Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Joe Tsai invest $20 million in Rent the Runway

 Rent the Runway has snagged a $20 million investment from Alibaba CEO Jack Ma and Joe Tsai via Blue Pool Capital, Recode first reported. Blue Pool Capital is a multibillion-dollar fund that invests in public and private equity on behalf people like Ma and Tsai. The round reportedly values Rent the Runway at about $800 million. Rent the Runway’s previous investment came in back in 2016,… Read More

Mad Paws, Australia’s Wag, raises $5M led by airline giant Qantas

 SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $300 million into dog walking app Wag earlier this year, and a new deal on the other side of the world is evoking similarities.
Mad Paws, an Australia-based startup that offers dog-walking, pet-sitting and other services for the fluffy friend in your life, has pulled in a $5 million investment led by Qantas, the $8 billion-valued Australian airline.
Yes… Read More

India’s Prime Venture Partners closes new $60M fund for seed investments

 India’s Prime Venture Partners has refueled its tanks for more angel investing after it announced a new fund of INR 400 crore, or around $60 million. Started by three managing partners — serial entrepreneurs Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani — in 2011, this fund represents the third (and largest) investment vehicle for the firm. Its previous $46 million… Read More

S&P Global snares Kensho for $550 million

 S&P Global announced today that it will acquire Kensho, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup that has concentrated on artificial intelligence and analytics for big financial institutions. The total value of the deal is $550 million in a mix of cash and stock. Kensho, which counted S&P Global as a client/partner and an investor, launched in 2013 and has raised $67.5 million, according… Read More

Degreed gets $42M to help build a tool to help employees learn the right skills

 When an employee is looking to advance in their career, where they work might have a kind of strict hierarchical path for the role they’re in and what titles come next — but there’s a good chance that employee might want to try something new without leaving their company. Instead of going from just an agent to a manager of agents, or following some existing promotion line,… Read More

RedDoorz raises $11M to grow its budget hotel network in Southeast Asia

 RedDoorz, a budget hotel startup focused on Southeast Asia, has closed $11 million in new funding to expand its presence.
The three-year-old startup is a number offers a network of hotels that are grouped together under a single brand. The goal is a happy combination that marries the ubiquity of (typically) unorganized local guesthouse-style rooms with the more organized and efficient (but… Read More

UiPath raising around $120M at $1B+ valuation for its ‘software robots’ for internal business tasks

 The initial hype around bots — applications that run partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other AI tech to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done — may have waned a bit, but a startup building the equivalent for the enterprise world, in a fast-growing field called robotic process automation,… Read More

Bugcrowd bug bounty platform gets big boost with $26 million Series C investment

 Bugcrowd and HackerOne both launched in 2012 and both companies are competing in the growing bug bounty market to pay a network of white hat hackers to bang on client software to find vulnerabilities. Today, Bugcrowd announced a $26 million Series C jolt led by Triangle Peak Partners. Bugcrowd is built on the premise that it’s better to dangle a cash reward to a group of people… Read More