MarketForce, a Kenyan B2B retail and financial services distribution startup, has expanded into five additional markets across Africa to grow RejaReja — its retailer ‘super app’ that makes it possible for informal merchants to order and pay for inventory digitally, accept payments for utility bills, and access financing for their businesses. The startup has today
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Jordan-based mobile game publisher TamatemGames announced today it has raised $11 million in a Series B led by KRAFTON, a South Korean game developer behind PUBG, marking its first investment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Venture Souq, Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors also participated in the round. The Series B round brings its total
The Federal Trade Commission sued to block Nvidia’s proposed $40 billion takeover of Arm Ltd., saying the deal would harm competition in the semiconductor market. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh has more on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
Sergiu Matei Contributor Sergiu Matei is the founder of Index, a platform that helps teams find and hire world-class remote software developers and be globally compliant from the get-go. We’ve recently been bombarded with news of job surpluses, including predictions that the number of software developer roles will increase 22% by 2030. With the need
Two years ago at AWS re:Invent, then AWS CEO Andy Jassy made it clear that he was tired of the slow pace of change and he wanted to find ways to get companies to move to the cloud faster. At yesterday’s opening keynote, in fact, new AWS CEO Adam Selipsky stated that the pace is
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes
James Nash Contributor James Nash is CEO and founder of inbeta, a tech-enabled talent specialist using data, social listening and human science to help corporations overcome bias. Today, the age of corporate social justice is dawning. With the business case for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) now more vital than ever, we’re beginning to see
Sourcing and importing goods from overseas can go very wrong, leaving companies in a position of not receiving what they paid for or even getting nothing. Manuel Rodriguez Dao, co-founder and CEO of Mexico City-based Meru.com, and co-founder Federico Moscato, learned this the hard way when they were sourcing goods for another company and faced
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai talks about how he passed the time during the pandemic and his parenting skills. He speaks with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Studio 1.0.”
Russ Heddleston Contributor Russ Heddleston is the co-founder and CEO of DocSend. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Greystripe and Trulia. Follow him here: @rheddleston and @docsend More posts by this contributor Pre-seed round funding is under
Online grocery sales are in single digits right now, but new data suggests it will top 20% by 2026 due to more consumers getting comfortable buying their groceries this way over the past two years. JOKR, an instant grocery delivery startup based in New York and operating in the Americas, is getting out ahead of
At its annual re:Invent conference, AWS announced that it will be launching over 30 new AWS Local Zones in major cities around the world. These new AWS Local Zones will be made available starting in 2022 in over 21 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece,
Donald R. Cravins Jr. Contributor Systemic racism is nothing new in America, and the effects of unconscious racial bias have long created inequity in the workplace. So why — when presented with the task of developing new “normal” hybrid workplaces — are we allowing the same systemic problems that boxed generations of Black and brown
People come together around the dinner table and the food they love, but for Umamicart founder and CEO Andrea Xu, it wasn’t always easy to find the ingredients to make the foods she grew up eating with her family. Xu’s parents are Chinese, but moved to Spain, opening up their own Chinese restaurant. She recalls
AWS held its annual customer conference, re:Invent, this week in Las Vegas. It’s typically been a high-energy customer extravaganza, a circus for tech people, but there were a few unusual things about this year’s model that made the event feel a bit more subdued than in the past. For starters, it was the first time
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. Looking for our other guides? Find them here! As we wade into the second pandemic-era holiday season, there’s no better time to throw yourself headlong into a new hobby. Or that’s what you should tell your loved ones
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s Friday, which means the whole crew was aboard for this particular episode. We had Grace and Chris behind the scenes, and Mary Ann, Natasha, and Alex on the mics. And, frankly, we
The plan is simple: First, we create a knockoff of a popular digital service. Second, we cry political persecution. Third, we raise a bunch of money with a SPAC. And then, to cap it off, we take on AWS. Got it? What’s actually funny is that I am not kidding. That is not only a
Facebook Messenger announced today that it’s starting to test out a new “Split Payments” feature that introduces a way for users to share the cost of bills and expenses through the app. The company says the new feature is a “free and fast” way to handle finances through Messenger. The new feature is rolling out
Bret Taylor is on a roll: On Monday, he became the chair of Twitter’s board, and a day later, Salesforce made him its co-CEO and co-chair. Enterprise reporter Ron Miller looked back at Taylor’s career to better understand how a one-time Google product manager ended up co-leading one of the world’s most valuable companies. To
Vinehealth, a 2018-founded, London-based digital health startup that’s built an app which offers personalized support for cancer patients while also making it easier to gather patient-reported outcome (PRO) data, including for drug development and clinical trials, has closed a $5.5 million seed round as it prepares to expand into the U.S. The round, which co-founder
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Zindi is all about using AI to solve real world problems for companies and individuals. And the South Africa-based crowd-solving startup has done that over the last three years they have been in existence. Just last year a team of data scientists under Zindi used machine learning to improve air quality monitoring in Kampala as
Grab, the Southeast Asian super app, announced last night that it completed its business combination with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Altimeter Growth. The result? Grab will begin trading today on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “GRAB.” And it raised a pile of money in the process. Billions, in fact. The Exchange explores startups,
TikTok is today introducing new ways for its creators to make money from their content. While already, the short-form video platform allowed creators to accept virtual gifts from fans during TikTok LIVE videos, a set of new features will allow creators to accept payments and gifts when they’re not livestreaming through the addition of Tips
Companies face all kinds of challenges moving to the cloud. The more complex and spread out you are geographically, the more difficult it becomes to manage your network. In an effort to solve this issue, Amazon announced AWS Cloud WAN today to bring software-defined wide area networking to AWS. Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels
If you’re trying to get a mortgage or an auto loan, banks will put on their judging glasses and look into your past. Makes sense; it’s a reasonably reliable indicator as to whether you’ll be able to repay your loans or not. Student financing is a little different. Sure, your past plays a role, but
What goes up must come down. And what goes SPAC must go splat? We’ll keep workshopping that. Regardless, shares of super app Grab took a pounding today after its SPAC combination was approved last night and began to trade this morning. Grab’s stock initially rose, before falling sharply as the day went on. By the
Religion-based apps, tools, and communities aren’t brand new, including to investors. Pray.com, for example, an L.A.-based app for daily prayer and bedtime bible stories that was founded in 2016, has raised at least $34 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins. Ministry Brands, a nine-year-old, Knoxville, Tenn.-based outfit that now includes dozens of software and payments
Rachel Delacour Contributor Rachel is the CEO and co-founder of Sweep. Previously, she co-founded BIME Analytics, which was acquired by Zendesk. She invests in mainly women-founded businesses, and her achievements have been recognized by La Tribune Women’s award, the French State’s Young Innovative Enterprise Award, and she was named as one of France’s Inspiring 50.