Technology

Camera technology company Light is the latest to do the money dance with SoftBankmassive Vision Fund after it raised a$121 million Series D round.

The funding round was led by Vision Fund, the near-$100 billion fund anchored by SoftBank, with participation from consumer camera giantLeica Camera AG. Todayannouncement takes Light to around $186 million raised from investors to date.

Light is best known for its futuristic camera technology and shooters. The company first introduced the $1,950 L16 camera back in 2015, which then began shipping in 2017. The camera uses 16 lenses to capture 52 megapixel imagery which produces impressive results. Perhaps most notably, the L16 is tiny which makes it hugely portable and convenient.

Given the small form factor and the rise of mobile photography, itwas with little surprise that earlier this monthLight teased its first smartphone camera product. Exact details of what that will look like are unclear, but a Light representative told TechCrunch that its mobile technology has been licensed to an OEM which plans to launch a Light-powered smartphone this coming September.

&In this era, pocketable, connected cameras can reconstruct the world in three dimensions and superhuman detail, cars are able to perceive the objects around them without the need for special sensors, and robots are able to thread the elusive needle autonomously,& Light said in a statement.

In addition, the company claims the smartphone tech, which supports up to nine cameras on the rear side of the phone, will &shatter the expectations of mobile photography& when it is released.

A representative said alsothat Leica and Lightpartnership may seethe duo develop consumer products that utlizeLighttech, although details of that are even less clear than the smartphone plan at this point.

That foray into mobile underscores the plans for this new round of funding for Light. The company said it intends to push its technology, which to date has been utilized in the consumer space, intosecurity, robotic, automotive, aerial and industrial imaging verticals.

You can imagine that this ambition to expand fed nicely into SoftBankpitch for Vision Fund, which is designed to bring together the worldtop technology companies and encourage synergies between them. With ARM and Nvidia among the chipset firms backed by the fund, Light will seeplenty of opportunities to knock on new doors and explore growth opportunities as part of the collective.

Herean interview with Light CEO Dave Grannan, who showed off the L16 at CES 2016:

Greycroft, the venture capital firm thatbacked companies like the Huffington Post, Plated and Venmo, is announcing that it has raised $250 million for its latest fund.

The firm was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Ian Sigalow and Dana Settle, and it now invests from a fund for seed and Series A deals (this is its fifth early-stage fund) and a separate fund focused on growth investments.Recent bets includescooter startup Bird and podcast network Wondery.

Sigalow told me that for the most part, the firmstrategy isn&t changing, though it has adapted to what he called &the rise of the institutional seed round& by making more seed investments of its own.

&I think itmostly a change in nomenclature,& Sigalow said — where a funding round of a few million dollars would previously have been called a Series A, itis now considered seed funding. (And anything before that becomes &pre-seed.&)&There is on the margin more capital being deployed industry-wide now than there was five or 10 years ago. Thattrue at every stage. Rounds have gotten slightly larger.&

And while Greycroft has offices in New York and Los Angeles, the firm notes that some of its recent successes have come from Birmingham, Alabama (Shipt, which was acquired by Target) and Chicago (Trunk Club, acquired by Nordstrom, as well asBraintree, acquired by PayPal).

Settle said Greycroft tries to look at &opportunities in all kinds of markets.& Sigalow added that one of the &big unsung advantages& of being in LA and NYC is &true access to virtually direct flights everywhere.&

The firm also says that nearly half of its investments go into startups founded by women and other underrepresented groups — its female-founded startups include BaubleBar, BitPesa, Clique, Cuyana, Eloquii, HopSkipDrive, theRealReal, Thrive Global and theSkimm.

And while many of Greycroftbest-known investments have been consumer startups, Settle and Sigalow said the firm has always had a pretty even split between business-to-business and business-to-consumer models. Itjust that the consumer startups tend to get more attention from the press.

Sigalow also said that lately, more enterprise and non-consumer startups seem interested in working with Greycroft because of its consumer successes, because they&re looking to incorporate &what was traditionally B2C functionality.&

&I really think therean advantage to all these cross-discipline approaches,& he said.

Intel 9th generation processors rumors and leaks have hit a boiling point, and now we even have a possible release date.

Supposedly, Intel will launch new Coffee Lake Refresh CPUs on August 1 with products said to release in the following weeks to months after that, according to PC Builders Club. What's more the report suggest that multiple 9th