Kukua's recent investment will support its goal to continue building an IP-centric kids’ “edutainment” universe with original content, licensing and merchandise
What do you call the opposite of the startup halo effect?
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. In…
MasterClass cuts 20% of 600-person staff to ‘get to self sustainability faster’
MasterClass, an education platform that sells subscriptions to celebrity-taught classes, has cut 20% of its team to “adapt to the worsening macro environment and get to self sustainability faster,” CEO David Rogier tweeted on Wednesday afternoon. The layoff impacts roughly 120 people across all tea…
Wilco gamifies your path through your software engineering career
Israeli startup Wilco describes itself as “an immersive upskilling platform for software developers,” and snuck out of stealth this week with its first public version, and a stash-box with $7 million worth of fresh seed funding. It’s just weird enough that it’s the kind of thing I completely love. …
Edtech company Pok Pok raises $3M to expand its digital play experiences for kids
Pok Pok, a Toronto-based edtech company, has announced that it raised $3 million in seed funding to expand its play-based learning experiences for kids. The company was founded in 2019 after it spun out of Snowman, the small studio behind award-winning iOS games Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey, Sk…
Tunisian edtech startup GOMYCODE raises $8M to expand across Africa and the Middle East
Yahya Bouhlel started coding in his early teens. Within this timeline, he interned at several companies in Palo Alto, California. Most of his work revolved around building apps and iPhone games. When he came home to Tunis, he met many students who wanted to build products like him each summer. And …
TikTok says ‘Project Texas’ will bolster security for U.S. users in wake of China data access concerns
Over the weekend, TikTok wrote to Republican Senators to assure them that it’s working on a program called “Project Texas” to bolster data security for U.S.-based users. This was in response to the Senators’ letter to the company dated June 27 that questioned its data access…
Meta is pulling the plug on its crypto payments wallet, Novi
Three years after Facebook announced its ill-fated push into cryptocurrency, aka the Libra project, the tech giant has signalled another scaling back of its activity — announcing Friday that Novi, the digital wallet payments pilot it launched last October, will be ending on on September 1. In…