Bootstrap

Nest, the smart-home startup best known for its thermostat, is closing in on some serious cash, according to a new report.

Nest is near the end of a financing round in which it will raise at least $150 million on a $2 billion valuation, Recode's Kara Swisher reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the talks. Nest could raise as much as $200 million on a $3 billion valuation, the site's other sources say.

Over the last few years, Nest has become one of the more popular companies in the smart-home business. The company was founded by Tony Fadell, … Read more

Oculus VR, the company behind the highly anticipated Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming goggles, has just secured a boatload of cash to bring the product to market.

The company late Thursday announced that it has secured $75 million in a venture funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Spark Capital and Matrix Partners, among others, participated in the round.

The cash infusion, which dwarfs the more than $18 million Oculus has raised through Kickstarter and a Series A round, will be used to hire more staff, the company said in a statement. That staff, coupled with the funding, will provide the … Read more

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates have dropped cash into a not-for-profit through their respective foundations.

EducationSuperHighway raised $9 million in a recently closed funding round, which was led by Zuckerberg's Startup:Education fund and included participation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, EducationSuperHighway told TechCrunch on Wednesday. According to TechCrunch, the nonprofit will use the funds for everything from lobbying government to expanding its broadband-speed testing initiative.

EducationSuperHighway's Web site claims that 80 percent of public schools in the US "lack fast enough Internet speeds to prepare our students for increasingly digital … Read more

Payments startup Clinkle might not have launched its service yet, but it's already finding some value in former Netflix employees.

The company on Wednesday announced that it has hired two former Netflixers -- Andrew Rendich and Allison Hopkins. Rendich joined Clinkle from Walmart.com, where he was senior vice president of supply chain and logistics. Prior to that, he spent 13 years at Netflix, where he served as chief service and operations officer and was tapped to take over the ill-fated Qwikster DVD-by-mail offshoot. After that fell through and it was clear Netflix was trying to focus more on … Read more

A new startup accelerator has launched in Pittsburgh with an eye on robotics.

AlphaLab Gear opened on Monday, inviting early-stage companies working in hardware and robotics to join the accelerator program. AlphaLab Gear's accelerator initiative starts first with cash. The company will offer $25,000 to startups for 5 percent equity. Those firms that need $50,000 will have to hand over 9 percent of the company to AlphaLab Gear.

In addition to funding, the accelerator will provide business mentorship and space for working on the project, according to the organization. The offer also includes access to TechShop, a … Read more

Nobody was quite expecting Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder and now clean-cut tech superstar at the helm of payments company Square, to pull up a slide showcasing the novel "The Art Spirit" by the American painter Robert Henri. Then he began reading from the book off his phone, and it only got weirder from there.

In a self-described first, Dorsey decided to forgo mentioning Twitter's upcoming IPO, or any of the gossip surrounding the founding of the social network. Instead, he waxed philosophical on the things that inspire and motivate him every day, including a longstanding experiment … Read more

CUPERTINO Calif. -- In the early days of Facebook, when schools with competing services would get the jump on the burgeoning social network with a unique feature or interesting addition, the company would go into what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called lockdown, where the team wouldn't leave the house until the problem was addressed. It still persists to this day, within reason.

Facebook doesn't lock people in the office, but it comes "as close to that as we can legally get," Zuckerberg said to an eruption from the crowd.

Zuckerberg spent his time with Y Combinator founder … Read more

CUPERTINO Calif. -- Balaji Srinivasan opened his Y Combinator startup school talk with a joke: Is the US the Microsoft of nations? The question was received warmly by the crowd of more than 1,700 and did in fact have a logical conclusion: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, were exactly what Bill Gates feared when he said in 1998 that two people in a garage working on something new was Microsoft's biggest threat.

What ties those two seams together? The idea of techno-utopian spaces -- new countries even -- that could operate beyond the bureaucracy and … Read more

CUPERTINO Calif. -- When Evernote CEO Phil Libin was faced with a cash reserve that would last only two weeks, and the US's record recession was unfolding before his eyes, he made what he refers to as one of the first difficult, truly adult decisions of his life: He decided to shut down the company. He simply couldn't pay the bills after Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy filing killed Evernote's first multimillion-dollar investment.

But one e-mail, from a soon-to-be investor, popped into his inbox at 3 a.m. It happened only moments after Libin came to the conclusion that … Read more