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Founders Fund
Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund formed in 2005 and based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $17 billion in total assets under management as of 2025. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and an early investor in Facebook. The firm's partners have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and SpaceX. The firm's investments include Airbnb, Anduril, DeepMind, Rippling, Facebook, Ramp, Palantir Technologies, Pudgy Penguins, SpaceX, Spotify, Stripe, Neuralink, and Nubank. Notable partners include Peter Thiel and Trae Stephens. Former partners include Brian Singerman, Keith Rabois, Cyan Banister, Ken Howery, Kevin Hartz, Sean Parker, and Bruce Gibney. History The firm was organized by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek in early 2005 and raised its first fund of $50 million from individual entr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Venture Capital
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for Equity (finance), equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because Startup company, startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovation, innovative technology or business model and often come from high technology industries such as information technology (IT) or biotechnology. Pre-seed and seed money, seed rounds are the initial stages of funding for a startup company, typically occurring earl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support E-commerce payment system, online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alternative to traditional Banknote, paper methods such as cheque, checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial and company users, for which it charges an international addition bank charges fee. Established in 1998 as Confinity, PayPal went public through an initial public offering, IPO in 2002. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year, valued at $1.5 billion. In 2015 eBay corporate spin-off, spun off PayPal to its shareholders, and PayPal became an independent company again. The company was ranked 143rd on the 2022 Fortune 500, ''Fortune'' 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue. Since 2023, PayPal is a member of the MACH Al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cox Enterprises
Cox Enterprises, Inc. is an American private company, privately held global conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, with approximately 55,000 employees and $21 billion in total revenue. Its major operating subsidiaries are Cox Media Group, Cox Communications, and Cox Automotive. The company's major national brands include AutoTrader.com, AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim Auctions and more. Through Cox Automotive, the company's international operations stretch across Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America. Cox Enterprises is currently led by Alexander C. Taylor, a fourth-generation Cox family member and great-grandson of founder James M. Cox. James M. Cox's grandson, James C. Kennedy, and other members of the Cox family are on the company's board of directors. On March 2, 2020, the sale of Cox Media Group's Ohio newspapers was finalized back to Cox Enterprises, and subsequently formed Cox First Media. This move was to ensure th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Axios (website)
''Axios'' (styled ΛXIOS in the logo) is an American news website based in Arlington, Virginia. It was founded in 2016 and launched the following year by former ''Politico'' journalists Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. The site's name is based on the (), meaning "worthy of". ''Axios'' articles are often brief to facilitate quick reading; most are shorter than 300 words and use bullet points. In addition to news articles, ''Axios'' produces daily and weekly industry-specific newsletters (including Allen's ''Axios AM'', a successor to his newsletter '' Politico Playbook'' for ''Politico''), and two daily podcasts. On September 1, 2022, Cox Enterprises completed its acquisition of ''Axios''. History VandeHei said he wanted ''Axios'' to be a "mix between ''The Economist'' and Twitter". The company initially covered a mix of business, politics, technology, health care, and media. VandeHei said ''Axios'' would focus on the "collision between tech and areas such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nubank
Nubank is a Brazilian neobank headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil. It is the largest financial technology, fintech bank in Latin America, with around 88 million customers in Brazil and 6 million between Mexico and Colombia and a revenue of $8 billion. At its initial public offering in December 2021, Nubank was valued at $45 billion. History Nubank was founded in 2013 by Colombian David Vélez, Brazilian Cristina Junqueira and American Edward Wible. The first transaction with a Nubank card was made on April 1, 2014. Four years later, Nubank became a Unicorn (finance), unicorn startup with its valuation of US$1 billion. In the company's first two years of existence, it raised 600 million Brazilian real, Brazilian reais. In September 2014, Nubank raised $14.3 million from Sequoia Capital, along with Kaszek Ventures and Nicolas Berggruen. Nubank launched its first financial product, an international Mastercard credit card that has no annuity fees and can be completely managed through ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neuralink
Neuralink Corp. is an American transhumanist neurotechnology company that has developed, as of 2024, implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), also known as brain implants. It was founded by Elon Musk and a team of eight scientists and engineers. Neuralink was launched in 2016 and first publicly reported in March 2017. The company is based in Fremont, California, with plans to build a three-story building with office and manufacturing space near Austin, Texas, in Del Valle, about 10 miles east of Gigafactory Texas, Tesla's headquarters and manufacturing plant that opened in 2022. Since its founding, the company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities. By 2019, it had received $158 million in funding ($100 million was from Musk) and had 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width)Elizabeth LopattoElon Musk unveils Neuralink's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stripe (company)
