Top tech startup news stories for the week of January 30, 2022

Happy Sunday! Here’s the past week in a review just in case you missed some of the top technology and startup news. Here are the most popular stories on TechStartups for the week of January 30, 2022.

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Amsterdam-based scooter startup Dott raises $70M in new funding to roll out new e-bikes and expand into new cities and countries. Amsterdam-based Dott said it had raised an extra $70 million to roll out new e-bikes, expand into new cities and countries and offer more services. The announcement comes a year after the company raised $85 million in the Series B funding. The latest round brings the total money raised by Dott to around $210 million. Dott was founded in 2018 by two former executives of Chinese bike startup Ofo, Maxim Romain, and Henri Moissinac. After surviving the Chinese bike-sharing bubble, the duo decided to launch Dott, a micro-mobility European startup that offers dock-less, shared electrical scooters, and bikes as alternatives for short-distance travel. Read more…

Saudi Arabia unveils more than $6.4 billion in technology and startup investment at LEAP22. Saudi Arabia has unveiled US$6.4 billion in global technology and startup investment in a milestone announcement set to cement the Kingdom’s position as an emerging leader of the digital economy and attract companies from around the world to set up in the country. The announcements were made at LEAP – the inaugural edition of the technology event the Kingdom is hosting and hoping will join the likes of CES, MWC, IFA as one of the must-attend annual technology conferences. Approximately 100,000 people attended the event. Read more…

PayPal lost 25% of its market value in just one day after it reported weak earnings caused by inflation and 4.5 million “illegitimate” accounts that joined its platform. Payments giant PayPal has lost a quarter of its market value after the company reported weak guidance that it blamed in part on inflation and supply chain issues. PayPal says continued headwinds from eBay Inc in the first half of this year. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman also pointed to challenges including the transition of former owner eBay to its own payments platform and “exogenous factors” like inflation bringing down consumer spending and supply chain issues “disproportionately impacting” cross-border payments. Read more…

Meditation and sleep app Calm acquires health tech startup Ripple Health Group; appoints a new co-CEO. Calm, the #1 meditation and sleep app, announced Wednesday it has acquired health technology startup Ripple Health Group. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the acquisition agreement, Ripple’s CEO David Ko will now serve as Calm’s co-CEO alongside Calm co-founder Michael Acton Smith. Ripple is also a San Francisco-based startup. It was founded in 2019 by Anastasios Kasiolas, David Ko, and Rhett Woods to bring physical, mental, and social help to every person. Ripple works to connect people with proper health care. Read more…

TuSimple becomes the world’s first company to complete more than 550 miles of fully driverless truck driving on public roads without a human driver behind the wheel. TuSimple is a San Diego-based autonomous trucking unicorn startup redefining the way freight moves from one point to another by offering game-changing autonomous capacity operating on the world’s first autonomous freight network without any human driver. This week, TuSimple announced its autonomous trucks have completed more than 550 miles (885 km) of public road driving in Arizona without a human driver on board. The startup added that it has since “completed a total of seven fully autonomous runs on that route, adding that no humans were used to operate the truck remotely, or intervene in traffic.” Read more…

Metaverse real estate sales top $500 million; projected to double in 2022. Metaverse started dominating the headlines back in October 2021 after Facebook announced it was changing its rebranding to Meta to reflect its focus on the metaverse. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said that the tech giant has committed $10 billion to transition from its much-criticized social network and related family of apps into what Zuckerberg describes as an “embodied internet.” Since then, thousands, if not millions of users are already buying and selling in the metaverse. One of the biggest areas is real estate. Last November, metaverse startup Decentraland announced it sold a patch of virtual real estate in the online world for a record $2.43 million worth of cryptocurrency, making it the world’s most expensive virtual real estate. Read more…

Crypto exchange FTX raises $400M in funding, valuing the 3-year-old tech startup at $32 billion. Just last week, we wrote about FTX U.S., the American affiliate of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, after the company raised $400 million in its first external funding round from high-profile investors including Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. The Series A funding round gives FTX U.S. a valuation of $8 billion, placing it among the world’s most valuable private crypto firms. This week, the parent company of FTX U.S., FTX, announced it has raised $400 million in a new round of funding. The deal gives the crypto exchange startup an eye-popping valuation of $32 billion, up from $25 billion in October 2021 when we covered the company. Read more…

Canvas.com loses its domain name after a district court judge ordered the diversity recruiting startup to cease using the brand due to trademark infringement. It looks like the diversity recruiting platform Canvas.com is going to have to change its brand and domain name after losing the second round of a legal battle with Salt Lake City, Utah-based Instructure. On January 5, the case was brought before U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball who later granted a request for a preliminary junction by Instructure, Inc., thereby ordering Canvas to stop using its domain name Canvas.com. The Judge also gave Canvas 15 days (January 20) to cease using the brand, delete all online posts using the Canvas brand, and stop using the canvas.com domain name. However, Canvas continued to use the brand and Canvas.com domain name after the deadline came. Canvas later appealed the District Court ruling to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Read more…

Dubai-based crypto tech startup MRHB DeFi raises $5.5M to bring ethical DeFi and halal crypto opportunities to excluded communities everywhere.  MRHB DeFi announced it has raised a total of $5.5 million in funding through a series of private and public funding rounds which culminated in an initial DEX offering (IDO) that was oversubscribed on the DODO and ZeeDO launchpads. MRHB DeFi consists of a team of researchers, technocrats, influencers, Islamic fintech experts & business entrepreneurs, who came together to ensure that MRHB DeFi prevails in a manner that will impact society as a whole, essentially bridging the gap between the faith-conscious communities and the blockchain world. Read more…

Paypal founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel secretly funded a ‘Cyber Warfare’ tech startup that hacked WhatsApp. Boldend is an American cyber ware startup that has kept a low profile all these years. Boldend’s hacking tools could also reportedly bypass WhatsApp’s security. Now according to a new report by Forbes, citing a piece from the New York Times, the San Diego-based Boldend is secretly backed by Billionaire Facebook Investor Peter Thiel.  In the Forbes article, the magazine pointed to The Times story about Israeli spyware business NSO Group. Read more…

Vendelux raises $2.4M seed round to help companies discover the best industry events. Vendelux, a New York-based tech startup that helps marketing and sales discover the best industry events, has closed $2.4 million in seed capital financing to support the development of the platform’s event intelligence product suite—including technology for users to find events and conferences with their key customers, competitors, and partners—and expansion of the team. The round was led by Tenacity Venture Capital, with participation from Earl Grey Capital, Pareto Holdings, and a number of SaaS founders, including Shafqat Islam and Avi Muchnick. The equity raise coincides with the company’s official launch from stealth amid promising gains in revenue. The most recent quarter showed double-digit month–over–month growth. Read more…

U.K government grants funding to blockchain startup Millicent to build the next generation of digital finance. UK-based distributed ledger company, Millicent announced the latest funding raise from one of the government’s most prestigious and competitive research and development grants. The blockchain company was awarded the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Innovate UK SMART Award with an aim to further the development of its digital finance network and build the next generation of distributed technologies. Co-funded by the UK Government’s innovation agency, Millicent is a hybrid blockchain tech startup that’s building the infrastructure for the future of global finance. The company is led by Harvard Business School alum and founder of Millicent, Stella Dyer, who said the company is on track to provide digital financial services to over 1.7 billion people across the globe. Read more…