Three Year Old Roofstock Tops $2 Billion in Real Estate Transactions

Roofstock, an online marketplace where you can invest in single-family rental homes, has topped $2 billion in transactions. The three-year-old platform topped $1 billion in January 2018. In July, Roofstock said it had surpassed $1.6 billion thus investing velocity is increasing. In a release, Roofstock states that the supply of investment opportunities is increasing – by 10X since 2018. Sellers can benefit by moving their property 77% faster than more traditional channels, according to the Propt…

AI experts urge machine learning researchers to tackle climate change

At the Tackling Climate Change workshop at this year’s NeurIPS conference, some of the top minds in machine learning came together to discuss the effects of climate change on life on Earth, how AI can tackle the urgent problem, and why and how the machine learning community should join the fight. The panel included Yoshua Bengio, MILA director and University of Montreal professor; Jeff Dean, Google’s AI chief; Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain and founder of Landing.ai; and Cornell University…

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Travis Kalanick Is Exiting His Uber Holdings Uber Quickly

Forget Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Travis Kalanick is having the sale of the century. The Uber Technologies Inc. co-founder unloaded $350 million more of stock this month, bringing his proceeds to more than $2.1 billion since a share lockup ended Nov. 6. The 43-year-old’s remaining stake in the ride-hailing company now constitutes about a fifth of his $3 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, down from about 75% before the lockup….

Chinese Co-Working Giant Ucommune Plans New York IPO

China’s largest co-working company, Ucommune, has filed plans for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The offering could take place as early as next month, the Wall Street Journal reported. It will represent a test of investor sentiment following WeWork’s IPO debacle this fall — was WeWork’s failure a symptom of problems specific to the company, or is the co-working business model as a whole now in question? “The fact that they’re doing it so soon after WeWork is surprisin…

Is PropTech About To Have Its ‘Man On The Moon’ Moment?

Advances in technologies have the potential to impact our lives in many profound ways, from the coffee you drank this morning that has an equal chance of being made by a fully automated espresso machine as it does in the otherwise capable hands of your local hipster barista, to the device you’re most likely reading this very article on that’s millions of times more powerful than the NASA supercomputers that put man on the Moon in 1969.

Verizon’s 5G comes to (parts of) Los Angeles

The clock is ticking on Verizon’s plans to bring 5G to 30 cities. Short of an actual Christmas miracle, things are looking rough. On the upside, the carrier (and, disclosure, parent of TechCrunch) just brought the next-gen technology to a nineteenth city. And it’s a doozy.  Verizon announced this morning that it has flipped the switch on 5G in Los Angeles. Or parts of it, at least. You get the usual caveat with Verizon’s chosen 5G tech here. It’s fast, coverage is limited. In fact, it’s limited …

Domio raises $100M in equity and debt to take on Airbnb and hotels with its curated apartments

Airbnb has well and truly disrupted the world of travel accommodation, changing the conversation not just around how people discover and book places to stay, but what they expect when they get there, and what they expect to pay. Today, one of the startups riding that wave is announcing a significant round of funding to fuel its own contribution to the marketplace. Domio, a startup that designs and then rents out apart-hotels with kitchens and other full-home experiences, has raised $100 million …

CREtech Acquires FUTURE PropTech To Form The Largest Global Real Estate Tech Conference And Research Company

CREtech, the leading commercial real estate technology conference and data company, has announced the acquisition of FUTURE: PropTech, Europe’s largest events company also devoted to the real estate tech sector. The acquisition of the London-based company represents CREtech’s commitment to building the largest international PropTech community through a new global expansion strategy. Together the combined company will drive innovation to the real estate industry by becoming the largest global rea…

HqO Raises $34.2 Million in Series B Funding Round to Enhance Tenant Experience Globally

HqO, the tenant experience (TeX) platform for commercial real estate, announced today that it has raised $34.25 million in Series B financing to power the company’s continued growth. HqO will use this capital to expand its market-leading technology, double its engineering team, and grow sales and business operations to accelerate national and international expansion. The funding round was led by Insight Partners and included the participation of previous investors Accomplice, Navitas Capital, Pr…