Private equity buyouts have become viable exit options — even for early stage startups

Ajay Chopra Contributor Ajay Chopra co-founded Pinnacle Systems in his living room and grew it to a multi-billion dollar public company before becoming a venture capitalist with Trinity Ventures. More posts by this contributor Full autonomy is years away, but here’s what’s next on autonomy’s wild ride From the distributed workforce to the partnered economy […]

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Alibaba confirms it raised $3B for its newly consolidated local services business

Alibaba has confirmed that it has raised $3 billion for its new-look local services business after it united its Koubei local services business with Ele.me, the on-demand delivery business it recently acquired. The company said it put the capital into the business alongside SoftBank, according to a note within its financial results that were released today. […]

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Alibaba’s Ant Financial fintech affiliate raises $14 billion to continue its global expansion

Ant Financial, the financial services affiliate connected to Alibaba which operates the Alipay mobile payment service, has confirmed that it has closed a Series C funding round that totals an enormous $14 billion. The rumors have been flying about this huge financing deal for the past month or so, with multiple publications reporting that Ant […]

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China’s SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI startup, closes $620M follow-on round

SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI company with a valuation of over $4.5 billion, is back in the money again. The company raised $600 million in an Alibaba-led financing round announced last month, and now it has added a further $620 million to that with a “Series C+” round announced today. Alibaba led the previous deal, […]

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Silver Lake is buying a $500M stake in Credit Karma in a massive secondary round

Credit Karma, which once started as a simple credit report system and is now looking to expand into a true financial assistant, announced today it is getting a massive $500 million secondary investment from Silver Lake. As part of the investment, Credit Karma says it is getting a 23% bump in the valuation from its […]

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