
PopSockets turned phone backs into a $169 million business
From a garage prototype in 2011, PopSockets built a global brand that generated $169 million in revenue by 2017. The company’s growth stemmed from embedding a simple grip into daily phone use, driving word‑of‑mouth buzz and celebrity endorsements.

Krvvy, a women’s innerwear and shapewear brand, and Ugees, an intimate‑wear wash brand, announced a strategic partnership to broaden their product ecosystems and drive direct‑to‑consumer growth. The collaboration will enable cross‑selling and post‑purchase care, aiming to improve retention and lower acquisition costs. Krvvy reported about $638,000 revenue so far and targets $1.59 million for the full year, while Ugees has processed over 500,000 orders and plans to raise up to $1.59 million for expansion. Both firms maintain roughly 70% gross margins and are preparing offline store pilots after upcoming funding rounds.

Catch The Upswing, a new weekly business and leadership podcast, launches on March 25, 2026, hosted by global finance executive Jessica Espinoza. The show features candid conversations with leaders ranging from former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres to media researcher...

Rapido officially launched Ownly, a standalone food‑delivery app in Bengaluru on March 3, 2026, backed by roughly $15 million (₹125 cr) from Nexus Venture Partners. The platform targets the 70,000 FSSAI‑licensed restaurants absent from Swiggy and Zomato, offering a zero‑commission model that...

Dream Sports, the parent of fantasy‑sports platform Dream11, announced it will launch a stockbroking service called Dream Street. The brokerage, aimed at retail investors, builds on the company’s recent wealth‑management app Dream Money and will tap the large Dream11 user...

Ramraj Cotton, the Indian ethnic‑wear label famed for modernising the dhoti, is gearing its operations for a public listing by 2030. Founder K R Nagarajan aims for a ₹10,000 crore (≈$1.2 billion) turnover before the IPO, while rolling out professional systems, senior hires and...

Pensar, a startup that delivers continuous penetration testing through AI agents, closed a seed round led by Basis Set Ventures to accelerate its platform. Co‑founders Kerem Proulx and Kyle Bhiro combine deep cybersecurity expertise with entrepreneurial experience to embed security...
OpenAI has abruptly shut down Sora, its generative‑video service, ending a $1 billion partnership with Disney. The move signals a strategic pivot toward enterprise AI and developer tooling as competition intensifies.
Halter, the New Zealand‑founded AI cattle‑collar company backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, closed a $220 million Series round, lifting its valuation to $2 billion. The funding will fuel expansion into Australia and the United States and underscores venture capital’s appetite for deep‑tech...

Terrestrial Bio, the microneedle vaccine patch pioneer originally founded as Vaxess Technologies, announced a $50 million Series B financing round to shift its focus from vaccines to GLP‑1 peptide delivery. The capital, led by a consortium of biotech investors, will fund clinical...

Trayd, a New York‑based construction‑tech startup, closed a $10 million Series A led by White Star Capital, bringing its total financing to $17 million. The SaaS platform automates payroll, HR, compliance and labor‑cost tracking for specialty trade contractors, shrinking a 14‑hour manual process...

Sherweb secured a $125 million minority investment from Investissement Québec to fund its next growth phase. The capital will expand its cloud marketplace and MSP enablement platform, building on the recent MicroWarehouse acquisition that gave it over 7,500 partners in North America...

Fintech startup Glimpse announced a $35 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from 8VC and Y Combinator. The company, a Y Combinator graduate, pivoted from an Airbnb product‑placement venture to an AI‑driven platform that automates retailer...

Swedish deep‑tech startup Renasens closed a €10 million seed round (about $11 million) to build a pilot plant in Borås, Sweden, for its waterless, chemical‑free textile recycling platform. The technology uses supercritical carbon dioxide to dissolve polymer chains, enabling the separation of...
In this episode of Real Agriculture, Whitney Shaw of Arvo and Sam Jenkins of Punch Card Systems discuss Arvo, an online farmer's market platform that connects local producers directly with consumers. Arvo was conceived to replace informal listings on sites...
Norwegian legal‑tech startup Newcode secured a seed round of over €5.7 million (≈$6.2 million) backed by Alliance VC, The LegalTech Fund and other investors. With this capital, the company will establish an Irish hub in Dublin, hiring 30 employees in its first...

