Chinaccelerator Daily Digest 12/18

Overseas:

1. Google to invest $1 billion in new campus in New York City

2. Foxconn not in settlement talks with Qualcomm in Apple battle

3. Morgan Stanley led a $50 million Series D round in data warehouse virtualization company AtScale

4. Careem launches delivery service, expects to close funding round soon

5. Uber welcomes, unions criticize UK plan to maintain flexible gig economy

6. Google and Amazon will launch Apple AirPods competitors next year, top analyst says

7. Moonbug nabs $145M to buy up kids’ digital media brands

8. Nielsen is getting serious about going private and will talk to potential buyers in January

9. Twilio’s 300% surge this year has been a windfall for 107-year-old venture firm Bessemer

10. Amazon has explored getting into consumer health diagnostics — testing for disease at home

11. Intel and TPG in talks to sell McAfee to Thoma Bravo for significantly more than $4.2 billion

12. Fintech company Plaid announces a $250 million funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins’ partner Mary Meeker.

13. Meeshkan raises €370K for its ‘ChatOps’ bot for training machine learning models

14. Abacus raises $2 million to help startups and investors manage tokenized liquidity programs

15. RightHand Robotics grabs $23 million in funding

China:

1. Apple to push software update in China as Qualcomm case threatens sales ban

2. Angry customers of Chinese bike-sharing pioneer Ofo queue up at Beijing office for deposit refund

3. Huawei says it is on target to ship a record 200 million smartphones in 2018, defying worries over business outlook after arrest of CFO

4. BMW’s premium ride-hailing service is now live in China

5. Tencent plans to shut down the web version of its QQ service

6. Hong Kong e-commerce 2018 year-in-review

7. The automatic machine selling Coconut Daomei Technology 道美科技 raised 15 million RMB.

Cross-border:

1. T-Mobile, Sprint see Huawei shun clinching U.S. deal – sources

2. Google brings its shopping service to India, tapping into the country’s digital boom

Blockchain:

1. Hong Kong Stock Exchange Ruins Bitmain’s Plans for an IPO

2. Bitcoin climbs above $3,400, headed for biggest daily rise in nearly three weeks

Emerging Market:

1. Traveloka reportedly has acquired rival OTAs PegiPegi, Mytour, TravelBook

2. Vietnam’s Vingroup targets global markets with smartphones in tech shift

3. Energy savings tech BBP Singapore raises up to US$32.8M from KKR

4. SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Alibaba Group led a $1.1 billion financing round in Indonesian e-commerce firm Tokopedia

5. India-based educational startup Byju’s targets global expansion for its digital education service after raising $540M

6. Indonesia-based digital accelerator DIVA launched an AI-based stock information instant messaging SIVA

7. Mark Zuckerberg-backed edtech startup Byju’s raises US$540M in fresh funding

8. Umitron gets US$2M funding to provide its AI fish feeding tech to farmers in Peru’s Lake Titicaca

Cover picture credits from CNBC