Top tech startup news for today, January 21, 2021: General Aeronautics, Cisco, Amazon, Tesla, Quantifind, and Parler

Good afternoon! Below is a list of the top tech startup news for today, the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century. Sorry, we missed yesterday’s top stories.

Former Cisco CEO John Chambers says his startups are leaving Silicon Valley for startup-friendly states. Former Cisco CEO John Chambers said Thursday that none of his tech startups are thinking about coming to California. Chambers added that the ongoing exodus is a warning sign for the future of the state. “We’re in trouble. We’re a state that is taking an entitlement approach, it’s not a good state to do business,” Chambers, who founded JC2 Ventures, said in a CNBC “Squawk Alley” interview. “You’re seeing many companies thinking about leaving and, even worse, none of my start-ups are thinking about coming to California.” Chambers’ startups are not alone. Late last year, at least a dozen other tech companies have either left or planning to leave California state.

Internet Society announces $1 million in grant funding to expand internet access to underserved communities in the Southeastern United States. The Internet Society announced a new grant program, Expanding Potential in Communities, or Truist EPIC Grant, to support broadband initiatives that help alleviate disparities in education, employment, and social welfare in the southeastern United States. As part of the grant, the Internet Society will distribute $1 million in funding through grants between $125,000 to $180,000 to organizations and entities to bring high-speed Internet infrastructure with limited or no Internet access to low-income communities and indigenous populations or communities of color in Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

India-based UAV startup General Aeronautics lands nearly $1M in pre-Series A funding for precision agriculture drones. General Aeronautics (GA), a Bangalore, India-based UAV startup that specializes in drones for precision agriculture, today announced it has raised nearly $1 million (INR 65 million) in pre-Series A financing led by Mela Ventures. Founded just a year ago, General Aeronautics designs and develops unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) towards societal and security applications, including agri-solutions, medical solutions (emergency response management). GA is incubated in the Indian Institute of Science’s incubation center.

U.S. federal judge refuses to force Amazon to put Parler back online. In a minor setback to the free speech social app Parler, a U.S. federal judge on Thursday rejected its demand that Amazon.com restore its web hosting services, saying the company’s cloud-computing unit was well within its rights to deny web hosting services to Parler. However, Parler CEO John Matze said he is ‘confident’ the platform will return back fully by month’s end after series of positive developments. About two weeks ago, Amazon said it pulled the plug on Parler’s servers after it failed to remove violent content from its platform. Amazon’s decision to shut down all Parler servers came a few days after Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores.

Quantifind, an AI startup founded by two atomic physicists, secures $22M in funding to use data science to help automate financial crime investigations. Quantifind, a Silicon Valley-based startup that provides AI solutions for anti-money laundering and fraud detection, today announced it has closed a $22 million funding to accelerate its pursuit of a growing market for automated financial crime and risk investigation. Founded in 2008 by two atomic physics PhDs Ari Tuchman and John Stockton, Quantifind combines internal financial institution data with public domain data to offer a comprehensive and fully automated screen for external financial fraud and money laundering risk factors. For over a decade, Quantifind’s data analytics platform has been used by governments and Fortune 50 companies to gain insights from a comprehensive array of public sources.