Alaska News

Startup CEOs are known for talking big games. A judge says Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes may bring up that fact in defending herself against criminal charges.

Era Software CEO Todd Persen. (Era Software Photo) New funding : Seattle-area database architecture startup Era Software , formerly known as EraDB, raised $15.2 million in a Series A round led by Playground Global. The tech:  Era helps companies manage their cloud-native workloads. Its first product, EraSearch, is built for log management and offers an alternative to Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. The idea is to reduce cloud hardware and operational costs. EraSearch is in private beta. Leadership: Era was founded by CEO Todd Persen , co-founder and former CTO of InfluxData, and CTO Robert Winslow , co-maintainer of Google’s FlatBuffers low-latency storage framework in Rust and co-creator of the Time Series Benchmarking Suite. Investors: Other backers in the 20-person company include Foundation Capital, Array Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and angel investors. Total funding to date is more than $22 million.

Microsoft’s bid to buy Discord is over — for now, at least. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the popular chat startup has ended acquisition talks with the Redmond, Wash. tech giant and others after reports surfaced last month that Discord was in final negotiations about a sale for at least $10 billion. A potential deal “could be rekindled in the future,” WSJ reported. Microsoft last week announced its $19.7 billion deal to buy Nuance Communications and completed a $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax Media this year. It has reportedly shown interest in Pinterest and made a bid for TikTok last fall. Previously: Why Microsoft would want to acquire Discord, which is reportedly exploring a $10B-plus sale