23andMe, the personal genetics company, has raised a $50 million Series D funding round to expand its users to one million individuals, drop the price of its Personal Genome Service to $99, and expand its infrastructure involved in its research capabilities. Read more »
Y Combinator, one of the oldest and most prestigious startup incubators in Silicon Valley, announced a change to its funding structure Monday, taking control of the VC investments made in each of its startup classes, and adding more facetime with local investors. Read more »
Flotype, the semi-stealthy Berkeley, Calif.-based startup has renamed itself Bridge and is making its messaging technology broadly available. Bridge promises real-time communications between any servers and other devices in a language- and hardware-independent way. Read more »
Education startup Codecademy — which promises to help anyone learn to program with its game-like online courses — is stepping up to the international market with a $10 million round of funding from new backers including Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Read more »
The Berlin clone factory rakes in the cash, but from whom? We take an initial look at the the sources of Rocket’s fuel. Read more »
Russian investor Yuri Milner plans to sell $1.5 billion of Facebook stock when the company goes public later this month — making more than a billion in profit. But it’s Silicon Valley that should be thanking him, not the other way around. Read more »
Two senior figures have checked out of one of Russia’s most successful internet companies in a matter of days. Is it natural turnover for Mail.ru, or are analysts who suggest the company may have reached its peak right? Read more »
Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies — a significant backer of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other Silicon Valley darlings — is raising a new $1 billion fund. So where will this tranche of money go? Read more »
Codecademy, which teaches users how to program for free with an interactive and social web application, has garnered more than 1 million users in less than five months. We talked to co-founder and CEO Zach Sims about how Codecademy started and where it’s going. Read more »
2011 has been all about personalized mobile apps, and Evernote has benefited handsomely: In the past 12 months, the personal note-taking software company grew its user base from 6 million to 20 million. GigaOM talked to CEO Phil Libin about the growth and Evernote’s 2012 outlook. Read more »
Shares in Russian Internet group Mail.ru have fallen to their lowest point since the company went public last year. But since the company has been indirectly fueling Silicon Valley’s latest investment boom, a serious slump could have repercussions far beyond Moscow. Read more »
Russian social network VKontakte has built a billion dollar business by cloning almost every aspect of Facebook for the local market. It seems a little rich, then, that founder Pavel Durov says his long-term ambition is to prove that Russian products can be global leaders. Read more »
Since Russia’s Yuri Milner burst onto the scene with heavy investments in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, many rivals have wondered whether he can see something they can’t. So what did he have to say for himself during a rare public appearance? Read more »
