Top tech startup news for today, Thursday, September 12, 2019

Good morning! Below are some of the top tech startup news for today, Thursday, September 12, 2019.

France says it ‘cannot authorize’ Facebook’s libra project on European soil. Facebook suffers another major setback today when French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Thursday Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency libra would put the sovereignty of governments at risk. Speaking at an OECD conference in Paris Thursday, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said libra would put the sovereignty of governments at risk. “All these concerns around libra are serious. So I want to say this with a lot of clarity: In these conditions, we cannot authorize the development of libra on European soil,” Le Maire said.

Real estate tech startup Prevu closes $2 million in seed funding to grow its digital home buying platform and save homebuyers money. Prevu, a real estate tech startup poised to disrupt the homebuying process by delivering greater transparency and savings to homebuyers, has closed $2 million seed funding round to grow its digital home buying platform and disrupt the homebuying process by delivering greater transparency and savings to homebuyers. The round was led by Corigin Ventures, a prominent seed-stage venture capital firm with expertise in the real estate technology and consumer industries as well as a history of backing startups disrupting residential brokerage business models. Prior successful investments include Compass, Transfix, Latch, ClassPass and Wheels Up. Kairos and AVG Basecamp Fund also contributed to the seed round.

Spotify acquires music and audio production talent marketplace startup SoundBetter. Spotify has  acquired SoundBetter, a Brooklyn, NY-based audio production and collaboration marketplace for creators to connect and hire audio professionals. The amount of the deal was not disclosed. Founded in 2012 by CEO Shachar Gilad, SoundBetter offers a comprehensive global marketplace for music and audio production professionals for hire in the world along with a member community of more than 180,000 artists (Singers, Producers, and Mixing & Mastering Engineers) spanning 176 countries and 14,000 cities worldwide. With the acquisition, SoundBetter will join Spotify for Artists, which provides services like insights, profile management and promotion tools to more than 400,000 artists and their teams. This deal will expand this offering giving artists the chance to use SoundBetter as a way to find collaborators, produce great music or generate additional income.

Apple reaches $1 trillion market cap again after iPhone launch. After reaching market cap of over $1 trillion in August 2018, Apple is rejoining the trillion dollar market club. Yesterday, Apple again reached a $1 trillion market cap, following series of new product announcement Tuesday, including the iPhone 11.Even at this impressive market capitalization, Apple is still just the second-most valuable U.S. company by market cap, behind first-place Microsoft Corp at $1.035 trillion. Amazon is in third-place at $904.7 billion market capitalization.

Healthtech startup Healthy.io raises $60 million to help over 35 million Americans suffering from chronic kidney disease with its FDA-approved urine test smartphone device. Healthy.io announced it has closed $60 million Series C funding round to accelerate Healthy.io’s global expansion and product development. The round was led by Corner Ventures with participation by Joy Capital and all previous investors: Ansonia Holdings, Aleph, and Samsung NEXT. The good news does not end there. The Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup also announced it has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its smartphone-based ACR test to be used in the aid of diagnosing chronic kidney disease (CKD). This is the second FDA clearance the company has received. Additionally, the company announced that longtime leader in health care innovation, former executive vice president of Aetna Gary Loveman, Ph.D. will join its Board of Directors.

Cloudera is buying cloud-native AI-powered business intelligence and real-time analytics startup Arcadia Data. Cloudera, an enterprise data cloud company, is buying part of the assets of Arcadia Data for an undisclosed amount. Arcadia Data is a provider of cloud-native AI-powered business intelligence and real-time analytics. As part of the acquisition agreement, Cloudera expect that the entire Arcadia Data organization will join the team. Led by Sushil Thomas, CEO, Arcadia Data provides an architecture that delivers fast insights from modern data platforms like cloud object stores, Apache Kafka and Apache Hadoop. Its patent-pending ArcEngine technology enables enterprises to generate insights in use cases like data lakes, cybersecurity, IoT and customer intelligence.

Boston-based Akeneo raises $46 million in funding. Akeneo, a tech startup that provide Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions for corporate brands and retailers, has raised $46m in funding. to continue to invest further in its sales and marketing efforts in the United States, while doubling down on research and development, including product data intelligence to boost product information automation and monitor product experience quality. The round was led by Summit Partners, with participation from existing investors Alven, Partech, and Salesforce Ventures, as well as Akeneo’s board member Stephan Dietrich. The company intends to use the funds  Akeneo also plans to hire more than 100 additional staff in the upcoming year to support this next round of rapid growth.