Josh Brown, hair colorist to the stars, gets $6.5M led by Index in its latest D2C bet

In the age of Amazon, where up to 90 percent of all consumers use it to buy goods and Amazon is accounting for a rapidly-growing percentage of a consumer’s total retail spend (along with other giants like Walmart), direct-to-consumer brands — leveraging social media alongside tech-first apps — are emerging as sometimes surprising, but often effective, […]

View More Josh Brown, hair colorist to the stars, gets $6.5M led by Index in its latest D2C bet

Report: Self-driving car startup Aurora is raising capital at a $2B valuation

Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory. Aurora, the developer of a full-stack […]

View More Report: Self-driving car startup Aurora is raising capital at a $2B valuation

30 European startup CEOs call for better stock option policies

Thirty European tech CEOs of big startups signed a letter about stock options in Europe. Other tech CEOs can join the group and sign the letter before it is sent to policymakers on January 7. As you can read in the letter below, these CEOs think Silicon Valley isn’t the only region suffering from talent […]

View More 30 European startup CEOs call for better stock option policies

Scale, whose army of humans annotate raw data to train self-driving and other AI systems, nabs $18M

The artificial intelligence revolution is underway in the world of technology, but as it turns out, some of the most faithful foot soldiers are still humans. A startup called Scale, which works with a team of contractors who examine and categorise visual data to train AI systems in a two-sided marketplace model, announced that it […]

View More Scale, whose army of humans annotate raw data to train self-driving and other AI systems, nabs $18M

Are scooter startups really worth billions?

It’s been hard to miss the scooter startup wars opening fresh, techno-fueled rifts in Valley society in recent months. Another flavor of ride-sharing steed which sprouted seemingly overnight to clutter up sidewalks — drawing rapid-fire ire from city regulators apparently far more forgiving of traffic congestion if it’s delivered in the traditional, car-shaped capsule. Even […]

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Beamery closes $28M Series B to stoke support for its ‘talent CRM’

Beamery, a London-based startup that offers self-styled “talent CRM”– aka ‘candidate relationship management’ — and recruitment marketing software targeted at fast-growing companies, has closed a $28M Series B funding round, led by EQT Ventures. Also participating in the round are M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, and existing investors Index Ventures, Edenred Capital Partners and Angelpad Fund. Beamery last […]

View More Beamery closes $28M Series B to stoke support for its ‘talent CRM’

A conversation with Sarah Cannon and Mark Goldberg, Index Ventures’ new partners

Index Ventures — a firm with investments in companies like recent IPO Dropbox, a series of successful gaming companies like King, and others including Slack and coming IPO Zuora — has seen a lot of moves in the past few months. There was the departure of partner Ilya Fushman earlier this year, but the firm also […]

View More A conversation with Sarah Cannon and Mark Goldberg, Index Ventures’ new partners

Pilot raises $15M to bring bookkeeping into the modern era

The first time Waseem Daher, Jessica McKellar, and Jeff Arnold worked together on a startup, they built one that allowed administrators to patch security updates to a system without having to restart it. So it might come as a bit of a surprise that the next big technical challenge the three MIT graduates want to tackle […]

View More Pilot raises $15M to bring bookkeeping into the modern era

Former Dropbox exec Ilya Fushman is joining Kleiner Perkins from Index Ventures

 Ilya Fushman, a former Dropbox executive most recently at Index Ventures, is joining Kleiner Perkins as a general partner and managing member, the firm said today. Fushman is a big pickup for Kleiner Perkins, who also brought on Social+Capital’s Mamoon Hamid in August last year. All these hires give the impression that Kleiner Perkins, with a storied history but one looking for fresh… Read More

View More Former Dropbox exec Ilya Fushman is joining Kleiner Perkins from Index Ventures