Ben Ling’s Bling Capital just raised $270M for its fourth fund, with half reserved for follow-on investments in standout startups. Known for backing unicorns like GitLab and Webflow, Bling leverages a powerful network of tech leaders from firms like OpenAI and Stripe to guide its portfolio.
This team invested in 170 startups, including Rippling and Vise, this seed-stage VC keeps proving its knack for spotting the next big thing.
Ben Ling’s Bling Capital just raised $270M for its fourth fund, with half reserved for follow-on investments in standout startups. Known for backing unicorns like GitLab and Webflow, Bling leverages a powerful network of tech leaders from firms like OpenAI and Stripe to guide its portfolio.
This team invested in 170 startups, including Rippling and Vise, this seed-stage VC keeps proving its knack for spotting the next big thing.
The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. Although some channels have been removed, the curation process is considered opaque and insufficient by analysts. On December 23rd, 2020, Pavel Durov posted to his channel that the company would need to start generating revenue. In early 2021, he added that any advertising on the platform would not use user data for targeting, and that it would be focused on “large one-to-many channels.” He pledged that ads would be “non-intrusive” and that most users would simply not notice any change. Soloviev also promoted the channel in a post he shared on his own Telegram, which has 580,000 followers. The post recommended his viewers subscribe to "War on Fakes" in a time of fake news. In addition, Telegram now supports the use of third-party streaming tools like OBS Studio and XSplit to broadcast live video, allowing users to add overlays and multi-screen layouts for a more professional look.
from vn
