Tennis star Serena Williams joins SurveyMonkey’s board
Serena Williams (yes, THAT Serena Williams) has joined the board of consumer survey startup SurveyMonkey, along with Intuit CEO Brad Smith. This is the tennis superstar’s first venture into Silicon Valley and, according to a SurveyMonkey spokesperson, came about at the suggestion of fellow board member and Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Read More Continue reading Tennis star Serena Williams joins SurveyMonkey’s board
Podium, a Utah-based enterprise software company specializing in customer review management has pulled in an over-subscribed $32 million Series A round, led by Accel Partners. Several sources close to the matter told us about this round, which we wrote about yesterday in an article about Utah-based Peak Ventures. However, Podium has now confirmed the numbers to TechCrunch. We were previously… 
Utah-based Peak Ventures has closed on a second fund for $50 million, outpacing Kickstart Seed Fund as the seed VC firm with the largest coffers in the state thus far. Peak took in $23 million for the first fund and has since invested in local startups like Owlet and Homie as well as the New York-based Nigerian education startup Andela. Sid Krommenhoek and Jeff Burningham launched the fund… 
That Qualtrics IPO many have been expecting is on hold for now. The online market research platform has just raised its third round for $180 million at a whopping $2.5 billion valuation.
Qualtrics, an online survey research platform, is listed as tops among likely candidates to go public this year. But is it really going to file and, if so, how close is it to doing that? I’m betting yes and very soon based on some interesting answers in a recent interview with founder Ryan Smith. 
Medical billing is a largely untapped and lucrative industry, potentially pulling in $55 billion globally by 2020. But it’s inner workings are still very murky — most of the time it’s not clear how much something will cost and sometimes you don’t even get the (possibly whopping) bill until months down the road. Founder Katelyn Gleason wants to make it easier to know… 
Workplace by Facebook officially launched six weeks ago and director Julien Codorniou came onstage at Disrupt London today to talk about how the platform is responding to and building features to reduce interruption at work. Workplace is both a desktop and mobile app much like Facebook, but for your colleagues to socialize and communicate. The platform sports the same features as its friends… 
Nearly one year ago LiveBlends was a Y Combinator smoothie delivery startup. The company has evolved since then, raised $3.8 million in seed from various investors and switched its name to Replenish. It’s also moved away from delivery and into manufacturing a line of Keurig-like self-cleaning smoothie machines. Replenish is still in the testing phase of the product, but… 
Twist Bioscience, a startup making and using synthetic DNA to store digital data, just struck a contract with Microsoft and the University of Washington to encode vast amounts of information on synthetic genes. Big data means business and the company able to gather a lot of it is very valuable to investors and stockholders. But that data needs to be stored somewhere and can cost a lot for… 
Billion-dollar customer insight startup Qualtrics hopes to recruit top Silicon Valley talent to its home base in Utah as it continues to grow and part of that strategy involves adding professional tech coach Kim Scott to the board of directors. Qualtrics became one of a handful of new unicorns in the Beehive State last year and it continues to climb up and to the right. But it’s hard…