Spotify has made its fourth acquisition of the year after it announced that AI startup Niland has joined its ranks. Paris-based Niland offered an API-based product focused on providing more accurate search and recommendation options for music. Spotify said the French company will join its R&D team which is based in New York to help hone its personalization and recommendation features… Read More

 Brit + Co, the media startup founded by Brit Morin, is announcing an additional $15 million in funding led by Verizon Ventures. Former Uber president and Target CMO Jeff Jones will also be joining the startup as an advisor. San Francisco-based Brit + Co will be using the funding to expand its digital content business that targets women. Read More

 No one, it seems, has come up with a good way to harness all the videos, photos, and tweets that budding creators post every day on YouTube, or the Facebook media juggernaut, or its smaller Snap-pier rivals. Read More

 The Farmer’s Dog wants to fill the bowls of canines everywhere with fresh food made especially for them. Based in New York City, the startup plans to expand its dog food delivery service after closing a $8.1 million Series A round led by Shasta Ventures. Returning investors Forerunner Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and SV Angel also participated. Read More

 Qupital, a one-year-old Hong Kong-based startup that addresses cash flow issues for SMEs, has closed a $2 million seed funding round. The is certainly a notable size for an early stage investment in Hong Kong’s nascent but growing startup scene. The financing was led by Hong Kong-London firm MindWorks Ventures and the $130 million Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund which launched in 2015.… Read More

 Let’s say you randomly selected 1,000 seed-stage startups based in the United States. How many of those would go on to raise a Series A? Of companies that go on to raise a Series A, how many would go on to raise a Series B? You could keep this process going until only a few companies remain. But it’s not enough to just ask what the survival rate of companies is from round to round. Read More

 Social payments app Verse has closed a $20.5 million Series B round of funding from its existing investors. The round is led by Spark Capital, with eVentures and Greycroft Partners also participating. It raised its Series A in October last year, when it took in $8.3M. Read More

 The business of hacking has dealt a huge blow to our democracy, not to mention a plethora of organizations and individuals, and our collective sense of sanity. One silver lining, however, has been that it has led to the emergence of a number of security startups that are building and deploying a range of tools to try to track and stop the nefarious activity. One of the bigger of… Read More

 Appear Here, the marketplace for short-term retail space that originally launched to ride the ‘pop-up’ shop craze, has raised $12 million in Series B funding. Read More

 The era of unicorn startups has created a distorted view of entrepreneurial success. All the talk about billion-dollar exits has inflated the numbers that define a win. Starting and selling a company for $100 million dollars is an outlier event in terms of pure entrepreneurial probability, but such outcomes are viewed as well short of success in many corners of today’s startup world. Read More