"For a lot of seed investors, it's almost like buying lottery tickets."
Armed with nearly $4 million, a list of prominent investors and tens of thousands of users, the apartment rental platform PocketList looked like a startup poised to take off. It never did. Reporter Francesca Billington talks with their co-founder about lessons learned.
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Lessons From PocketList's Rapid Rise and Fall
CEO and co-founder Nick Dazé touted the proptech software that let potential renters get an inside peek at apartments before being listed as technology that "turned the entire rental market on its head." It wound up folding before it could even expand, one of the many seed stage startups that never get off the ground.
Drake Is Behind A $40M Investment Into Faux Chicken Startup
In Los Angeles, where food tech startups race to invent the latest replica burgers and bacon, Daring Foods sets its sights on plant-based chicken. On Wednesday, pop star Drake joined D1 Capital Partners in a $40 million Series B funding round to help Daring triple its team and scale up retail and foodservice sales.
Speeding Up Clinical Trials Using AI
Clinical trials, often the one of the most expensive parts of bringing a drug to market, can last as long as a decade. Narrativa uses artificial intelligence to automate medical reports on clinical studies, compressing a process that can take weeks into hours.
Metropolis' CEO On the Future of 'Touchless' Parking
CEO Alex Israel said there were times during the pandemic where the startup's future didn't seem certain. On Wednesday, he talked about the last year and the future of mobility during the Motivate SOCAL conference, dedicated to highlighting early-stage mobility startups in the region.