socaltech.com
Santa Monica-based
Happy Returns, which operates a business which makes it easier for consumers to returns items they have purchased at e-commerce startups and also handles all the logistics in processing those returns has been acquired by
PayPal. Financial terms of the buy were not announced. Happy Returns was venture backed by U.S. Venture Partners and Upfront Ventures, and also had previously raised strategic funding from PayPal itself. The last announced funding for Happy Returns was in April of 2019. Happy Returns has a network of approximately 2,600 retail locations, where consumers can drop of returns of products they purchased online.
Published: - May 03, 2021
Reese Witherspoon is one of Hollywood s most famous actresses. However, after realizing that women are underrepresented and underpaid in the film industry, she decided to found her own production company: Hello Sunshine.
The Woman Post | Carolina Rodríguez Monclou
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Witherspoon is an Academy Award-winning actress for her role June Carter Cash in Walk the Line. She is well-known for starring in the acclaimed film Legally Blonde. The Cruel Intentions star was also nominated for an Academy Award for Wild and won awards for the Golden Globes and Emmys for Big Little Lies.
At Basis Set Ventures merging venture capital and software development yields a $165 million new fund
When Xuezhao Lan first formed Basis Set Ventures, the goal was to leverage technology to give venture capital investing super powers.
From the earliest days, when Lan hired former TechCrunch reporter John Mannes, and then built out the team with the data scientist, Rachel Wong, former Upfront Ventures partner, Chang Xu, and former vice president of growth, Sheila Vashee, the focus was as much on technology products as it was on dollar investments and advisory services.
Together with Niniane Wang, a former advisor who now serves as the firm’s chief technology officer, Basis Set grounded its decisions in the technical bona fides of Lan’s firm. And product development isn’t something that the firm simply pays lip service about. Basis Set ships about three different updates to a massive suite of internal and external products every week, according to the partnership.
Gaming infrastructure startup Pragma raises $12M from Greylock, Mark Pincus and others
Pragma is building what it calls a “backend as a service,” providing ready-made infrastructure to developers of online, live service games. And it’s announcing today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by David Thacker at Greylock, with participation from Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Oculus founder Nate Mitchell and Cloudera founder Amr Awadallah, along with previous investors Upfront Ventures and Advancit Capital. Amy Chang, who sold her business intelligence startup Accompany to Cisco, is joining Pragma’s board of directors.
Co-founder and CEO Eden Chen told me that where Unity and Unreal have built popular frontend game engines, he and his co-founder Chris Cobb (former engineering lead at Riot Games) are hoping Pragma will fill the void for a “de facto backend game engine.”