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Live video shopping startup Talkshoplive brings in another $6M

by Christine Hall

Five months after announcing a $3 million seed round from Spero Ventures, shopping-focused live video host Talkshoplive is back, this time with a $6 million seed extension led by Raine Ventures.

The new round of funding gives Los Angeles-based Talkshoplive $10.5 million raised to date and enables it to scale its product management and technical teams. In addition, the company will double-down on category verticals.

Talkshoplive CEO Bryan Moore said he founded the company with his sister Tina in 2018, after he led social media efforts at Twentieth Television (previously known as Twentieth Century Fox) and CBS Television.

Following the initial seed round, Moore said he found himself talking to even more investors wanting to get involved with the company. Then San Francisco-based Raine came along.

“We were not looking to fundraise, but when Raine reached out, what they had to offer was so strategic to our business,” Moore said in an interview. “Live commerce is today where social media was 15 years ago. Everyone is asking what their brand’s live commerce strategy is, but we had to figure out how to build it for the U.S.”

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?

Initially, the company was focused on books and music, working with famous names, such as Matthew McConaughey, Alicia Keys and Dolly Parton. Now, the company is looking at food, beauty, fashion, and sports.

“We’ve had just about everyone from the Food Network essentially start using Talkshoplive,” Moore said. “A large community around food (Read more...)

Yieldstreet raises $100M as it mulls going public via SPAC, eyes acquisitions

by Mary Ann Azevedo

These days, investing goes way beyond the stock market. And in recent years there’s been a growing number of startups which aim to give more people access to a wider array of investment opportunities. Today, one of those startups has raised a significant round of funding to help it achieve its goals.

Yieldstreet — which provides a platform for making alternative investments in areas like real estate, marine/shipping, legal finance, commercial loans and other opportunities that were previously only open to institutional investors — announced Tuesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round.

Former E*TRADE CEO Mitch Caplan, of Tarsadia Investments, led the round. Other participants include Alex Brown (a division of Raymond James), Kingfisher Capital, Top Tier Capital Partners and Gaingels. Existing backers Edison Partners, Soros Fund Management, Greenspring Associates, Raine Ventures, Greycroft and Expansion Capital also put money in the round, which brings Yieldstreet’s total raised to $278.5 million since its 2015 inception.

Milind Mehere and Michael Weisz co-founded Yieldstreet with the mission of making investing more inclusive for non-institutional investors. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Mehere declined to say at what valuation the Series C was raised other than to say “near unicorn.”

What he did share is that Yieldstreet has funded nearly $1.9 billion on its platform and has about 300,000 consumers signed up on its platform. That’s up from $600 million invested on its platform from more than 100,000 members in February 2019, at the time of its last (Read more...)