#USA DoorDash Partners With b8ta For On-Demand Tech Gadget Delivery

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Intro doordash DoorDash, known for its on-demand food delivery service, has partnered with newly-launched retail store b8ta. b8ta, founded by four former Nest alums, opened earlier this month in Palo Alto to sell trendy tech gadgets and offer hands-on experiences with those products to customers before they buy them. b8ta sells gadgets like the Gi Flybike, a folding electric bicycle, and Thync, a wearable… Read More

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#USA Pinterest Launches A New Way To Track Price Drops On Buyable Pins

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Price Drop Pin & Email notification Pinterest has a new way to entice users to come back and buy things: keeping tabs on the price. That comes in the form today of a new tool that helps Pinterest users monitor price drops on products they’ve pinned. When users save pins, they’ll get a heads up when a price drops in the form of an in-app notification and an email. They can then jump straight to that pin and make… Read More

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#USA Former Ad Tech CEO Rob Leathern Is Building A Subscription Service For Avoiding Ads

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adblock-ios1 Rob Leathern is hoping to help publishers embrace ad blocking, and he’s doing it under a familiar name — Optimal.com, which was previously the social ad company where Leathern was founder and CEO. Brand Networks acquired Optimal (okay, so not exactly the same name, but really, really close) in 2013. Leathern left six months later, though he stayed on the Brand Networks board… Read More

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#USA Build Or Buy? Anatomy Of An Acquisition — Or Why Buffer Just Bought Respondly

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buffer + respondly Radically transparent social media scheduling firm Buffer, which does stuff like publish its staff salaries and publicly detail its company revenue, has announced its first major acquisition — buying social media customer support tool Respondly for — wait for it — an undisclosed amount… Read More

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#USA Social Ad Startup Funnely Raises Seed Funding From Verizon Ventures

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Funnely Funnely, a startup that helps e-commerce companies automate and improve their ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, has raised $988,000 in a seed round led by Verizon Ventures. The product uses businesses’ customer data to create and target ads. The goal is to effectively reach consumers throughout the sales funnel, whether it’s first getting their attention through lead… Read More

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#USA First Round’s Holiday Video Will Have You Reaching For Your Cell Phone

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Screen Shot 2015-12-16 at 6.27.26 PM In the tech world it’s just not the holidays until First Round Capital drops its annual holiday video. It’s that time again, folks. The annual festivities started way back in 2008, the year of our blog. Then it happened again and again. If you’d like to sing along, you’ll find the lyrics below the video. They are most certainly…special. I won’t ruin anything… Read More

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#USA Online Publisher Purch Acquires ShopSavvy

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purch Purch just announced that it has acquired ShopSavvy, the mobile shopping startup backed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Purch was formerly known as TechMediaNetwork and operates sites including Tom’s Guide and AnandTech. The company recently raised a $135 million funding round, and has been actively buying up companies — this is its fourth acquisition in the past year.… Read More

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#USA Service, The Customer Service Startup, Launches Its iOS App

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app_pressshot Service, the LA-based customer service startup that recently closed a $3.1M seed round, just launched its iOS app. As a refresher, Service acts as an intermediary between disappointed customers and businesses. For example, instead of a customer having to fill out a generic complaint form for an airline or retailer they contact Service, who have dedicated support staff to contact the company… Read More

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#Asia 4 Indian startups that stole the limelight

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Money Money Money Photo Credit: GotCredit

Money Money Money Photo Credit: GotCredit

It was a day of investments as food tech firm Eatfresh and logistics firm Rivigo snapped up funding. Acquisitions also made news, with a retail chain gobbling up an online grocer. Here are the four startups that made it to our list today:

Eatfresh

Ubiquitous Foods, which runs the food startup Eatfresh, today announced a fresh round of funding from Kalaari Capital. The amount was not disclosed.

The startup is an online platform for chef-made meals with a menu that changes daily and includes Indian, European, Mediterranean, and Oriental cuisine.

Eatfresh was launched in August this year and delivers in 15 areas around Bangalore. The funds from this round will be used for expansion of the Eatfresh delivery network to Bangalore and Chennai, with more cities to be added in 2016.

Rivigo

Logistics platform Rivigo has secured US$30 million in a series B round led by SAIF Partners, the company said today. The funds were raised through equity and debt financing.

The fresh funds will be used to scale up 10 times in the next 12 months. “We’ll also be focusing on expanding the technology team to add IoT, automation and data sciences,” Deepak Garg, the company’s founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Rivigo operates across major industry verticals like ecommerce, auto, pharma, and the cold chain space.

Rivigo was founded in 2014 as TrucksFirst. It aims to provide a 50 percent reduction in delivery time to clients, while improving upon the quality of life of truck drivers.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer support platform, has made its third acquisition in five months by picking up chat facilitator Konotor for an undisclosed amount, the company said in a statement.

Five-year-old Freshdesk has 50,000 customers globally. It believes customer support is becoming increasingly important for today’s businesses and this acquisition is significant as the importance of mobile first companies grows. Businesses can talk to their mobile app users through Konotor’s chat inbox.

“Mobile ­first companies face a unique set of challenges in customer support and user engagement, creating the need for a different solution,” said Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk.

Spencer’s

Omnipresent Retail India, the parent company of popular Kolkata-based retail chain Spencer’s, has acquired online grocery store MeraGrocer for an undisclosed amount, Livemint reported today.

The online grocery store operates in Gurgaon and Delhi, while Spencer’s currently has 122 stores across 35 cities in India.

Shashwat Goenka, who runs the retail business of Spencer’s, also mentioned that the back-end integration would take around two months. For the past few months, Spencer’s has reportedly been developing an ecommerce platform.

We’ve been bringing you cool Indian startups regularly. Check them out here.

This post 4 Indian startups that stole the limelight appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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#USA Songkick Raises Another $10M From WMG Owner Access Industries

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CrowdSurge_SongKick Songkick, the concert discovery app and ticketing company (after it merged with white-label artist-to-fan ticket seller CrowdSurge), has raised a further $10 million in funding from previous backer Access Industries, owner of WMG. It follows a $16 million Series C from Access, Sequoia, and Index, announced in June. Read More

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