BardTech

The post Getting personal: Funding rises for software-driven tastemakers appeared first on BardTech . Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Global unicorn exits hit multi-year high in 2018 Boston-area startups are on pace to overtake NYC venture totals It has the feel of a science fiction plot. A young man heads online to look up deals on things he likes. Slowly, the tables turn. Now, it’s the computer that starts telling him what he wants. Buy these pants. Play this song. Eat this pizza. Date this girl. Read news with this political spin… OK, I lied. This isn’t sci-fi at all. It’s the current reality. And it’s the kind of thing venture capitalists seem keen on funding. An analysis of Crunchbase data shows that global venture funding for personalization and recommendation platforms has surged in recent quarters. Investors are pouring billions into the space, creating a string of newly minted unicorns relying on algorithms to customize music streams,...

The post Bessemer is reportedly raising $1.6B for its tenth fund appeared first on BardTech . Bessemer Venture Partners is gearing up for its next billion-dollar fund. The early-stage venture capital firm, which had filed to raise new capital in early August, has reportedly set a $1.6 billion target for its tenth flagship fund, an amount that a source familiar with the fundraise tells us is “directionally correct.” Bessemer declined to comment. If Bessemer indeed raises that amount, it will be the same size as its ninth fund, which closed on $1.6 billion in 2015. If that’s the case, Bessemer may be bucking VCs’ new favorite trend of raising their largest funds to date. Maybe, just maybe, Bessemer hasn’t fallen victim to the SoftBank effect . The Japanese telecom giant has a nearly $100 billion “Vision Fund” and invests in tech companies, competing directly with Silicon Valley heavyweights.  General Catalyst, for example, closed its biggest fund ever earlier this year on $...

The post Cleo Capital sets $10M target to fund female entrepreneurs appeared first on BardTech . Sarah Kunst has filed to raise $10 million for her debut venture capital fund, Cleo Capital . According to Axios , t he firm will give cash to female entrepreneurs who will act as scouts.  Scouts look for viable early-stage startups for firms to invest in and then receive a cut of the profits on the investments. Kunst, pictured above, is a scout for Sequoia; it’s unclear if that will change now that she’s running her own firm. She’s also the founder of ProDay, a fitness tech startup that had raised at least $500,000 from angel investors, including Arielle Zuckerberg, but folded earlier this year. We’ve reached out to Kunst for comment. Cleo isn’t the only female-focused fund with which Kunst is involved. She joined Bumble as a senior adviser in February, and earlier this month, the popular dating app announced the launch of a VC fund targeting early-stage startups with wom...

The post Armory lands $10M Series A to bring continuous delivery to enterprise masses appeared first on BardTech . Armory , a startup that has built a CI/CD platform on top the open source Spinnaker project , announced a $10 million Series A today led by Crosslink Capital. Other investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, YCombinator and Robin Vasan. Software development certainly has changed over the last several years, going from long cycles between updates to a continuous delivery model. The concept is actually called CI/CD or continuous integration/continuous delivery. Armory’s product is designed to eliminate some of the complexity associated with deploying this kind of solution. When they started the company, the founders made a decision to hitch their wagon to Spinnaker, a project that had the backing of industry heavyweights like Google and Netflix. “Spinnaker would become an emerging standard for enabling truly multi-cloud deployments at scale. In...