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American multinational financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States, and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications. Stripe is the largest privately-owned fintech company with a valuation of about $91billion and over $1.4trillion in payment volume processed in 2024. History Irish entrepreneur brothers John and Patrick Collison founded Stripe in Palo Alto, California, in 2010, and serve as the company's president and CEO, respectively. In 2011 the company received a $2million investment, including contributions from Elon Musk, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Irish entrepreneur Liam Casey, and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel. In March 2013, Stripe made its first acquisition, Kickoff, a chat and task-ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spotify
Spotify (; ) is a List of companies of Sweden, Swedish Music streaming service, audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. , it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services, with over 678 million monthly active users comprising 268 million paying subscribers. Spotify is listed (through a Luxembourg City–domiciled holding company, Spotify Technology S.A.) on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts. Spotify offers Digital rights management, digital copyright restricted recorded audio content, including more than 100 million songs and 7 million podcast titles, from record labels and media companies. Operating as a freemium service, the basic features are free with advertisements and limited control, while additional features, such as offline listening and commercial-free listening, are offered via paid Subscription business model, subscriptions. Users can search for music based ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pudgy Penguins
Pudgy Penguins is a blockchain-based collection of digital artwork composed of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It is a collection of 8,888 unique NFTs launched on the Ethereum blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ... in August 2021. The project was established in July 2021, the organization was formed by a cohort of university students. In April 2022, Pudgy Penguins underwent acquisition by Luca Schnetzler for a sum of 750 ETH, equivalent to $2.5 million. Pudgy Penguins and its associated intellectual property are owned and managed by LSLTTT Holdings, Inc.. References Non-fungible tokens Digital artworks Penguins in popular culture {{US-entertainment-company-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ramp (company)
Ramp Business Corporation is a Manhattan-based multinational financial technology company that offers corporate charge cards, expense management, and bill-payment software. The company is headquartered in the Flatiron District of New York City with additional offices in Miami and San Francisco. As of March 2025, Ramp was valued at $13 billion and processing $55 billion in payments annually. Investors in the company include Thrive Capital, Goldman Sachs, Peter Thiel of Founders Fund, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, 137 Ventures, BoxGroup, D1 Capital Partners, Contrary (venture capital firm), Contrary, and 8VC, among others. History Ramp was founded in March 2019 by Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, and Gene Lee. Glyman and Atiyeh met as classmates at Harvard University and had previously founded price tracking app Paribus, which was acquired by Capital One in 2016. Glyman and Atiyeh talked with approximately 100 finance experts before launching Ramp's corporate card ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rippling (company)
Rippling is a privately-owned international software company.https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/09/20/rippling-finance-cloud-salesforce-of-employee-data/ Launched in 2017 in San Francisco, California,https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/14/parker-conrad-said-raise-7-million-for-new-start-up-rippling.html it operates a cloud-based software platform that allows businesses to manage their HR, finances, and IT matters.https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/12/rippling-2/ History Parker Conrad and Prasanna Sankar co-founded Rippling in 2016 in San Francisco. The company creates software for companies to handle HR and onboarding, as well as payroll and other management matters.https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2020/05/28/the-comeback-of-a-fallen-tech-unicorn-ceo/ It charges customers a monthly fee for access to its software platform. Rippling released a function to help file for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans in April 2020.https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/20/one- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DeepMind
DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014 and merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023. The company is headquartered in London, with research centres in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and Switzerland. DeepMind introduced neural Turing machines (neural networks that can access external memory like a conventional Turing machine), resulting in a computer that loosely resembles short-term memory in the human brain. DeepMind has created neural network models to play video games and board games. It made headlines in 2016 after its AlphaGo program beat a human professional Go player Lee Sedol, a world champion, in a five-game match, which was the subject of a documentary film. A more general program, AlphaZer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
