Top tech startup news for today, Thursday, July 11, 2019

Good morning! Below are some of the top tech startup news for today, Thursday, July 11, 2019.

An Apple Watch bug allowed people to spy on your iPhone; Apple disabled the feature. Apple has deactivated the Walkie-Talkie feature on its Apple Watch after the company finds that people can use it to eavesdrop on an iPhone. Back in January, a similar bug lets people use a FaceTime exploit to listen in on someone else’s iPhone. Apple is working on a fix, and says it doesn’t know of anyone using the bug against any of its customers. Initially, the company said it was not aware of the Walkie-Talkie bug being exploited by anybody in the real world. Apple later backtrack and said it had been “made aware” of a flaw that “could allow somebody to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent,”and apologized for the inconvenience.

On-demand manufacturing startup Xometry receives $5 million investment to grow its custom manufacturing on demand marketplace. Xometry, a Gaithersburg, Maryland-based large on-demand manufacturing marketplace, has received about $5 million investment from Robert Bosch Venture Capital. RBVC will join the company’s recently announced Series D round. This additional investment brings the total amount raised in the Series D to $55MM. Xometry has raised $118MM overall. Founded by CEO Randy Altschuler, Xometry provides the Instant Quoting Engine, which gives product designers the ability to simply upload a CAD file, get instant quotes and then order a wide variety of custom manufactured parts. The orders are then sourced through a partner network of over 3,000 manufacturers. The company’s customers include include BMW, Bosch, Dell Technologies, General Electric and NASA.

NEAR secures $12.1 million to bridge the adoption gap for decentralized applications (DApps). Near, creators of NEAR Protocol, a developer-friendly platform for building decentralized applications, has raised $12.1 million venture round to bridge the adoption gap for decentralized applications (Dapps). The round was led by Metastable and Accomplice and with participation from Electric Capital, Pantera Capital and Amplify Partners. Other notable investors include Multicoin Capital, ACapital, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO Colab Ventures, Scalar Capital and Ripple’s Xpring. Notable angels include Naval Ravikant, Andrew Keys and Balaji Srinivasan.

Matterport to acquire machine learning and computer vision technology startup Arraiy. Matterport, a Sunnyvale, California-based world leader in 3D capture technology and data, is to acquire Arraiy for an undisclosed amount. Arraiy is a provider of machine learning and computer vision technology that allows visual creators to integrate real and virtual worlds. Matterport will integrate Arraiy’s core engineering team into its team when the acquisition is complete. The deal will also bring Matterport into close collaboration with OpenCV, the AI industry’s leading open source computer vision and machine learning software initiative, led by Arraiy co-founder Gary Bradski.

Swit raises $6 million to dominate the $45 billion team collaboration app market. With booming team collaboration app market, and in the wake of Slack’s recent IPO, San Francisco-based startup Swit today announced it has raised more than $6 million in additional funding to aid its already rapid growth within the app space. Founded in 2017 by Josh Lee, Swit is a team collaboration suite that has seamlessly combined a cutting-edge team communication with a high-performance task management. Swit is being used by businesses of all sizes across the United States and internationally.