VENTURE CAPITAL POST

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, and Tesla founder Elon Musk invested $40 million in the second funding round of secretive artificial intelligence (AI) startup Vicarious.

The US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) awarded $17 million to clean energy businesses across 13 states to tackle the big problem of energy consumption.

San Francisco, US-based online restaurant reservation service OpenTable will shut down Los Altos, California-based restaurant recommendation app Ness, which it acquired in February, on April 21.

Arusha, Tanzania-based solar energy provider Off Grip Electric scored $7 million in a funding round led by Vulcan Capital, SolarCity, and Omidyar Network to power homes with prepaid electricity.

Denver, US-based health tech firm Welltok Inc acquired Seattle-based health app developer Mindbloom for an undisclosed amount to establish itself in the mobile health space.

The co-founders of New York, US-based ad tech startup Spotfront decided to turn down seed funding from strategic investors and bootstrap the firm to give them more independence in their company decisions.

Pamela York, the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of AccelerateMSP, scrapped the nonprofit entrepreneurship organization's plan to raise a seed fund for Twin Cities startups but will instead focus on mentoring them after they have raised capital.

Cupertino, US-based tech giant Apple is mulling on launching its own on-demand music service to compete with music streaming giant Spotify as the number of downloads goes down.

Chicago, US-based big data startup Food Genius analyzes and detects future trends in the US and shares it with restaurant chains, convenient stores, and other companies to help them determine their standing or future strategy in the food market.

Austin, Texas-based startup CitySprout is raising $2 million in its second financing round to help consumers establish a link with the local farmers who produce their food.

Zaragoza, Spain-based paper and packaging firm Saica purchased Istanbul, Turkey-based paperboard producer OMK for an undisclosed amount to establish its position in the European market.

Winston-Salem, US-based specialty crop developer Technology Crops International (TCI) bought Hampshire, UK-based firm Premium Crops Ltd for an undisclosed amount to expand its product portfolio.

Hermosa Beach, US-based payments firm Oink found a way to let parents monitor and control their kids' in-app purchases by linking a credit card to their accounts and letting them set a purchase limit for a specified length of time.

Developers have modified the open source Bitcoin software and released a new version to resolve the transaction flaws and to prevent a Mt Gox-like incident from happening again.

London, UK-based Video-on-Demand (Vod) service Screenburn raised $500,000 (£302,000) in an angel funding round to fuel its expansion for 2014 and to continue monetizing the presence of music and film artists on Facebook.