VR just spawned another unicorn:
Just two weeks after Magic Leap raised $794M at a $4.5B valuation (without a product on the market), today Swiss VR hardware and software developer MindMaze announced $100M in new funding led by The Hinduja Group, a multinational conglomerate that led the company’s seed round last March. This brings MindMaze’s funding total to $109M at a $1.1B post-money valuation.
/giphy Congrats:
Giphy, a New York-based search engine for GIFs, announced a fresh $55M in Series C funding yesterday at a post-money valuation of $300M. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors including General Catalyst, RRE, and Lerer Hippeau, which brings the three-year-old startup’s funding total to $79M.
Meet Jigsaw, Google’s new tech incubator.
Google Ideas, the company’s five-year-old think tank, is relaunching as an incubator named Jigsaw. As Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote in a blog post yesterday, Jigsaw will invest in and develop solutions to “expand access to information for the world’s most vulnerable populations and to defend against the world’s most challenging security threats.”
Speaking of incubators…
500 Startups kicked off its Batch 15 Demo Day yesterday in Mountain View, where 35 founders pitched to a crowd of investors. (Check out TechCrunch’s top 7 finalists, which range from kids’ PC assembly kit Piper to Sqoop, a news discovery network for journalists.) If you’re curious about the diversity stats: 44% of Batch 15 founders are international, 33% are female, 15% are black and 10% are Latino.
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