37M

Amid the speculation and volatility in the casino-like crypto land, there remains a subset of individuals who espouse blockchain’s potential to decentralize various aspects of human activities for the greater good. Taiko‘s founder Daniel Wang is one of these idealistic founders. A serial entrepreneur, Wang initially wanted to bring decentralization to social platforms. Decentralized networks like blockchains, he believes, help resist censorship through distributed data storage and community-based content moderation.…

Everyone has a story in them, as someone famous once said. A startup called Inkitt believes that it can use AI to turn the strongest of these into blockbusters and to build a new “Disney” for the 21st century around that content. Now, it’s raised $37 million in aid of that ambition. The startup’s eponymous app lets people self-publish stories, and then, using AI and data science, it selects what it believes are the most compelling of these to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell on a second app, Galatea. Its…

MariaDB is the subject of another potential takeover bid, as the company behind the eponymous open source relational database management system (RDBMS) confirmed it had received a provisional offer from California-based K1 Investment Management. K1 quietly revealed on Friday that it had tabled what is known as an “unsolicited non-binding indicative proposal” for MariaDB, which — as its name suggests — is a non-binding exploratory offer that may change depending on how negotiations progress in…

DEUNA, a Silicon Valley-based one-click checkout commerce startup, is officially joining Latin America’s nearly $100 billion e-commerce sector with $30 million in Series A funding after largely staying under the radar since being founded in late 2020. Co-founders Roberto Enrique Kafati Santos and Jose Maria Serrano started the company after a career at McKinsey leading digital payments for Kafati Santos and in private equity at Carlyle for Serrano. They also recently brought on Jose Jorge Molina, who was previously…

Founders Fund has made its first investment in the Middle East by backing UAE-based proptech startup Huspy. The $37 million Series A round, one of the largest at this stage in MENA, was led by Sequoia Capital India.  The round also welcomed participation from Fifth Wall, the largest VC firm backing real estate and proptech startups. Chimera Capital invested in the company as well as existing investors from its undisclosed seed round last April, such as Breyer Capital, VentureFriends, COTU, BY Venture Partners, and…

Faseeh Mangi / Bloomberg: Pakistan-based Dastgyr, which is building an e-commerce service, raised a $37M Series A, the country's largest-ever, led by telecom Veon's venture arm — Pakistan's Dastgyr Technologies Pvt., which aims to create an e-commerce platform similar to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. for emerging markets … Faseeh Mangi / Bloomberg: Pakistan-based Dastgyr, which is building an e-commerce service, raised a $37M Series A, the country's largest-ever, led by telecom Veon's venture…