Another round of startup layoffs:

News broke yesterday that Pebble, the seven-year-old smartwatch pioneer based in Palo Alto, is laying off 25 percent of its staff – or 40 of 120 employees – amid increased financial concerns. CEO Eric Migicovsky told TechCrunch that he blamed a more cautious outlook from tech-focused VCs as the primary reason for the layoffs. Pebble has raised $28M in debt and venture financing over the past eight months, in addition to a second wildly successful $20M Kickstarter campaign.

What’s the hierarchy of engagement?

Sarah Tavel of Greylock Partners speaks to the importance of understanding how a product is built to maximize and leverage user engagement. The hierarchy of engagement, as Tavel lays out, has three levels: 1) Growing engaged users, 2) Retaining users, and 3) Self-perpetuating.

YC Demo Day, round two:

Y Combinator kicked off Demo Day 2 for its Winter 2016 batch in Mountain View yesterday, where its second batch of 59 startups pitched to a full house of investors and press. Among yesterday’s presenters are OpenTrons, a robot for automating the web lab to accelerate life science research, and SHRI, a solution for converting human waste into drinking water. TechCrunch has the full recap on Day 2 and the favorites from Day 1 here.

Interactive data visualizations on the Unicorn Leaderboard

This quarter has already seen 8 new unicorn companies. In 2015, CrunchBase recorded 77 new unicorns, an average of 19 per quarter. Check out the latest investors and companies on our interactive timeline visualization.

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Recent Investments

Mesosphere

$74M / Series C

Mesosphere is a datacenter operating system based on Apache Mesos. Today’s round was led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and brings the company’s funding total to $123M.

Categories:

San Francisco · Cloud Computing · Cloud Infrastructure · Data Center Automation · Enterprise Software · Software

Founders:

Tobi Knaup, Florian Leibert, Benjamin Hindman

Investors:

Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, + 1 more

Friendsurance

$15M / Venture

Friendsurance is a peer-to-peer insurance startup that rewards claimless groups of customers with a cashback bonus each year. Founded in 2010, the Berlin-based company counts 70 domestic insurance partners and plans to expand its services into Australia in 2016.

Categories:

Berlin DEU · Financial Services · Insurance

Founders:

Tim Kunde, Sebastian Herfurth, Janis Meyer-Plath

Investors:

Horizons Ventures (Lead)

Visionary VR

$6.0M / Series A

Visionary VR provides tools for content creation and storytelling in virtual reality. This is the company’s first round of institutional funding, on top of a $580K angel round raised in 2015.

Categories:

Internet · Software

Founders:

Cosmo Scharf, Gil Baron, Jonnie Ross, Adam Levin, Luke Patterson

Investors:

Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) (Lead), End Cue, LLC, BDMI, + 3 more

More Investments
Company Amount / Round Lead Investor
Lagou $34M / Series C Hongdao Capital
HG Data Company $12M / Series B Updata Partners
Kreditech Holding $11M / Series C International Finance Corporation
Verdigris Technologies $6.0M / Series A
ITaxi $2.1M / Seed
Taranis $2.0M / Seed
Nuren Group $2.0M / Series A Gobi Partners
All Recent Funding Activity

Recent Acquisitions

Guidecentral

Acquired by wikiHow

Shopular

Acquired by Ebates

More Acquisitions
Company Acquired by Amount
Netsmart Technologies Allscripts
Brewster FullContact
Gibbon Degreed
Bucket Galavantier
All Recent Acquisition Activity
 

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March 29, 2016 6:00pm in New York

An insider access event featuring the brightest minds in the NYC on-demand platform economy. You'll hear insider perspectives from on-demand
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Start Date Event Location
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Date Accelerator Location
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