London-based fintech startup Revolut has announced that it is applying for a bank charter in the U.S. The company has submitted a draft application with the FDIC and the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. If the company manages to get a charter in California, it would let the company operate throughout the U.S.
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It’s plain to see that electric vehicles are the future, but there’s more to making that change happen than swapping out a gas motor for a battery-powered one — especially in aircraft. H3x is a startup that aims to accelerate that future with a reimagined, completely integrated electric motor that it claims outperforms everything on
Traditional remittance companies, while necessary, currently have two flaws in speed and exorbitant fees. It can take a long while (days to weeks) for money sent from an immigrant in the U.S. to reach a relative in Nigeria. The fees charged depend on the amount sent — and let’s not forget the extra charges for
Indonesia-based fintech Pluang announced today it has raised $20 million in a pre-Series B round led by Openspace Ventures, with participation from Go Ventures and other returning investors. The company offers proprietary savings and investment products that allow users to make contributions starting from 50 cents USD. Go Ventures, the investment arm of Gojek, also
The historical trajectory of venture capital has been to move to earlier and earlier finding rounds in order to capture the greatest potential multiple on exit. In the US, we’ve seen an explosion of Pre-series A funds, and similarly in Europe. But there’s been an opportunity to tie a lot of that activity together and
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here. Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and
Jul.10 — Marcos Galperin, MercadoLibre Inc. chairman and chief executive officer, discusses the growth of e-payments in Latin America with Bloomberg’s Paul Sweeney at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
Once the path less traveled, bootstrapping today has become a much more viable and common approach to building a startup. By not taking venture capital dollars early, bootstrapping can force founders to remain disciplined in serving their paying customers well. It’s also a pretty compelling way to minimize dilution for founders and early employees. No
Ann Shepherd Contributor Ann Shepherd is co-founder of social impact venture Him For Her. She serves on the board of fintech startup HoneyBook. More posts by this contributor How to build a diverse board Jocelyn Mangan Contributor Jocelyn Mangan is the founder and CEO of social impact venture Him For Her. She serves on the
Nathan Beckord Contributor More posts by this contributor Founders seeking their first check need a fundraising sales funnel Fundraising lessons from David Rogier of MasterClass Christine Tao runs Sounding Board, a business founded in 2016 that offers executive coaching services to leaders at major companies like Kraft and Heinz. But not long ago, she was
Abodu, one of a slew of startup companies pitching backyard homes and office spaces to Californians in an effort to help address the state’s housing shortage, has instituted a new “Quickship” program that can take an order from contract to construction and installation in about 30 days. Behind the quick turnaround time is a pre-approval
Most American retail banks are designed the same way: Customers must pass several desks set aside for loan and mortgage officers before they can talk to a customer representative. I only step inside a bank a few times each year, but even pre-pandemic, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone sitting at one
In an Extra Crunch Live this past week, Cleo Capital founding partner Sarah Kunst broke down what founders can learn from Supreme, a sought-after streetwear brand. She argued that founders, similar to Supreme, should build a brand around themselves that is so well-respected and has clout that whenever they start something new, investors will line
Fireblocks has raised a $133 million Series C funding round led by Coatue, Ribbit and Stripes. The company provides several products that let you store, transfer and issue digital assets. In particular, Fireblocks provides custody to institutional investors — it currently stores $400 billion in cryptocurrencies. BNY and SVB Capital are also participating in today’s funding
Barely more than seven months after its most recent funding announcement, Yotpo is revealing that it has raised another $230 million in a Series F round that values the company at $1.4 billion (post-money). “Our round, in my eyes, it’s all about celebrating the future of e-commerce,” co-founder and CEO Tomer Tagrin told me. “Brands
The B2B payments space has been on fire for a while, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only fueled mass adoption of digitizing finances. In regions like Latin America, the need for innovation in the sector is even more paramount than in the United States with so many people still relying on outdated processes. One Mexico
Amid all the news of the last few days, you might have missed that eToro, an Israeli consumer stock-trading service, is going public in the United States via a SPAC. Don’t worry about the SPAC bit: If you want a rundown of the deal itself, Mary Ann has you covered. What matters for our purposes
Offerpad is the latest proptech company to go public via a SPAC merger. The Phoenix, Ariz.-based company announced Thursday its plans to go public by merging with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company in a deal valued at $3 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second, or early third, quarter of 2021. The combined
Snowflake announced earlier this month that it would give up its dual-class shareholder structure, a corporate governance setup that often gives founders and executives superior voting rights, typically involving 10 times as many votes for their own shares as others receive. The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This time around we had whatever passes for a quiet week as far as news volume. But that still meant we had to cut stuff and
Recently public unicorn Upstart announced earnings that blew the socks off of Wall Street this week. After closing on Wednesday at around $61 per share, Upstart wrapped Thursday worth $115 per share. It turns out that all the blather we’ve had to endure about artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade is coming true, at
The paradox of connected computing is how much information is made available to us in just a few clicks or taps — but also how this ocean of available data can overwhelm and lap over a particular bit of intel the moment we need to lay our fingers back on it. Fire up a web
Facebook this morning announced it will increase the penalties against its rule-breaking Facebook Groups and their members, alongside other changes designed to reduce the visibility of groups’ potentially harmful content. The company says it will now remove civic and political groups from its recommendations in markets outside the U.S., and will further restrict the reach
Shortly after Twitter announced it would begin testing a better way to display images on its app, it’s now doing the same for YouTube videos. According to a new post on Twitter’s Support account, the company will today start testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly from your home timeline within the Twitter iOS
As WhatsApp spends months to address users’ concerns and confusion about its planned policy update, there is evidently one entity it hasn’t had much luck making inroads with: The government of India. The Indian government alleged on Friday that WhatsApp’s planned privacy update, which goes into effect in two months, violates local laws on several
John S. Kim Contributor John S. Kim is CEO of Sendbird, makers of a customizable chat and messaging API service for mobile and web applications. Social+ companies are upping the stakes for everyone by giving consumers multiple benefits at once: products that serve a purpose but also meet our need for belonging to a community.
Instagram and WhatsApp experienced an apparent outage on Friday. It began around 1:40 p.m. ET and lasted for more than half an hour. WhatsApp was unable to connect to the server, and messages were not being delivered. It’s not clear if the issue also affected Facebook Messenger, which last year rolled out new functionality to
Facebook’s hardware strategy often looks pretty opaque from the outside. The company has done fairly well with Oculus sales amid pandemic demand. Even its Echo Show competitor Portal has seen a bump as people have been forced to socially distance. The company’s smartphone partnership with HTC, meanwhile, fell flat eight or so years back. Earlier
Facebook develops a new way to interact with AR, Uber’s facial recognition policy faces scrutiny and SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster hits a major milestone. This is your Daily Crunch for March 19, 2021. The big story: Facebook shows off wrist-based interface This project comes out of Facebook Reality Labs and is supposed to present an
The Swiss-based, venture capital-backed, direct air capture technology developer Climeworks is partnering with a joint venture between the government of Norway and massive European energy companies to map the pathway for a business that could provide not only the direct capture of carbon dioxide emissions from air, but the underground sequestration and storage of those