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Goodcall picks up $4M, Yelp partnership to answer merchant inbound calls

Even without staffing shortages, local merchants have difficulty answering calls while all hands are busy, and Goodcall wants to alleviate some of that burden from America’s 30 million small businesse

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General Catalyst, Abstract back Wanderlog’s $1.5M round for collaborative travel

Twin brothers Harry and Peter Yu grew up traveling all over, an aspect of their lives that continued even into their careers. What they didn’t enjoy was figuring out all the logistics, which has becom

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Tango dances in with $5.7M, making employee onboarding easier

Ken Babcock and his co-founders, Dan Giovacchini and Brian Shultz, were in the midst of Harvard Business School in March 2020 when they felt the call to start Tango, a Chrome extension that auto-captu

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Yelp adds tools that let businesses share their COVID policies related to vaccines

As more businesses around the U.S. are choosing to implement vaccine requirements for patrons or staff, business discovery and review site Yelp is introducing new tools that allow businesses to commun

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Democratic bill would suspend Section 230 protections when social networks boost anti-vax conspiracies

Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would strip away the liability shield that social media platforms hold dear when those companies boost anti-vaccine conspiracies and other kinds

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Biden nominates another Big Tech enemy, this time to lead the DOJ’s antitrust division

The Biden administration tripled down on its commitment to reining in powerful tech companies Tuesday, proposing committed Big Tech critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Justice Department’s antitr

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Austin-based iFly.vc closes $46M second fund from legendary tech founders

To compete with the myriad venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, iFly.vc has a unique vantage point.Its founder Han Shen has straddled the United States and China for several decades. He was the fi

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Uberall raises $115M, acquires MomentFeed to scale up its location marketing services

Location-based services may have had their day as a salient category for hot apps or innovative tech leveraging the arrival of smartphones, but that’s largely because they are now part of the un

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Apple’s iPadOS 15 breaks the app barrier

The announcement of new iPad software at this year’s WWDC conference had an abnormally large expectation hung on it. The iPad lineup, especially the larger iPad Pro, has kept up an impressively franti

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The exit effect: 4 ways IPOs and acquisitions drive positive change across the global ecosystem

For many VCs, the exit is the endgame; you cash in and move on. But as we know, the startup world is evolving, and that means the impact of investment is no longer limited to how much money is made.As

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Chasing hype is human nature: The tyranny of startup trends

I think it’s important that we explicitly discuss something that every VC instinctively knows: The hype around a given business or category has become a form of bias for investors and founders when ve

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Blind raises $37M to double down on workplace gossip and career advice

Blind has carved out a unique niche in the social-networking world. It’s an app of verified, pseudonymous employees talking to each other about what’s going on at their employers, trading notes on eve

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Pathlight, a performance management tool for customer-facing teams and the individuals in them, raises $25M

The longer we continue to work with either all or part of our teams in remote, out-of-physical-office environments, the more imperative it becomes for those teams to have some tools in place to keep t

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Knowing when your startup should go all-in on business development

There’s a persistent fallacy swirling around that any startup growing pain or scaling problem can be solved with business development. That’s frankly not true.Business development is rarely, if ever,

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Daily Crunch: Facebook launches rap app

Facebook unveils another experimental app, Atlassian acquires a data visualization startup and Newsela becomes a unicorn. This is your Daily Crunch for February 26, 2021.The big story: Facebook launch

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Yelp puts trust and safety in the spotlight

Yelp released its very first trust and safety report this week, with the goal of explaining the work that it does to crack down on fraudulent and otherwise inaccurate or unhelpful content.With focus o

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End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business

At Battery, a central part of our consumer investing practice involves tracking the evolution of where and how consumers find and purchase goods and services. From our annual Battery Marketplace Index