Getting mental health services can be burdensome. And if you’re already going through a tough time, you’re probably looking for help sooner than later. But based on the current landscape, it can take months to find the right therapist who also takes your insurance. This is where Meru Health hopes to come in. By providing its service as a benefit for employers to offer to their employees, Meru Health can operate as a first line of treatment where people can get help in a matter of weeks, Meru Health co-founder and CEO Kristian Ranta told TechCrunch. Ranta, who lost his…
Author: geekfenceblogger
Anker, a popular if battery and cable company, recently announced the Mars II projector under its Nebula brand. The company, which primarily sells via Amazon, is expanding out of batteries and cables and is now creating audio and other portable AV gear. This compact, battery-powered DLP projector is their latest creation and it has found a place of honor at our family barbecues. The projector is actually an Android 7.1 device stuffed into a case about as big as a Bluetooth speaker. A physical lens cap slides down and turns on the system and you control everything from he included…
Technology’s heavy hitters are in Chicago this week, showing off their latest ed-tech offerings at International Society for Technology in Education conference. For Google, that means some key updates to Classrooms, the free, browser-based educational software that’s currently used by “over 30 million students” globally, by its count. The app is getting a number of tweaks, including, most notably, more control over quizzes. The Google Forms Quiz now features a “locked mode,” which prohibits students from surfing the web or opening apps until the answers are submitted — in other words, it stops them from cheating on the machine, while taking…
An app that has the needs of modern-day parents in mind, Winnie, has now raised $4 million in additional seed funding in a round led by Reach Capital. Other investors in the new round include Rethink Impact, Homebrew, Ludlow Ventures, Afore Capital, and BBG Ventures, among others. With the new funds, Winnie has raised $6.5 million to date. The San Francisco-based startup, which begun its life as a directory of kid-friendly places largely serving the needs of newer parents, has since expanded to become a larger platform for parents. Winnie was founded by Bay Area technologists, Sara Mauskopf, who spent time at Postmates, Twitter,…
In the new Netflix film “Set It Up,” two personal assistants (played by Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell) come up with an unusual plan to keep their tyrannical bosses (Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs) busy: Make them fall in love with each other. As decreed by the unbreakable laws of romantic comedy, it’s not just the bosses who find themselves attracted to each other, but their assistants as well. And in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by Jon Shieber to talk about the film. If you’re looking for a wildly original or unpredictable story, “Set…
Apple is reportedly working on a new, likely more expensive, set of AirPods with noise-cancellation, according to Bloomberg. The report cites people familiar with the matter, who said that Apple is exploring making the AirPods water resistant. That said, you still don’t want to go swimming with these things, as the rumored water resistant AirPods would be more likely to only stand up against perspiration and rain rather than being submerged. Bloomberg said that one source suggested Apple could add biometric sensors to the next-gen AirPods, furthering the company’s health tracking efforts. Sources also say that the updated AirPods would…
RRE Ventures has raised $265 million for its latest fund. The firm was founded back in 1994, and this is its seventh fund (eighth if you include a separate “opportunity” fund for making follow-on investments). Exits in the last few years include Bitly (acquired by Spectrum Equity), Business Insider (acquired by Axel Springer) and TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter). General Partner Raju Rishi said that RRE will continue to follow its current investment strategy. That means putting about 60 percent of its money into Series A investments, 5 to 10 percent into seed deals and the rest in B or C…
BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. It’s been a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io. BigID has a product that helps companies inventory their data, even extremely large data stores, and identify the most sensitive information, a convenient feature at a time where GDPR data privacy…
India’s PolicyBazaar, which runs a digital insurance business of the same name and a lending marketplace called PaisaBazaar.com, is the latest company to join SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund after it announced a new funding round of over $200 million. The deal was led by the Vision Fund with participation from existing investors including InfoEdge, the company behind jobs platform Naukri.com. The startup’s other investors count Softbank, Temasek, Tiger Global and True North, but an announcement from PolicyBazaar didn’t specifically mention if any of those names took place in this latest round. This new round takes PolicyBazaar to nearly $350 million to date. The…
Another legacy carrier built on offering phone services is now taking a deeper dive into the world of advertising and specifically ad tech to help catapult itself into the next generation of tech and communications. Today, AT&T confirmed that it is buying AppNexus, a programmatic advertising marketplace. The news caps off a week of speculation after it was reported last week that it was eyeing up the company for about $1.6 billion. Today’s release did not reveal any financial terms, except to note that the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018. (We are reaching out…