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Condeco gets $30m, Twitter buys Magic Pony & more in The Week in Tech

Welcome to your Week in Tech – our video round up of this week’s top technology news.

Investments

Workplace management tech provider Condeco has raised $30m. The round was led by Highland Europe and the company plans to use the funds to aid its expansion across the US, Europe and Asia.

Lystable closed an $11m Series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures and Goldcrest Capital. Although founded in the UK by Google designer Pete Johnston, Lystable has now reincorporated as a US company

Other UK tech investments this week include the £5m Series A raised by Techspace and the $4m seed raised by Invoice Cycle.

Twitter and Magic Pony

Twitter announced its acquisition of London-based machine-learning outfit Magic Pony. The social media giant reportedly paid around £102m for the company, which uses tech to recognise patterns and textures, meaning it can improve low-quality pictures and videos.

This is Twitter’s third machine-learning acquisition in two years, having acquired Madbits in 2014 and Whetlab last year.

Instagram

Instagram hit over 500 million monthly users this week, which is twice the amount it had on board two years ago. 300 million daily active users contribute towards the 95 million photo and video uploads that take place each day. The company also revealed that more than 80% of its users live outside of the United States.

Download of the Week

Our ‘download of the week’ is Karhoo. The app is similar to Uber, but lets you book cabs from local taxi firms, rather than private drivers. Payment is made by linking a credit or debit card, there’s no surge pricing and, rather than giving you a ballpark figure for the fare, Karhoo shows the exact amount you’ll pay.

And finally…

And finally, Ghostbot, released by Burner, will detect incoming texts from a person you want to cease communication with and sends automated responses until the other person takes the hint.

…That’s all for this week!

Topics

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