TechCrunch Startup News

BrainQ, an Israel-based startup that aims to help stroke victims and those with spinal cord injuries treat their injuries with the help of a personalized electromagnetic treatment protocol, today announced that it has raised a $5.3 million funding round on top of the $3.5 million the company previously raised. The company’s investors include Qure Ventures, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lerer Hippeau has raised two new funds — $122 million for a sixth fund devoted to seed stage investments, as well as $60 million for a “Select Fund” focused on later-stage deals. Managing Partner Eric Hippeau said both funds will be used to continue the firm’s existing strategy: “We continue to be seed-first investors and New York-first investors. We’re big believers in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As old-school industries like oil and gas increasingly network entities like oil platforms, they become more vulnerable to hacking attacks that were impossible when they were stand-alone. That requires a new approach to security and Xage (prounounced Zage), a security startup that launched last year thinks it has the answer with a concept called ‘fingerprinting’ combined with the blockchain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Monzo, one of a plethora of U.K. fintech startups aiming to re-invent current account banking, has launched a new feature that makes it even more frictionless to transfer money to friends. Dubbed ‘Nearby Friends’, the new geolocation functionality uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Whether forAR or robots, anytime you have software interacting with the world, itneeds a 3D model of the globe.We think that map will look a lot more like the decentralized internet than a version of Apple Maps or Google Maps.” That’s the idea behind new startup Fantasmo, according to co-founder JamesonDetweiler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HQ, the live trivia game that is now seeing up to 2 million players per game, is introducing some new social features, including answer sharing with friends. The company has been testing this feature across a small group of users already, but on Friday the feature will roll out to all HQ users. Here’s how it works: Users can connect their address book to HQ and add their friends. Once they have added friends, they can see which of their friends are playing the game alongside them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Startups in Brazil, Latin America’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem, are no longer solely focused on Brazil as their only frontier to conquer. Based on conversations with founders and in tracking the news, dozens of startups born in Brazil have realized they can compete on a global scale and expand their companies quickly by exporting their business models to other regional markets around the world, including Canada, Colombia, Europe, Japan, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gamalon wants to change the game when it comes to understanding text-based customer communications. Instead of using neural networks to learn about vast corpuses of information, the startup takes a different approach, putting the text in a database and building decision trees to very rapidly train the data to arrive at the required information. Today, it announced a $20 million Series A investment led by Intel Capital. Other participants in the round included . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why has San Francisco’s startup scene generated so many hugely valuable companies over the past decade? That’s the question we asked over the past few weeks while analyzing San Francisco startup funding, exit, and unicorn creation data. After all, it’s not as if founders of Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Dropbox and Twitter had to get office space within a couple of miles of each other. We hadn’t thought our data-centric approach would yield a clear recipe for success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nearly every aspect of the current ICO market is pay-for-play or otherwise tainted. I do not paint the industry with such a broad brush lightly but this sort of chicanery hasn’t existed since the heyday of print media when journalists – myself included – took long, convoluted trips to distant headquarters where they enjoyed, as I wrote back in 2007, “suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sling TV expands cloud DVR service to a bunch of new devices Dish’s Sling TV service is expanding its Cloud DVR to a wide variety of new devices. Chrome browser, Chromecast, Xbox One, LG Smart TVs, and more recent models of Samsung Smart TVs (2016 and 2017 models) will all now support Sling TV’s Cloud DVR service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SoFi founder Mike Cagney is back with a new startup and $50 million in funding, too Mike Cagney, who was ousted last summer from the lending company he founded, is back with a new startup and a whole lot of funding from at least one of his previous investors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hustle 20X’d its annual revenue run rate in 15 months by denying clients that contradict its political views. It’s a curious, controversial, yet successful strategy for the startup whose app lets activists and marketers text thousands of potential supporters or customers one at a time. Compared to generic email blasts and robocalls, Hustle gets much higher conversion rates because people like connecting with a real human who can answer their follow-up questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To paraphrase a saying popularized by countless dorm room stoners: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you use the hype around decentralized crypto economies to sell bacon.” The latest example of this age-old adage comes to us from Oscar Meyer and involves their exciting new cryp-faux-currency, Bacoin. The currency can be redeemed for bacon and you “mine” it by sharing the good news of bacoin with your friends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rip Pruisken waffled in college (we got that pun safely out of the way for now). He was a student in the Ivy League at Brown University, and had focused on academics for much of his life. His parents were physicists, and “I thought I would study some sort of cookie-cutter path of studying something that I would use post-college,” he explained. “I didn’t really consider entrepreneurship to be a viable option because I was still in that frame of mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The buzz or chime of a push notification on your phone is, at best, a distraction, and at worst, a source of stress and anxiety. A new app called Aloe Bud wants to make those push notifications into something more welcome: gentle reminders to take care of yourself and your own needs. With its configurable reminders, Aloe Bud will encourage you to take a break, drink water, move your body, rest, breathe, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Often when I attend a conference or a networking event I am surprised by how many people operate at the periphery of the tech industry. Social media gurus, SEO “ninjas,” bloggers, etc. It’s a coterie of tech “club promoters.” The hype men of the industry. “Hack your way to success.” “Meet the right people.” “Become a business superstar.” They’ve found their silver bullet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Drew Houston to upload his thoughts at TC Disrupt SF in September Dropbox is a critically important tool for more than 500 million people. The company launched back in 2007 and founder and CEO Drew Houston has spent the last decade growing Dropbox to the behemoth it is today. During that time, Houston has made some tough decisions. A few years ago, Houston decided to move the Dropbox infrastructure off of AWS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Groupon founder Andrew Mason’s audio tour startup Detour has been sold to Bose. The acquisition, which involves only the software and tour content – not the team – was quietly announced on Detour’s blog a few days ago, followed by an email to customers. Bose, initially, seems like an unlikely acquirer for an app designed to help people discover a city through narrated walking tours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Etleap is a play on words for a common set of data practices: extract, transform and load. The startup is trying to place these activities in a modern context, automating what they can and in general speeding up what has been a tedious and highly technical practice. Today, they announced a $1.5 million seed round. Investors include First Round Capital, SV Angel, Liquid2, BoxGroup and other unnamed investors. The startup launched five years ago as a Y Combinator company. It spent a good 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While most people probably would not think of New York as a hotbed for enterprise startups of any kind, it is actually quite active. When you stop to consider that the world’s biggest banks and financial services companies are located there, it would certainly make sense for security startups to concentrate on such a huge potential market — and it turns out, that’s the case. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every startup needs a little skill and a little luck. BigID, a NYC-based data governance solution has been blessed with both. The company, which helps customers identify sensitive data in big data stores, launched at just about the same time that the EU announced the GDPR data privacy regulations. Today, the company is having trouble keeping up with the business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pivotal has kind of a strange role for a company. On one hand its part of the EMC federation companies that Dell acquired in 2016 for a cool $67 billion, but it’s also an independently operated entity within that broader Dell family of companies — and that has to be a fine line to walk. Whatever the challenges, the company went public yesterday and joined VMware as a separately traded company within Dell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Funding Societies co-founders Reynold Wijaya and Kelvin Teo. Funding Societies, a peer-to-peer lending platform in Southeast Asia, said today that it has raised a $25 million Series B led by Softbank Ventures Korea, the Japanese tech conglomerate’s early-stage venture capital unit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices