Yet another major investment is going down in the travel sector, underscoring its ongoing rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosus, the tech conglomerate controlled by Naspers, is paying $1.7 billion to acquire Despegar, one of the biggest online travel agencies in Latin America, to scale up its operations in the region. Despegar’s board of directors […]

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Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year.  But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for […]

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A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions is returning to the spotlight.  Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf (pictured above, right) describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer products based on the lab’s work. […]

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The tourism and travel industries are finally back on track, expected to make a “full recovery” to pre-pandemic levels of activity, the UN said earlier this month. As an indicator of that, Hostaway, one of the bigger software startups in the space, is announcing a giant round of funding to double down on growth.  The […]

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A startup out of Turkey that has built a hit casual mobile game where you have to find cats in Where’s Wally-style drawings of increasing complexity has now found something else: $18 million in funding. Agave Games, the creator of Find the Cat, will be using the Series A to build out its team and […]

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These startups have fascinating new technologies, business models, founder stories or are pushing an industry forward in exciting ways.

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A deep learning scientist whose last startup was acquired by Snap to build its My AI chatbot has raised seed funding for his latest venture: a platform for building and operating real-time, video-based conversational AI agents.  eSelf, as the startup is known, is today coming out of stealth with $4.5 million in its coffers to […]

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Existing investor Vor Capital is leading the round, which also saw other previous backers CNI and Incore participating.

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Languages are typically taught by first exposing you to reading and writing, but native speakers always start learning languages by hearing and talking. Speak has built a platform to teach languages by focusing on how native speakers learn: Using AI, the startup generates audio conversations and listens to users’ responses to improve their grasp of […]

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Interest in Donald Trump surged higher than interest in Kamala Harris. People ate up content on Dubai chocolate bars. And the Yankees really did win. These and more insights are all from Google’s annual list of top trending searches, which it released today.  Google’s place in popular culture today is undisputed. It’s the biggest internet […]

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Some believe Klarna’s planned IPO in 2025 could set the stage for other fintech startups to go public. But with the tech IPO market still sluggish, one of the candidates hotly tipped to follow suit has instead just announced a fundraise, and its CEO says going public is “not a priority.” Zopa, the U.K. neobank […]

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As Meta faces off with antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe, a £2.1 billion+ Facebook U.K. class action-style competition lawsuit, which takes Meta’s market dominance as a given, is moving ahead after the social media giant lost a bid to have the litigation thrown out. The suit is seeking damages worth a minimum of […]

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The figures are now in for consumer spending on Cyber Monday, the third big online spending day — alongside Thanksgiving and Black Friday — in the first critical week of the holiday shopping season.  On Monday, as many U.S. consumers returned to work after the long weekend, online shopping continued to power ahead spurred by […]

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In November, TechCrunch broke the news that cybersecurity startup Upwind was getting a lot of inbound interest to raise money on a big valuation. Now, we can confirm that the deal is done: Upwind has closed a Series A round of $100 million. The company confirmed that the round values it at $900 million post-money.  […]

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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly known as Twitter) may detest the current Keir Starmer government due to clashes on topics like free speech and immigration, but Musk is playing the long game. He’s getting cozy with major figures on both sides of the aisle, advancing his particular beliefs on AI […]

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The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang. Adobe said that in the U.S., consumers made a record-breaking $10.8 billion of purchases, up 10.2% on last year. Meanwhile, Salesforce is giving a much […]

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Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta’s investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usage even further. So to make sure it will […]

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Thanksgiving weekend has long been seen as the traditional start of the most important sales period for retailers, and so far, the indication is that we’re in for a strong holiday season for e-commerce. Salesforce is tracking activity in real time and said that yesterday, Thanksgiving, generated $33.6 billion in sales online globally, up 6%. […]

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Adults are spending an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes each day online across smartphones, tablets and computers in the U.K., according to figures from Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report diving into consumer digital habits. The figure is a big jump compared to 2023, when adults over 18 spent an average of 3 hours […]

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More than a quarter of all U.S. residents use co-branded credit cards to get discounts and other extras from brands they use regularly. But not all is rosy in the world of loyalty commerce. Major brands like Uber, Starbucks and Walmart have all pulled back from such projects over the years after failing to see […]

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