Dock-less bike rental company Mobike is teaming up with messaging app firm Line to boost its presence in Japan. Line, which is Japan’s most popular messaging app with 71 million users in the country, is making an undisclosed investment in Mobike Japan, the Chinese firm’s entity in the country. The deal will see the Mobike

Convercent, a company that provides ethics and compliance software to businesses, today announced that it has raised a $25 million funding round led by Rho Ventures. Additional investors include Sapphire Ventures and Tola Capital. The idea behind Convercent is to give businesses the tools to, in MBA-speak, “operationalize ethics.” In practice, this means that the

Dgraph is an increasingly popular open-source distributed graph database that uses a version of Facebook’s GraphQL as its default query language. Today, the company announced that it has raised $3 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, Blackbird Ventures and AirTree (this includes a $1.1 million seed round the company raised last year). The

While some financial derivatives like futures trading are slowly coming to Bitcoin, we’re still a long time away from these financial products being widely available for the entire cryptocurrency asset class. So dydX is building a decentralized protocol for derivatives, built on the Ethereum blockchain and the 0x protocol. The protocol lets you take out

The SoftBank Group has finally made a good tech investment around real estate. After investing $4.4 billion in what is essentially a bespoke office space rental business (WeWork) and another $450 million in Zillow for rich people (Compass), the gargantuan Japanese tech investor is leading a $120 million round of funding for Lemonade, a startup

Ola, the Uber rival in India, is entering the food delivery space after it announced a deal to acquire Foodpanda’s India business from its parent company DeliveryHero. The deal will see Ola scoop up the Foodpanda India business with DeliveryHero taking an undisclosed amount of Ola stock in exchange. Undisclosed all-stock deals are usually indicative

AxleHire, a last-mile logistics startup that facilitates deliveries for companies like HelloFresh, Freshly, Sun Basket, La Boulangerie and others, has raised $4.3 million from Acorn Pacific, RGA Ventures and others. AxleHire, which started back in 2015, is doing more than 150,000 shipments per month and bringing in $750,000 in monthly revenues. By April, AxleHire expects

Springboard is a platform that helps people advance their tech skills, and ultimately career. Today it took a step further to realizing its own potential after it landed a $9.5 million Series A round to develop specialisms. I wrote about the U.S.-based service nearly two years ago when it was just starting out and it

Horizons Ventures, the VC firm founded by Hong Kong’s richest man Li Ka-Shing, has made a rare early-stage investment after it backed AI startup Fano Labs. Horizons has invested in the likes of Facebook, Razer, Slack, Improbable, Spotify and more, and now it is putting undisclosed money into Fano Labs, which recently graduated AI accelerator

Andover, Massachusetts-based Casa Systems had a tough time pulling off its IPO this week. The broadband solutions company wanted to debut Thursday, but pushed its launch back to Friday, likely because of weak initial demand. Casa had planned to sell 8.4 million shares, but reduced it to 6 million following the investor roadshow (where companies pitch

Airwallex, an Australia-based fintech startup that helps banks and businesses handle cross-border transactions at scale, has closed a $6 million investment ahead of a planned Series B next year. The new funding comes from Square Peg — a VC firm located in Melbourne, the same city as Airwallex HQ — which joins Tencent, MasterCard, Gobi Ventures and Sequoia

Go-Jek, the company leading Uber and Grab in Southeast Asia’s largest market, has bagged a hattrick of deals to advance its mobile payment strategy. Indonesia-based Go-Jek revealed it has acquired offline payment firm Kartuku, payment gateway Midtrans and payment and lending network Mapan for undisclosed sums. The company started out in 2015 offering a ride-hailing service for motorbike

In the eight years since Frederic Descamps and Jordan Maynard launched their last gaming startup, the industry they helped shape with A Bit Lucky now brings in more than $100 billion in revenues globally. Games like League of Legends and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds have brought about a resurgence in gaming on personal computers. Indeed, user-generated content

Getting the myriad of devices involved in the industrial internet of things provisioned and communicating with one another in a secure way will be one of the great technological challenges facing companies in the coming years. Xage (prounounced Zage) emerged from stealth today with a blockchain-based security solution that could help simplify this. The company also

Boston biotech startup Ginkgo Bioworks has announced the raise of $275 million in Series D funding to build out its Bioworks3 production facility. The funding comes from previous investors Viking Global, Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Cascade Investment, Bill Gates, as well as new investor, General Atlantic. The company previously raised over $154 million, bringing the total

Teabox, the company pioneered the concept of selling tea to direct to consumers online, has served up $7 million in fresh funding to grow its five-year-old business. This new infusion of capital — last tea joke, I promise — is a Series B round that takes Teabox, which has head offices in India and Singapore,

Loans can be the hardest to get for the people who need them the most. An estimated 45 million Americans don’t have a credit score and others have trouble bringing up their scores, even if they are in a better financial position than in years past. While most lenders would consider low-income families with bad credit scores

Sophia Amoruso famously founded the retailer Nasty Gal, growing it from an eBay store that sold vintage items to a darling of the fashion world that was seeing more than $300 million in sales at one point. Somewhere along the way, however, Nasty Gal lost its way. After raising $65 million over its 10 years

Here’s a great present for a sports fan this holiday season: Fanchest is a Brooklyn-based startup that curates and sends team-themed gift boxes as gift. The boxes start at $59 and include about $80 worth of apparel and gear from whatever pro or college team you choose. Today the startup has announced $4M in seed

Japanese company ispace has raised $90.2 million in a Series A funding round, an amount it’s calling the “largest ever” Series A in commercial space financing. The funding comes from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, Development Bank of Japan, Tokyo Broadcasting System, Konika Minolta and others, and will help the company continue its progress towards