Cryptocurrency lending firm BlockFi Lending LLC said today it has raised $30 million in new funding to hire more people and expand its current range of product offerings. The Series B round was led by Valar Ventures and included Morgan Creek Digital, PJC, Akuna Capital, CMT Digital, Avon Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Purple Arch Ventures, Kenetic Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Arrington ...

Data warehouse virtualization startup Datometry Inc. today said it has raised $17 million in new funding to accelerate go-to-market activities with its partners Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform as well as select systems integrators. The Series B round was led by WRVI Capital and included Nepenthe, Dell Technologies Capital, Redline Capital ...

Google LLC will start requiring users of its Nest smart home devices to use two-factor authentication in a move the company describes as providing more protection for Nest accounts. The introduction of compulsory 2FA will start to roll out in the spring to customers who have not yet enrolled in the option or migrated to a Google ...

Antivirus firm Avast Software s.r.o., the owner of popular free products such as AVG and Avast Antivirus, is under investigation in its home country, the Czech Republic, for allegedly selling the browser history of its users to outside companies. The allegations that Avast was harvesting user browser history and selling it via a subsidiary called Jumpshot Inc. surfaced ...

Facebook Inc.-owned messaging service WhatsApp has passed 2 billion users, becoming the third app to pass the mark after the Facebook app and the YouTube app. To put the number in perspective, there are currently 7.8 billion on the planet, meaning that more than a quarter of the world uses WhatsApp. Despite never gaining wide ...

Some 440 million records in a database belonging to cosmetics maker Estée Lauder Companies Inc. have been found unsecured and exposed online, potentially putting customers at risk. The database was discovered by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler from Security Discovery Jan. 30 and publicized today. It involved 440,336,852 individual pieces of data, including plaintext email addresses, some sent ...

Despite beating analyst predictions in its fourth-quarter earnings Monday, shares in Lyft Inc. dropped in after-hours trading after the company failed to move up its profitability timeline as rival Uber Technologies Inc. did Feb. 6. For the quarter ending Dec. 31, Lyft reported revenue of $1.02 billion, up 52% from the same quarter of 2018 ...

Microsoft Corp. today backflipped on its controversial decision to install Bing as the default search engine in Google Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users. The original decision announced Jan. 22 was justified on the grounds that it will allow users in an organization to “take advantage of Microsoft Search, including being able to access relevant ...

Airbnb Inc. reportedly lost $322 million in the first nine months of 2019 on rising costs, raising questions about its valuation going into an initial public offering later this year. The Wall Street Journal reported the figure today, saying that the loss came from rising administrative and technology costs despite increased revenue in the third quarter. ...

Apple Inc., along with various other tech companies, may have avoided serious supply shortages as some plants belonging to Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn partially opened Monday, despite conflicting reports that they might not. Reuters reported Monday that the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen was given approval to reopen but with the plant only having “some production.” The report added ...