Fundings and Exits

It’s common knowledge, especially to those who work in financial services, that the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically increased demand for digital banking globally. A flurry of fintechs emerged in hope of meeting that demand while incumbent banks clamored to step up their own digital games. And then there were those companies that existed well before the

Focused on Southeast Asia, Ayoconnect’s APIs make it faster for businesses to launch new financial services, instead of needing to build their own tech infrastructure. It is also licensed by Indonesia’s central bank, enabling it to offer more services. The open finance startup announced today it has closed a $13 million Series B extension round

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. If you’re joining us at Disrupt next week, here’s an incentive for turning up early — we’re recording our podcasts live onstage, and you can be in the audience! Fun fun fun!

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Any tips for negotiating

Tiger Global’s latest investment in India is Vecmocon, a startup building solutions to bring safety and reliability alongside intelligence and health monitoring to light electric vehicles (EVs), addressing concerns that are curtailing the sales of electric scooters in the South Asian market. Unlike traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles that have existed for more than

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello, humans, and the hundreds of AIs that are probably reading this as well. May your day be full of joy. If you can’t feel joy today, be kind to yourself. Perhaps

Elenas estimates that 11 million women in Latin America sell consumer items via catalogs and door-to-door sales methods. It is digitizing that process so they can more easily sell from home. Founder and CEO Zach Oschin started the Colombia-based social commerce company in 2018 (and participated in our Latin American Startup Battlefield that year) to

Founded 10 years ago, Konvy is now Thailand’s top beauty e-commerce platform. It plans to accelerate its omnichannel and international distribution with a new Series A of $10 million from Insignia Ventures Partners. Konvy was launched in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur QingGui Huang, who previously managed fashion e-commerce platforms in China. It now works with

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Beep boop, here we go again with another exciting week in tech. Next week is Disrupt, so the TechCrunch Slack watercooler is full of sartorial advice, much to our surprise and confusion.

Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor Why growth activation matters To optimize for growth, study your down-funnel metrics Who knew that “growth hacking,” a term coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis,

Automation Anywhere, one of the best-funded RPA providers with over $1 billion capital raised to date, went the debt route this week, securing a $200 million loan from Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Capital and Hercules Capital. Debt raises aren’t necessarily a bad thing — they’re a useful tool, particularly for companies with high annual recurring

Hello and welcome back to The Exchange’s weekend missive. If you are reading this on TechCrunch and want to get the letter in your inbox, head here. Your regular host Anna Heim is off this week on a much-deserved vacation, so I’m stepping back into my old role as newsletter scribe. It’s good fun to

Hi all! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up some of the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. The goal? Even when you’re swamped, a quick skim of WiR on Saturday morning should give you a pretty good understanding of what happened in tech this week. Want

Eric L. Sophir Contributor Matthew Horton Contributor Matthew Horton is a senior counsel and IP lawyer at law firm Foley & Lardner LLP where he focuses his practice on patent law and IP protections in cybersecurity, AI, machine learning and more. Early-stage companies are innovating new artificial intelligence-based solutions, but they often face questions as

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Friday! How’s that for brevity in newsletter introductions? Let’s get to it so we can crack open a Liquid Death and let the week sag off into the murky distance of memory

It’s a rote story by now that many populations around the world are facing rapid decline. Birth rates in many countries are falling, leading to concerns about graying populations engendering imbalanced economies. That’s true when we consider nation-level populations. It’s also true when we consider the rate at which new unicorns are born, measured by the

A Kenya-based venture studio with a focus on tourism, Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV), has raised $1 million pre-seed funding to build the next generation of startups that use technology to modernize the tourism sector. Investors participating in this round include Klister Credit Corp., a Canadian investment firm, The Untours Foundation, and a number of angel

The proliferation of delivery services give customers many options, but means chaos for busy restaurants that need to manage orders across multiple apps and channels. Many kitchens handle this by juggling several devices at a time, one for each app. Klikit wants to save Southeast Asian food businesses from “tablet hell” by aggregating order information

Atman Capital, a year-old early-stage venture firm partially backed by about 20 founders, is sweetening the deal for these individual limited partners. It promises to give credit to any one of them who refers a successful deal to the venture firm in the form of some carried interest in the firm’s own profits. It’s an

Microsoft has held conversations to invest in the Indian play-to-earn gaming platform Zupee in recent weeks and proposed to potentially lead a funding round of over $100 million, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, the latest in a series of bets from the cloud services giant to expand its business in the key

In South Korea, there are about 7.3 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — defined as firms with less than 250 employees. Their workforces combined make up 83.1% of all corporation employees in the country, totaling about 17.1 million people, according to OECD data. To help meet SMEs’ financial needs in the country, Seoul-based fintech

A world-class tech conference like TechCrunch Disrupt — coming to you live and in person in San Francisco on October 18-20 — doesn’t just happen. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation, and we want to direct your attention to an essential group of deck hands — our partners. Building a startup is no easy task — not

IriusRisk, a threat modeling platform, today announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B funding round led by Paladin Capital Group with participation from BrightPixel Capital, SwanLab Venture Factory, 360 Capital and Inveready. In a conversation with TechCrunch, CEO Stephen de Vries said that the proceeds will be put toward growing IriusRisk’s U.S.

Party Round wants you to know that the party isn’t over. In fact, it just rebranded, put the music just a little bit lower and finally put out some appetizers. After a certain point, don’t we all get peckish? Party Round announced today that it has rebranded to Capital to underscore its product expansion. Now,

It is typical for consumers to purchase more food items than they need and then throw them away because they either forgot about it or the food expired. It is estimated that 1.3 billion tons of food items are wasted yearly, an approximate $1 trillion loss. Recelery, a pantry tracker app and online marketplace, aims

For the average individual living in Lagos — Nigeria’s most populous city, with over 20 million people — apartment hunting is an extreme sport. Not only is rent expensive — low- to middle-income housing can cost between $1,000 and $5,000 yearly — but renters must also pay a year in advance, sometimes even two before

Zenskar, a startup that is aiming to help SaaS companies automate their billing workflows, has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round. Headquartered in New York and Bengaluru, Zenskar is building a platform for SaaS companies to generate bills for their complex pricing plans — whether they are based on usage-based pricing, subscriptions, nuanced

We’re just a few short weeks away from the first in-person TechCrunch Disrupt in three years. The agenda is absolutely bursting with expert insight and information from the leading voices in the early-stage startup universe. We want to take a moment to highlight a session led by our title sponsor, AT&T, who helps more than

Prosus Ventures has called off the $4.7 billion acquisition of BillDesk it announced last year, the European technology giant’s largest acquisition, saying “certain conditions precedent” were unfulfilled in a surprising move a month after the proposed acquisition received approval from the local antitrust watchdog. “Certain conditions precedent were not fulfilled by the 30 September 2022

It takes a veritable army to make TechCrunch Disrupt — which takes place October 18–20 in San Francisco — the well-oiled experience that savvy startuppers have come to know and love. And we couldn’t do it nearly as well without our incredible volunteers. If you’re looking for a no-budget way to experience Disrupt up close