After leaving an AmLaw 200 firm, the author launched Texas Appellate Counsel as a fully remote practice. He discovered that long‑time clients often don’t even know the city where he lives, underscoring that proximity is no longer a trust factor....

London‑based Eunice, which builds AI‑driven due‑diligence infrastructure for regulated markets, closed an $8 million seed and pre‑seed round led by Moonfire Ventures and Speedinvest. The funding will accelerate development of its institutional‑grade AI agents and broaden coverage beyond digital assets into...

Italian‑based Subbyx has closed a €30 million (≈$33 million) Series A round, bringing its total financing to €50 million (≈$55 million). The round, led by Systemiq Capital with Azimut participation and venture debt from Flashpoint, will fund the rollout of its AI‑powered Subbyx Builder platform...

A book tech twitter hasn’t read but is a great biz book Ruthless, the story of Eazy E and Ruthless Records: - eazy e was a 21 year old drug dealer - saved up 200k from selling drugs - used it to...

Swiss startup Pave Space has secured $40 million in seed funding to build a 20‑metric‑ton orbital transfer vehicle capable of moving up to five metric tons from low‑Earth orbit to medium, geostationary or lunar trajectories in less than a day....

India’s leading digital commercial‑vehicle marketplace 91trucks has acquired Motorfloor and Trucksfloor, the two platforms operated by Bhubaneswar‑based Indiyanet. The deal merges two of the country’s top‑traffic sites, creating a more comprehensive buying and selling experience for trucks, buses and three‑wheelers....

Berlin‑based Cellbricks Therapeutics secured €10 million (≈$11 million) in funding, including a €7 million seed round and over €3 million of non‑dilutive capital, to advance its light‑based biofabrication platform. The company aims to commercialise vascularised human tissue implants for complex wound healing and breast...

Swiss startup PAVE Space announced a $40 million seed round led by Visionaries Club and Creandum, accelerating its LYOBA heavy‑lift kick stage development. The company, a 2024 spin‑off from the Gruyère Space Programme, targets rapid satellite transport between orbits and plans...

PZ Myers explains that his cooperative blog, freethoughtblogs, survives on a modest Patreon contribution that covers server costs, leaving the site only slightly in the red and without profit ambitions. He contrasts this lean model with Trump Media & Technology...

Notch Ltd., a former specialty insurer turned AI startup, announced a $30 million Series A round to accelerate its AI operating system for regulated sectors, especially insurance, across the United States. The platform provides transparent, auditable AI agents that automate both front‑office...

Airbase announced its emergence from stealth with a $5 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, joined by Squadra Ventures and Founders You Should Know. The startup aims to automate the Federal Communications Commission’s outdated, manual spectrum‑allocation workflow that relies on...

Fintech VibePay, a UK peer‑to‑peer payment app backed by Nick Candy’s Candy Ventures, entered liquidation after investors withdrew funding. The company, founded in 2019 by Luke Massie, had raised over £12 million (approximately $15 million) and aimed to enable open‑banking account‑to‑account transfers...

In this episode of The Sound of Economics, Bruegel experts Reinhilde Wöglers, Fiona Scott Morton, and Professor Tobias Tröger discuss the European Commission’s new “28th regime” – a voluntary corporate‑law tool aimed at simplifying company formation and attracting venture‑capital investment across...

Dare Okoudjou, a Benin‑born telecom engineer, founded MFS Africa—now rebranded as Onafriq—to build the continent’s underlying payments rail. The network interconnects more than 500 million mobile wallets and 200 million bank accounts across 40 African nations, turning a fragmented ecosystem into a...
Cursor, the AI‑driven code generation platform valued at $29 billion, is seeing investor enthusiasm cool and market demand soften. The shift highlights broader uncertainty for AI‑assisted development tools that power DevOps pipelines.
OpenAI announced today that it is shutting down Sora, its AI video‑generation product, and terminating a $1 billion partnership with Disney. The move reflects mounting compute expenses and a strategic pivot toward enterprise and developer‑focused AI offerings.

Spendesk, the AI‑powered spend‑management platform, announced the hiring of Quentin Vigneau as Chief Product Officer and Alan Wright as Chief Technical Officer. The appointments come as the company celebrates its first profitable year and launches a new finance category, Spend...

