The company captures diverse microbes for agricultural applications, like crop protection, and screens strains for the best assays that would work for insect, disease and nematode control.

SoftBank Group Corp. is doubling down on its commitment to Latin America. Today, the Japanese investment conglomerate is announcing the launch of the SoftBank Latin America Fund II, its second dedicated private investment fund focused on tech companies located in LatAm. SoftBank is launching the new fund with an initial $3 billion commitment. “Fund II […]

Helsinki-based VC Maki.vc is poised to reach the final close of its second fund at €100 million, with the aim to invest in seed-stage startups across Europe. The first investments from the new fund include UK-based Baseimmune (antigen discovery and vaccine design), Volare (Foodtech), and PixieRay (adaptive eyeglasses). Maki.vc’s initial ticket sizes range from €250,000 […]

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said on Tuesday it fined Google $177 million for abusing its market dominance in the Android operating system (OS) market. The U.S. tech company has restricted market competition by prohibiting local smartphone makers like Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics from customizing their Android OS, through Google’s anti-fragmentation agreements (AFA), […]

London-based PassFort, a SaaS provider that helps business meet compliance requirements such as KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) reporting, has closed a $16.2 million Series A led by US growth equity fund, Level Equity. The 2015-founded startup‘s existing investors OpenOcean, Episode 1 and Entrepreneur First also participated in the round. The Series […]

Apple is set to announce new iPhone models today. The company is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live. Rumor has it that there […]

India and Singapore are working to link their digital payments systems to enable “instant, low-cost fund transfers,” in a major push to disrupt the cross-border transactions between the two nations that amounts to over $1 billion each year. The project to link India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Singapore’s PayNow is targeted for operationalization by […]

Whether or not Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom survives Tuesday’s recall election may depend to some degree on a small but vocal group of Silicon Valley power players who’ve thrown their weight behind the effort to oust him, including some who previously supported mostly Democratic politicians. To better understand what happened, we talked recently with […]