Startup

Wes Blackwell joins Scout Ventures to invest in early-stage, veteran-led startups

We haven’t written much about Scout Ventures, but the New York City-based firm has built up a big portfolio over nearly a decade of investing, with exits like Olapic (acquired by Monotype for $130 million) and Kanvas (acquired by TechCrunch’s parent company AOL).

And, it’s done all of this with just one full-time partner, Bradley C. Harrison — unt

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LightTag is a text annotation platform for data scientists creating AI training data

LightTag, a newly launched startup from a former NLP researcher at Citi, has built a “text annotation platform” designed to assist data scientists who need to quickly create training data for their AI systems. It’s a classic picks ‘n’ shovels move, in that the bootstrapped Berlin-based company is hoping to take advantage of the current boom in AI d

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Cleveland offered $120 million in freebies lure Amazon to the city

A Cleveland.com article detailed the lengths the small midwestern city would go to lure Amazon’s in 50,000-person HQ2. In a document obtained by reporter Mark Naymik, we learn that Cleveland was ready to give over $120 million in free services to Amazon including considerably reduced fares on Cleveland-area trains and buses.

The document, available

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Free stock trading app Robinhood rockets to a $5.6B valuation with new funding round

Robinhood started off as a dead-simple stock trading application that had no transaction fees — but since it’s continued to grow, and especially as it starts to dive into cryptocurrency, investors are getting pretty excited about its prospects and are pouring a ton of new funding into it.

And it’s that tantalizing prospect of creating a next g

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Necto looks to help individuals get their own local ISP businesses off the ground

If you live in a city, you’re probably deciding between a handful of major broadband or wireless carriers — maybe something like Comcast or AT-T. But there’s a good chance that there are a bunch of local carriers that are looking to get off the ground, and Benjamin Huang wants to help make sure there are even more options/.

That’s the idea b

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Tailor Brands raises $15.5M for AI-driven logo creation and more

Tailor Brands, a startup that automates parts of the branding and marketing process for small businesses, announced this morning that it has raised $15.5 million in Series B funding.

CEO Yali Saar has said the company sits at the intersection of design and machine learning. The idea is to create technology that understands the best practices of

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  1. Google to acquire cloud migration startup Velostrata
  2. Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, now lets you pay ‘Nearby Friends’
  3. MoviePass parent drops another 46%
  4. Fantasmo is a decentralized map for robots and augmented reality
  5. Emily Weiss and Kirsten Green will join us on the Main Stage at TC Disrupt SF