Starting a business with the end in mind forces founders to choose the right legal entity, anticipate ownership changes, and embed exit‑oriented provisions from day one. The article compares sole proprietorships, LLCs, C‑corps and S‑corps, highlighting how each impacts tax...

Fintech startup Kiwi has named payments veteran Sumeet Basrani as its new Chief Business Officer, bolstering the firm’s leadership as it pivots toward mass‑scale credit distribution on India’s UPI network. Basrani arrives with more than 15 years of experience at...

Thread Factory, a B2B fashion‑supply platform, secured a pre‑seed round of about $180,000, led by AJVC. The funding will boost its technology stack, expand the team, and grow its retailer‑manufacturer network across India. The startup reports an annual recurring revenue...

Togo’s tech ecosystem gained global attention when Lomé‑based super app Gozem closed a $30 million Series B round in February 2025, briefly placing the country among Africa’s top five startup funding destinations. The nation now hosts over 300 registered startups that have...

Two Los Angeles high‑school friends, Noah Fakheri and Brian Ohebshalom, launched LockedIn, an app that disables distracting applications with a triple‑tap when students step onto campus. The tool debuted at Milken Community School and is already being piloted at other...

Amazon Leo announced a plan to double its launch cadence, targeting 20 missions in the second year after completing 11 launches in the first year. The company already operates more than 200 satellites and has hundreds of flight‑ready units stored...

In this episode, host Brian Dukes talks with serial entrepreneur Rachel Murphy about her two successful exits—first a consultancy she built in her early 20s and later a healthcare‑government services firm she grew to an eight‑figure sale. Rachel shares how...

Fullife Healthcare, the parent of Fast&Up, secured Rs 300 crore (approximately $36 million) in a Series D round led by Elev8 Venture Partners, marking the investor’s first foray into the direct‑to‑consumer segment. The capital will fund brand acceleration, new product lines in digestive...

Cricketer Riyan Parag has invested roughly ₹2 crore (about $240,000) in industrial‑tech startup Proxgy, joining backers Ajinkya Rahane, Nikhil Kamath, Peyush Bansal and Suhail Sameer. Proxgy, founded in 2020, creates IoT‑enabled hardware and AI‑driven software to boost safety and efficiency for blue‑collar workers. The fresh capital...

Yazu Hospitality, a design‑led restaurant group founded in 2019, now runs eight outlets across five Indian cities, with its flagship Yazu brand contributing 85% of revenue. The company projects a 20% revenue increase next fiscal year, targeting Rs 60 crore (~$7.2 million) from...

Thai AI group Amity announced a $100 million Series D round, the biggest generative‑AI raise in Southeast Asia, bringing its total capital to about $160 million. The funding backs a revenue run‑rate that has topped $100 million, driven largely by European operations, and fuels...

Communications strategist Rachel Abad has launched Looped‑in, a behaviour‑change consultancy aimed at embedding audience insight, concept testing and behavioural frameworks into communications planning. Abad brings 15 years of experience working with major Australian organisations such as the Level Crossing Removal...

Co‑working operators in Lagos are being forced to relocate because soaring electricity costs, driven by the new service‑based tariff, are eroding margins. In Band A zones, a ₦200,000‑₦400,000 (≈$435‑$870) monthly bill can be cut to about ₦250,000 (≈$543) by moving to...
Building your own tools like GStack is an amazing experience. You come up with something you think might work and then two days later it replaces what you were doing before. Instead of /plan-ceo-review and /plan-eng-review sequentially, I find myself using...

I've scaled app servers, I've scaled HAProxy, I've scaled Postgres replica dbs, I've scaled job servers Never until today have I had to scale my local max_connections for Postgres but once you run 20 simultaneous workers doing full tests, now I...

The merger of Australian restaurant‑tech firms Mr Yum and me&u defied early scepticism by surviving a grueling first year of integration and emerging profitable by late 2025. Founders focused on disciplined system consolidation, customer migration, and cultural alignment rather than headline...

In this episode of Uncensored CMO, Steve Beckett—former Head of Cycling at Team Sky and the fifth employee of Zwift— walks through the creation of Zwift from a niche indoor cycling concept into a global fitness unicorn. He shares how...
Amazon has completed the acquisition of Fauna Robotics, the New York startup behind the $50,000 Sprout humanoid robot. The deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, brings a consumer‑focused robot into Amazon’s already massive warehouse‑robot fleet of over one million...