Former journo Alexia Bonatsos takes the wraps off her new venture fund, Dream Machine

Five years ago, Alexia Bonatsos, née Tsotsis, was co-editor of TechCrunch, a job that made her renowned in startup circles and familiar with a wide number of startups and their founders. What she really longed to do, in fact, was invest in some of them. “I was among the first people to write about Pinterest […]

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Ripple is going after startups to build an ecosystem around the XRP cryptocurrency

It’s finally happening. Ripple is making a push to expand the use of the XRP cryptocurrency it created into new verticals and segments beyond the payment and banking space where the company is focused. XRP is the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency behind only bitcoin, the original breakout artist, and Ethereum, the platform that most developers pomp for. XRP […]

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SearchInk rebrands as omni:us, aims its hand-writing reading AI at insurance industry

Back in 2016 a startup called SearchInk, launched out of Berlin with the aim of combining machine learning with handwriting recognition. The upshot would be the ability to semantically label handwritten documents. Pretty nifty. It went on to raise €4.2 million in seed funding, but after developing this AI to read hard-written documents, it went […]

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Ripple turns investor as execs lead $25M round for storage and rental startup Omni

 Earlier this month, I wrote that crypto companies are going to become investors in 2018. I didn’t quite imagine that happening as quickly as mid-January, but here we are. Ripple, the fintech startup behind the controversial XRP token, has its first investment after it backed U.S.-based storage startup Omni through a $25 million round. Omni was founded in 2015 as a storage option for… Read More

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Storage startup Closetbox raises $7.3 million Series A round

 Startup Closetbox recently raised a $7.3 million Series A round, bringing its total amount of funding to $19.8 million. Closetbox, of course, has competitors like fellow startups Makespace and Omni, as well as larger companies like Pods and Public Storage. Closetbox offers “full-service storage,” which means it has professional movers come to your house to do any heavy lifting and… Read More

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Automating your life on this week’s episode of CTRL+T

 People are lazy. Well, let me speak for myself. I am lazy. So it’s no wonder why on this week’s episode of CTRL+T, I was drawn to some news items that touched on home assistants and personal assistants for when you’re out in the wild. Amazon’s Echo Dot was the top-selling product on all of Amazon this holiday season and startup Fin recently launched its human/AI… Read More

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