Techmeme: Thirty startups attained $10B+ valuations globally in 2021 so far, compared to 15 new decacorns in 2020 and five in 2019 (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

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Investigation shows how Facebook and Google fund misinformation globally by paying millions of dollars in ad revenue to the operators of clickbait pages — A month after the fall of the democratic government. — In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement …

Andrés Engler / CoinDesk:

El Salvador plans to build a “Bitcoin City” initially funded by a $1B “bitcoin bond”, with $500M to build mining infrastructure and $500M to buy more bitcoin — El Salvador, the only country in which bitcoin is a legal tender, is going to build an entire city based …

More: Blockstream, Reuters, CryptoPotato, Cointelegraph, and Bloomberg. Tweets: @mdudas

Michael D McDonald / Bloomberg:

Inside “Bitcoin Week”, a series of events in El Salvador that let industry experts and crypto proponents celebrate their bitcoin allegiance — Bitcoin bulls, as undeterred as ever, flocked to a week of events and revelry in the first country to make the cryptocurrency legal tender.

More: The Block

Adi Robertson / The Verge:

A look at projects like the Voguverse and companies like Pixel Vault that are trying to build media franchises around their NFT collectibles — There's a long way to go — In the online auction market OpenSea, you can pay around $600 to buy a portrait of a robot in streetwear — and, if you're lucky, a stake in a new media empire.

Gené Teare / Crunchbase News:

Thirty startups attained $10B+ valuations globally in 2021 so far, compared to 15 new decacorns in 2020 and five in 2019 — More new startups valued at $10 billion or above have been minted in 2021—far more than in any prior year, and double the number created in 2020 …

Issie Lapowsky / Protocol:

A voter turnout group says Facebook served 36.8% of their conversion ads to iOS users after Apple's ATT change, down from 63.6% — Tatenda Musapatike is as familiar as anyone with the way Facebook's political ad system works. During the 2016 election and the 2018 midterms …

Tweets: @carnage4life, @codinghorror, @issielapowsky, @issielapowsky, @issielapowsky, @issielapowsky, @kingjen, @saramorrison, and @saramorrison

See also Mediagazer

Niket Nishant / Reuters:

Brazil-based global payments network CloudWalk raises a $150M Series C led by Coatue at a $2.15B valuation, bringing its total funding to $365M — Brazilian financial technology company CloudWalk said on Wednesday it was valued at $2.15 billion after a funding round led by Coatue …

More: Business Wire, The Paypers, and pitchbook.com

Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE:

Extended threat detection and response startup Stellar Cyber raises a $38M Series B led by Highland Capital Partners with Samsung and others participating — Extended detection and response startup Stellar Cyber announced today that it has raised $38 million in new funding to expand its Open XDR platform.

Source: Stellar Cyber. More: VentureBeat and SecurityWeek

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:

SVT Robotics, which develops software for simplifying robot deployment at warehouses and factories, raises a $25M Series A led by Tiger Global — SVT Robotics, a provider of software that orchestrates robots in warehouses and factories, has raised $25 million in series A funding led …

Source: GlobeNewswire News Room. More: DC Velocity and The Robot Report

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:

Ultraleap, which develops ultrasound-based hand tracking tech and touchless interfaces for VR/XR headsets, raises an $82M Series D from Tencent and others — It was way back in 2017 that the company that became Ultraleap (Ultrahaptics, as weas) demonstrated at TechCrunch Disrupt a technology …

Source: Media4growth and PR Newswire. More: eeNews Europe, University of Bristol, Auganix.org, Virtual Reality Times, Sixteen:Nine, and Road to VR. Tweets: @mikebutcher

Casey Newton / Platformer:

Twitter's AI ethics researchers on getting public feedback about algorithmic bias, why responsible AI is hard, why they think algorithms can be saved, and more — While other tech giants hide from their internal researchers, Twitter is doing its failing — and fixing — in public

Tweets: @hkanji, @sherryaske, @platformer, @jackbandy, @caseynewton, and @tanit

Ben Lang / Road to VR:

Japan-based VR startup Hikky raises a $57M Series A led by NTT Docomo to expand its web-based virtual events platform Vket Cloud — Japanese social VR startup HIKKY announced today that it has raised ¥6.5 billion (~$57 million), led by Japanese mobile network operator NTT Docomo.

More: Business Wire and Forbes

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