Latest from Rip Empson
If today isn’t your first day in the tech industry (or reading TechCrunch), then you’re likely familiar with the rise of the accelerator program, a phenomenon that has swept through…
Enterprise
Three Classes In, Boost.vc Is Raising A New Fund With Plans To Incubate 100 Bitcoin Startups By 2016
Adam Draper and Brayton Williams launched Boost.vc in 2012 at a time when the accelerator market was beginning to burst at the seams with new entrants — some would say…
Startups
YC-Backed CareMessage Is On A Mission To Improve Health Literacy By Bringing Mobile Healthcare To The Underserved
It’s no secret that the U.S. healthcare system is in desperate need of change, especially as costs have continued to rise, while the quality of care remains the same. While…
Startups
In 18K Schools And Counting, Clever Confirms $10.3M Raise From Sequoia, As It Looks To Build The Next Big Learning Platform
Clever launched out of Y Combinator in 2012 on a mission to help K-12 schools bring the latest education software into their classrooms. By giving districts a central way to…
Startups
Unbabel Launches A Human-Edited Machine Translation Service To Help Businesses Go Global, Localize Customer Support
Today, you can be anywhere in the world in a matter of clicks. Thanks to globalization and the plucky old Information Superhighway, our world is shrinking. Inquisitive globetrotters can pop…
Fintech
With Over $100M Raised, P2P Lending Platform CommonBond Expands To 100 Programs To Help Grad Students Reduce Debt
New York City-based CommonBond launched in late 2012 on a mission to bring the power of person-to-person lending and crowdsourcing to the student debt crisis. With student debt in the…
Startups
What eCommerce Boom? From Amazon Textbooks To New Seed Funds, Education Technology Is Exploding In Brazil
Over the last decade, Brazil has “come online” in a big way. The percentage of people using the Web in Brazil leapt from 9 percent in 2002 to about 50…
Startups
Looking To Serve 17M In 2014, SimpleTuition Lands $26M To Help Students Afford College, Pay Off Loans
By now, you’ve probably heard about the mounting student loan crisis. Thanks to the financial crisis, the high cost of a college degree and comparatively high interest rates in the…
Enterprise
Another Day, Another EdTech Giant Acquired: Following Renaissance Learning, Education Software Veteran Skillsoft Sells For $2B+
It’s been an active week in the world of education software, with this weekend bringing news of the second big-ticket acquisition of a veteran EdTech company in as many days.…
Startups
With 40% Of U.S. Doctors Signed On, Doximity’s Jeff Tangney Reveals How The Social Network For M.D.s Hit The Tipping Point
With the arrival of Obamacare, millions of uninsured Americans are entering the healthcare system for the first time. As these new patients happily stream into waiting rooms, doctors are scrambling…
Startups
Smart Sparrow Lands $10M To Help Teachers Make Online Learning More Adaptive And Interactive
For most students, learning within the traditional confines of the educational system has been something to be endured, rather than something that’s just as fun as it is rewarding. Every…
Startups
With 10K Schools On Board, BrightBytes Lands $15M To Help Measure The Real Impact Of Technology In Education
Over the last year, BrightBytes has become a personal favorite in the ballooning world of education startups. The reason for this begins with the fact that when it comes to…
Startups
Seeing 15M Travelers In 2013, Gogobot Goes After Kayak With New Hotel Metasearch Utility To Help You Find The Best Deals
Gogobot launched in 2010 in the early stage of a wave of new interest in the social travel space, as a glut of new startups promised to as a new…
Startups
Fresh From IPO, Wix Acquires Israeli Startup Appixia To Bring Native Mobile Commerce Support To 42M Users
Wix emerged in 2006 as part of a new generation of startups on a mission to do for website creation what Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr have done for bloggers and…
Historically, the U.S. educational system has struggled to get young people excited by and involved with STEM-related fields, especially computer science, which has actually seen a steady decline in participation…
Enterprise
Priceline Buys Israel’s Qlika For $15-20M To Boost Global Expansion With Rocket Science-Powered Ad Tech
Qlika launched out of UpWest’s fourth batch of Israeli-American startups in March to tackle a big problem in online marketing: Localization. In other words, what’s the point of spending millions…
Startups
Ingram Buys CourseSmart, As Two Largest eTextbook Players Unite, Point The Way To A Post-Textbook Future
Over the past few years, change has come to the textbook market in a big way. Chegg, one of the first companies to bring textbook purchasing and rentals online and…
Media & Entertainment
With 11K Pre-Orders, Play-i Lands $8M To Teach Kids To Code With Interactive Toy Robots
If we’re going to prepare future generations for the increasingly technical workforce, and world, then computer science and engineering will need to be given greater credence in early education —…
Startups
A Year From Launch, Skillshare Lands $6M From USV, Spark To Double Down On Its Project-Based, Online Classes
Skillshare launched in 2011 to give those interested in continuing to learn outside the classroom a place to get real-world skills from both online and offline classes. Over the past…
Startups
With $500K In The Bank, Credible Launches A Kayak-Style Marketplace To Simplify Student Loan Refinancing
With outstanding student debt now over $1 trillion in the U.S., it’s clear that college grads are struggling mightily to make payments and refinance their debt. Meanwhile, thanks to decades…
Startups
IAC-Backed Skyllzone Launches A New Fantasy Sports App That Lets You Play “The Machine” In Quick, Byte-Sized Contests
Spurred on by its entry into the digital and mobile age, the fantasy sports world is booming. From the fact that a hilarious and increasingly popular show based on fantasy…
Considering we humans now have a slew of gadgets, apps and products at our disposal that allow us to track and monitor our health and daily activity, it was only…
Startups
Smarterer Lands $1.6M To Bring Its Skill Testing And Assessment Technology To The Enterprise
In an effort to usher in the post-resume era and make the job application process less of a headache, Smarterer developed a platform that provides job searchers with an easy…
Media & Entertainment
Meet Oppia, Google’s New Open Source Project That Allows Anyone To Create An Interactive Learning Experience
Google has become an increasingly active participant in the world of education, particularly when it comes to exploring the role technology can play in re-imagining the way we learn. With…
Startups
With Box, Yelp And Palantir On Board, Piazza Lands $8M From Khosla To Bring Recruiting To Its Social Q&A Platform For Students
As free online social tools now play a central role in how we communicate, interact and manage our interpersonal relationships, and as consumerization sweeps through IT and learning, the traditional…
Enterprise
Fast-Growing 2U Files For $100M IPO, But Is It Poised To Be The Next Big Education Company?
When 2U emerged in 2008, online education was still struggling to be taken seriously. Despite steadily increasing online enrollment, many remained skeptical. Both fairly and unfairly, online education was seen…
Startups
Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups, But Don’t Expect Him To Launch His Own
After a long tenure at the helm of Y Combinator — during which a summer “bootcamp” for undergrads turned into a Silicon Valley institution, pioneering the “seed accelerator” model and…
In May of last year, we broke the news that Seamless and GrubHub — two of the largest players in the online and mobile food delivery space and “arch rivals”…
Enterprise
An AT&T For Dentistry? Y Combinator-Backed Weave Launches To Bring Modern Telecom To SMBs
Small businesses, by definition, are lean. With a price tag that includes license renewals, maintenance and upgrades to servers and IT support, the costs of adopting enterprise-grade software and services…
Biotech & Health
AWS For Life Science? With $4.1M In The Bank, Transcriptic Wants To Reinvent Scientific Research And Bring Labs Into The Cloud
As a biomedical engineering student at Duke, Max Hodak became intimately familiar with the sterile tedium of life in a research lab. Like many others who’ve spent wasted hours of…
