positive habits.
La Fundación José Manuel Entrecanales, a través de su brazo inversor FIDES, y Axon Partners Group, lideran esta ronda de financiación que impulsará el desarrollo tecnológico y la internacionalización de la plataforma de análisis de conversación en redes sociales en español
Birst, a company selling business-intelligence software that competes with from companies like MicroStrategy and Tableau, announced today that it’s picked up $65 million in a new funding round.
Clear Flight Solutions has won €1.6 million (about $1.7 million) to invest in “robird” drones that mimic the flight of peregrine falcons in order to scare other birds away from damaging private property.
This modern scarecrow startup has come out of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and it wants to prevent the “billions of dollar” damage made by birds at airports every year, which sometimes results in loss of life.
SimpliVity, a startup that sells data center hardware aggregating components typically sold separately — servers and storage boxes — is announcing today that it’s picked up a major funding round totaling $175 million.
The money, which now gives SimplVity a valuation in excess of $1 billion, puts the startup in a position to more seriously challenge publicly traded companies in the converged-infrastructure business, whose fast growth is somewhat reminiscent of the fast rise of server virtualization. That technology lets companies run multiple applications on each physical server and thereby reduce its server footprint.
Product visualization startup Cylindo has raised $1 million in new funding.
CEO Janus Jagd told me the company emerged from his own struggles moving into a new apartment, where he and his girlfriend wanted to visualize how their living room would look with a bunch of new furniture. To do that, Jagd said he built a 3D room model on his own and gave it to furniture merchants.
The 26-year-old Michigan native grew up working in the fields of his family's fifth-generation farm, growing traditional row crops such as corn and wheat. In high school, Vollmar taught himself how to build custom software for the Web, a hobby he later he turned into a business by forming an IT consulting company.
After graduating from college in 2011, Vollmar discovered a problem plaguing virtually every farmer he knew.
Investors are wont to follow. It therefore shouldn’t be a surprise to see Airtame pick up a VC round of funding.
The Copenhagen-based startup, which is building a nifty wireless HDMI dongle to easily share your computer or phone’s screen to a TV or projector, made headlines in late 2013 for its crowdfunding efforts after raising $1.3 million on Indiegogo in just 60 days.
To add to that pot of cash, the company has closed a $1.4 million seed round led by Danish investment firm SEED Capital and Libratone-founder Tommy Andersen — money it plans to use for a full product launch in the second quarter of this year.
StartX, the Stanford-funded and affiliated incubator, just held its demo day for the Fall 2014 batch of startups at its headquarters in Palo Alto. The 20 companies presenting ran the gamut from Bitcoin and cybersecurity to open source machine learning.
In no particular order, here are the five startups whose pitches piqued our interest:
An Israeli start-up is getting ready to give your microwave a major upgrade. Using RF (radio-frequency) technology, Goji Food Solutions has developed a microwave-style oven that its developers promise will be used for much more than heating up food.
“Microwaves were never ideally designed for cooking,” said Gabi Zada of Goji. “Microwaves ‘shout’ at food, emitting rays in any and every direction. RF tech can be controlled and regulated, so the cooking process is precise and perfect every time.”
