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Once upon a time, I had a truck. I loved that truck! I didn’t actually use the truck as a truck all that often, so eventually I sold it and bought something more in tune with my daily needs. Something more “practical,” I suppose. I still miss that truck. Now the few times a year I do need to use a truck as a truck, I’ve gotta convince a buddy to let me borrow theirs for the 34th time or try to nab a rental at the big box hardware store. Hope one is available by the time I get there, wait in line, fill out the paper work, run out to my car because I forgot my insurance card, get back in line, yadda yadda. Fetch , a company we first wrote about a few years ago , makes the process a bit easier: find a truck (or van!) nearby, reserve it through the app, walk up and unlock it from your phone, and be on your way. This week the team is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million to help expand their team and operations. To make Fetch happen, you could say. Fetch is up and running in a ha...

This time last year, Box  was fighting tooth and nail  to keep  activist investors led by Starboard Value from taking over its board and dictating the company’s direction. If the activist investors had won, CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie might have been forced out, and the company could have been sold . But Box prevailed , and the shareholders who backed the executive team were rewarded this week with a quarter that beat everyone’s expectations , including the company’s own. Now that the proxy fight is over, it’s clear that some of the initiatives that Box had been building over the past few years to move further into the true enterprise market are paying off. Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst, Deep Analysis Last quarter, Box’s revenue reached $233 million, up 17% from a year earlier, and beating analyst estimates of $229 million, according to the company. The revenue result also came in ahead of Box’s own estimates that growth would land somewhere around 12%. Its...

The D’Amelio family, including TikTok stars and digital creators Charli D’Amelio and sister Dixie , are formalizing their investments in startups with the launch of a new VC fund, 444 Capital. The family is teaming up with Doug Renert of Tandem Capital and producer Jeff Beacher of Beacher Media Group on the fund, which aims to back high-growth companies with strong end-user brands, including those in the direct-to-consumer space, fintech, edtech, healthcare, insurtech and other B2B2C platforms. The fund has a target of up to $25 million, some of which has already been raised and deployed. The D’Amelio family said the fund will have a particular focus on women- and minority-led startups. “Our family wants to help a new generation of female and minority entrepreneurs build great companies. We hope to play a growing role in leveling the startup playing field over time,” Dixie and Charli D’Amelio said in a joint statement. Though the sisters are the best-known family members du...

A shrewd entrepreneur joins the 100+ accelerator program sponsored by brewing giant AB Inbev and home consumables emporium Unilever , and spots a pattern. The breweries have tons of spent grain, and the home consumables have a plastics problem. Build a bridge between the two problems, and you have Mi Terro , a company that takes agricultural waste and processes it into proteins that can be used as a plastic replacement, animal feed and much more. The company just raised $1.5 million to start scaling up production. “Think of Tide Pods — our material is very similar to the polyvinyl alcohol material that Tide Pods are made out of,” says Robert Luo, the founder at Mi Terro. “Except our product has zero microplastics, unlike the Tide Pods that we use today. Our product is water soluble and can break down into water under room temperature. It is also biodegradable. Our in-house data indicates that to naturally degrade will take a year or so. In industrial composting facilities, it can d...

Yousuf Khan Contributor Share on Twitter Yousuf Khan is a partner at Ridge Ventures . Prior to joining Ridge, he was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, CIO and vice president of Customer Success at cloud-based AI platform Moveworks, as well as CIO of Pure Storage, Qualys and Hult International Business School. More posts by this contributor Hiring is just the first step when building an early-stage comms team 3 keys to pricing early-stage SaaS products Technology vendors who have been successful over the long term all have something in common: they know how to sell to chief information officers. They understand that the work isn’t over after the handshakes and signatures — effectively managing and nurturing a vendor-CIO relationship requires attention. I’m a VC now, but my five CIO stints over the past two decades have taught me plenty about the before and after of the enterprise sales process. My daily conversations with existing CIOs reaffirm these insight...

Twitter has claimed it’s complying with an EU-wide ban on Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik which came into force yesterday as part of the package of sanctions imposed by the bloc on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, albeit reluctantly. In a statement the social network has been circulating in response to press requests this week a Twitter spokesperson said: The European Union (EU) sanctions will legally require us to withhold certain content in EU member states, and we intend to comply. Our global approach outside of the EU will continue to focus on de-amplifying this type of state-affiliated media content across our service and providing important context through our labels. We continue to advocate for a free and open internet, particularly in times of crisis. However it’s not clear how well Twitter is actually complying with the legal order banning the distribution of RT’s content in the EU. While some users around Europe have reported encountering an “account withheld”...