Month: January 2022

Six months after its $20 million Series A, payroll connectivity platform Pinwheel just announced that it has nabbed another $50 million in a round led by new investor GGV Capital.  Pinwheel serves neobanks and fintechs like Block, Acorns, and Current by providing application programming interfaces (APIs) linked to payroll, income, and employment data. Historically, systems
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In 2020, Africa50, an infrastructure financier backed by the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) Group and a good number of African governments, hosted an innovation challenge that sought affordable and reliable solutions for last-mile internet connectivity across the continent. A proposal by Poa Internet, a Kenyan startup beat 673 others from across the world as a
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Mio, the Vietnamese social commerce platform, has raised an $8 million Series A, less than a year after announcing its seed round. The funding was led by Jungle Ventures, Patamar Capital and Oliver Jung, with participation from returning investors GGV, Venturra, Hustle Fund, iSEED SEA and Gokul Rajaram. TechCrunch first covered Mio at the time
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French startup Exotec has raised a $335 million Series D round in a new round of funding led by Goldman Sachs’ Growth Equity business. Following today’s investment, the company has reached a valuation of $2 billion. Exotec sells a complete end-to-end solution to turn a regular warehouse into a partially automated logistics platform. It’s a
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Whatever you do, don’t refer to LG’s incubator program LG Nova as a corporate venture capital (CVC) outfit. LG Nova is the pointiest tip of the spear for LG, the company’s experimental playground to work with startups to explore spaces where the corporation has spotted areas ripe for future growth. Backed by a relatively large
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Shanea Leven Contributor Shanea Leven is co-founder and CEO of CodeSee, a developer platform that helps developers and development teams better understand codebases. “Raising money is catastrophically challenging for female founders, and even harder for Black female founders.” It’s a bold, even damning statement — one I made in a recent discussion speculating what’s to
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Payments company Checkout.com isn’t just a unicorn — it has closed a $1 billion Series D founding round. Following today’s round, the company is now valued at $40 billion. That’s a stark increase compared to last year’s valuation. With its Series C round, the company raised $450 million at a $15 billion valuation — it represents
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Embedded finance continues to be the engine driving the growth of fintech, with one group of companies building core banking, payments and other financial technology, and a much bigger group tapping that technology through APIs to build customer-facing businesses. Today, one of the bigger players on the core technology side — Global Processing Services —
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