Boxed in talks to be acquired by Kroger for $500 million

 New York-based Boxed, the startup for buying food and household items in bulk, is in talks to be acquired by Kroger for about $500 million. Other retailers are also expected to be making bids. The news was first reported by Forbes and confirmed to TechCrunch by a source with knowledge of the situation. We’re hearing that the company is aiming to make a decision this weekend. Founded… Read More

Google acquired Redux, a U.K. startup focused on audio and haptics

 Alphabet, the umbrella corporation of Google, Inc. etc., has quietly acquired a UK-based startup called Redux, reports Bloomberg. Redux was founded in 2013 out of Cambridge, and built technology that uses vibrations to turn surfaces of phones or tablets into speakers or provide haptic feedback. The acquisition is reflected on Crunchbase, and in confirmed transfer of shares within U.K.… Read More

Bugsnag snares $9 million Series B, now gives you a software stability score

 Bugsnag, the cloud service that helps developers find bugs inside their software, announced a $9 million Series B today. They also released a new version of their dashboard that features a stability score than can give customers an unbiased grade of the current stability of their software. Let’s look at the funding first. Investors included first-timer GV (formerly Google Ventures)… Read More

Developer Social Network StackShare Raises $5.2 million from e.Ventures

 Web development is complicated. What was once the relatively uniform LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP years ago has been replaced by nearly infinite variations. Multiple cloud providers, dozens of databases, hundreds of developer tools, and that is not even getting into the world of libraries. NPM, the Node Package Manager, lists about half a million packages that can be imported… Read More

E-commerce startup citiesocial raises $2.75M led by Alibaba’s fund for Taiwanese entrepreneurs

 Citiesocial, a Taipei-based startup that helps emerging brands break into Asia’s e-commerce market, has raised $2.75 million led by Alibaba Taiwan Entrepreneurs Fund, a non-profit backed by Alibaba Group to support local startups. CDIB Capital and returning investor Cherubic Ventures also participated. The capital will be used to expand citiesocial into China, South Korea and Japan this… Read More

Equity podcast: Spotify’s impending debut, Uber’s done deal, and Nasdaq 7,000

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This episode, the first of 2018, saw our own Katie Roof and your humble servant (Alex) joined by Atish Davda, CEO and founder of EquityZen. Matthew Lynley is off this week.
(Davda’s firm put together a landing page for Equity, which we thought was… Read More

MoneyLion raises $42M to grow its personal finance platform for the middle class

 MoneyLion, the part lending, part savings and part wealth management app targeted at the financial middle class has raised $42M in Series B funding.This brings total equity funding to $67M since being founded in 2013.
The startup provides an all-in-one platform for anything finance related. A user connects their bank accounts and credit cards and then gets personalized advice based on their… Read More

Microsoft acquires Avere Systems to further hybrid computing mission

 In a world shifting to the cloud, Microsoft has carved out a place trying to help companies caught between two worlds — on-prem legacy solutions and the public and private cloud. To help further that hybrid mission, the company announced it was acquiring Avere Systems today for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft describes Avere as “a leading provider of high-performance NFS and… Read More