Roundup of news and ideas from the world of startups – Week ending 20th Jan 2019
News you can use
Amazon: why it’s hard to escape its long reach – Everything Amazon does seems to make news. A recent article in the Wired magazine by Paris Martineu and Louise Matsakis highlights “WHY IT’S HARD TO ESCAPE AMAZON’S LONG REACH” In the article, the authors begin by explaining “The company is known as the “everything store,” but in its dogged pursuit of growth, Amazon has come to dominate more than just ecommerce. It’s now the largest provider of cloud computing services and a maker of home security systems. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks. The company now occupies roughly as much space worldwide as 38 Pentagons. It has grown so large that Amazon’s many subsidiaries are difficult to track—so we catalogued them all for you. This is our exhaustive map of the Kingdom of Amazon.”
Image : The Wried
Purdue hits startup milestone with 200+ startups, $350 million funding in five years, nine acquired for $2.3+ billion – Purdue University hit a milestone in startup creation in 2018 with 223 startups, more than $350 million in funding and investments generated and more than 300 new jobs, officials announced today
Corporate M&A
Indian education technology startup Byju’s buys Osmo for $120 million – Indian education technology firm Byju’s (officially known as Think and Learn Private Ltd) has announced it has acquired education gaming and app startup Osmo for $120 million. Firm says near future for education game company involves more content, lower cost
Coinbase acqui-hires San Francisco startup Blockspring – Coinbase is continuing its push to suck up talent after the $8 billion-valued crypto business snapped up Blockspring, a San Francisco-based startup that enables developers to collect and process data from APIs. The undisclosed deal was announced by Blockspring on its blog, and confirmed to TechCrunch by a Coinbase representative. Coinbase declined to comment further.
Ubiquity6 acquires AR music startup Wavy – Ubiquity6 has announced that it is acquiring Wavy, a small AR music startup founded last year. In a blog post, the Wavy team confirmed they’ll be joining the Ubiquity6 team and won’t be continuing their work on the Wavy app. “When we met the team at Ubiquity6, it became apparent that joining the team there would be a leap forward towards our shared mission of enabling creators to edit reality,” the post reads.
Failed Startups
AR headset company Meta shutting down after assets are sold – Augmented reality technology enables us to see things in virtual sphere, and lot of startups are trying to innovate in the space. Meta, maker of the Meta augmented reality headset, was incubated at Y Combinator and became the first to ship a set of “end-to-end” AR glasses. The AR startup that was has been sold to an unknown company after a months-long struggle to keep its doors open.
Shuttle startup Chariot will shut down less than 3 years after its $65m sale to Ford – Ford is undergoing a large scale corporate restructuring, that includes shutting its Chariot commuter shuttle service. After Chariot raised $3m in its first 2 years, it was acquired by Ford for a reported $65m in 2016 and added to Ford’s ‘Smart Mobility’ division. In 2016, Ford paid more than $65 million for shuttle-van startup Chariot