Notivize makes it easier for non-technical teams to optimize app notifications

A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications. The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that …

End Game, the startup behind Zombs Royale, raises $3M

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: “We’re just building games. And to be honest, we don’t know what we’re doing.” Despite this self-proclaimed ignorance, End Game has just raised $3 million in seed funding from an impressive group …

Teen hit Yolo raises $8M to let you Snapchat anonymously

It wasn’t a fad. Yolo became the country’s No. 1 app just a week after launch by letting teens ask for anonymous replies to questions they posted on Snapchat. But nine months later, Yolo is still in the top 100 iOS apps and has 10 million active users. Now it’s safeguarding the app from predators …

Indian research firm Convergence Catalyst is ready for its second act

A 9-year-old is smashing the shuttle far and wide, and frantically pacing back and forth on the court in Bangalore, India, as her competition refuses to back down. Her rival is not a human. She is playing against a machine that is mimicking the game of badminton legend P.V. Sindhu, toned down a few notches …

Andreessen Horowitz has backed Run The World, a startup with a timely offering: live online events

Every day, there’s another event-related cancellation owing to concern around the coronavirus. Just today Microsoft announced it will not have a presence at the Game Developers Conference in mid-March “out of an abundance of caution.” Facebook also said today that it is canceling its annual F8 conference scheduled for May over coronavirus-outbreak concerns. The last …

Stem is offering cash advances to help musicians stay independent

Stem, a startup that helps independent musicians get paid, is expanding with a new financing program called Scale. Co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis described the company’s core offering as a way for collaborators to “memorialize the split” of the proceeds from a song — once they’ve uploaded a track, Scale can automatically handle splitting …

Daily Crunch: DoorDash files to go public

DoorDash prepares to go public, Roblox raises $150 million and Reddit’s CEO takes aim at TikTok. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 27, 2020. 1. DoorDash, the $13B on-demand food delivery startup, says it has confidentially filed for an IPO The company said that its Form S-1 (a draft registration statement) was filed with the …

Newlab and The Boston Globe team up to launch AI tools startup applied XLabs

Applied XLabs is a new startup building tools that can automate data-gathering for journalists — and eventually, for knowledge workers in other industries. The company is emerging from Brooklyn-based Newlab, with The Boston Globe as its launch partner. It will be led by Francesco Marconi (pictured above), who was previously R&D chief at The Wall …

London-based Gyana raises $3.9M for a no-code approach to data science

Coding and other computer science expertise remain some of the more important skills that a person can have in the working world today, but in the last few years, we have also seen a big rise in a new generation of tools providing an alternative way of reaping the fruits of technology: “no-code” software, which …

ShapeMeasure’s smart tool and robotic cutter let contractors measure once and cut never

As much as we’d all like to believe that our houses are built with perfectly square angles and other highly regular measurements, that’s rarely the case — which makes remodeling complex and tedious. ShapeMeasure hopes to alleviate that pain with a device that automatically measures a space and a robotic mill that cuts the required …