After Employer.com acquired bankrupt accounting startup Bench in a fire-sale late last year, CEO Jesse Tinsley pledged on LinkedIn and elsewhere to honor past customer payments. “We’re honoring all prepaid Bench services even though we will not have the revenue from that directly ourselves,” Tinsley said in an interview with founder and investor Julian Weisser. […]
UK digital ‘end-of-life’ services startup Farewill acquired for $16.8M
Farewill, a U.K.-based end-of-life services provider that offers online tools for writing wills, organizing probate, and arranging cremation, has been acquired by funeral service provider Dignity in an all-shares deal valuing the startup at £12.9 million ($ 16.8 million). The deal is a classic case of an established legacy incumbent chasing growth by buying a […]
LinkedIn says 10M people have signed up as freelancers on its Services Marketplace
More than 100,000 people have been laid off in the technology industry alone this year, and — either by circumstance or choice — at least some of them are not heading back into exclusively full-time work. LinkedIn launched a freelancer marketplace in 2021 to capture some of that activity. Now, at a time when other […]
AWS CEO Matt Garman on generative AI, open source, and closing services
It was quite a surprise when Adam Selipsky stepped down as the CEO of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit. What was maybe just as much of a surprise was that Matt Garman succeeded him. Garman joined Amazon as an intern in 2005 and became a full-time employee in 2006, working on the early AWS products. […]
Driverless car-sharing startup Vay steers toward B2B services
Vay, a startup that has put a teleoperated twist to car-sharing in Berlin and Las Vegas, is expanding into commercial and business-to-business services buoyed by recent deals with French automaker Peugeot and Belgium-based Poppy. Vay isn’t traditional a ride-hailing or car sharing startup, nor does it operate a robotaxi service. And yet, when customers in […]