Online branded payments now run the gamut of anything from Spotify vouchers, Netflix vouchers, Neosurf, PaySafe cards, and everything in between. Consumers use them to pay for a variety of things. In Europe, they are an increasingly big business. Now, European branded payments company Recharge.com has raised €10m ($11.8m) in a debt funding round led
Meniga, the London fintech that provides digital banking technology to leading banks, has closed €10 million in additional funding. The round is led by Velocity Capital and Frumtak Ventures. Also participating are Industrifonden, the U.K. Government’s Future Fund and existing customers UniCredit, Swedbank, Groupe BPCE and Íslandsbanki. Meniga says the funding will be used for
Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than $50 million in new funding. Notably, two of the main investors are not venture capital firms but instead are two large tech companies: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre and San Francisco-based software
Rick Song Contributor Rick Song is co-founder and CEO of Persona. Since the dawn of the internet, knowing (or, perhaps more accurately, not knowing) who is on the other side of the screen has been one of the biggest mysteries and thrills. In the early days of social media and online forums, anonymous usernames were
You might expect that a startup that makes community building software would be thriving during a pandemic when it’s so difficult for us to be together. And Bevy, a company whose product powers community sites like Salesforce Trailblazers and Google Developers announced it has raised a $40 million Series C this morning, at least partly
Everybody says they want to build user-centric companies and products, but how exactly is that achieved? Talking and listening to users, of course — a task that is both unnecessarily time-consuming and cumbersome to organise, according to Axel Thomson, a former product manager at U.K. recipe-box subscription unicorn Gousto. His burgeoning startup, dubbed Ribbon, wants
Our picks for the most intriguing companies of Y Combinator’s latest batch were based entirely on substance and our endless expertise, so it’s time for something much more superficial. Here are the 11 best logos from the hundreds of companies that presented yesterday. Watching companies go by 60 seconds at a time for like 8
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, the Equity team brought on Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia and Hustle Fund General Partner Elizabeth Yin to talk about equity crowdfunding. It’s been about a week since the SEC increased the equity
Twitter today is announcing what the company calls a “strategic acquihire” of the API integration platform Reshuffle. The startup’s commercial technology, which allows developers to build workflows and connect systems using any API, will be wound down as a result of Twitter’s deal. However, Reshuffle’s entire team of seven, including co-founders Amir Shevat and Avner
When AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced in an email to employees yesterday that Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky was returning to run AWS, it was probably not the choice most considered. But to the industry watchers we spoke to over the last couple of days, it was a move that made absolute sense once you thought
Leveraging networks of “experts” online started out as a very manual online business. But it’s rapidly becoming more efficient as machine learning is applied to the whole business model. Indeed, in the UK alone $60bn is spent a year on using outside expertise. Large players in this space include GLG, Third Bridge, Guidepoint, and AlphaSights.
Spotify Technology SA is offering cheap plans in countries with low purchasing power as the audio streaming platform plans its broadest market expansion to date across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, said vice president of markets and subscriber growth Gustav Gyllenhammar in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg’s Juliette Saly. ——– Follow Bloomberg for business news
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: What type of visa
Ketch, a startup aiming to help businesses navigate the increasingly complex world of online privacy regulation and data compliance, is announcing that it has raised $23 million in Series A funding. The company is also officially coming out of stealth. I actually wrote about Ketch’s free PrivacyGrader tool last year, but now it’s revealing the
If you’re old enough to remember the outrage that followed Twitter’s decision to replace stars with hearts (aka likes instead of favorites), then you know that Twitter’s user base has strong feelings about how it wants to engage with tweets. Now, Twitter is considering another radical change on this front that could shake things up
As the Ubers of the world continue to scale, a smaller on-demand transportation startup has raised some funding in Germany, underscoring the opportunities that remain for startups in the space targeting specific service niches. Blacklane — the Berlin startup that provides on-demand black-car chauffeur services in Berlin, London, Dubai, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Singapore
The pandemic has clearly had an impact on the way we work, and this is especially true for salespeople. Salesforce introduced a number updates to Sales Cloud this morning including Salesforce Meetings, a smart overlay for Zoom meetings that gives information and advice to the sales team as they interact with potential customers in online
A German court that’s considering Facebook’s appeal against a pioneering pro-privacy order by the country’s competition authority to stop combining user data without consent has said it will refer questions to Europe’s top court. In a press release today the Düsseldorf court writes [translated by Google]: “…the Senate has come to the conclusion that a
Lidar companies across the planet are going SPAC, but Baraja isn’t in a hurry to go public. The Australian lidar maker has raised a $31M B round to continue the deployment and development of its “unique and ingenious” imaging system, with participation beyond the usual VC suspects. Baraja’s lidar uses what the company calls SpectrumScan,
We’ve reached the end of Y Combinator’s biggest Demo Day, which saw more than 300 companies pitching back-to-back over eight hours. Earlier, we highlighted some of the companies that caught our eye in the first half of the day. Now we’re back with our favorite companies from the second half. From a marketplace to help
Airwallex, the fintech company for cross-border businesses, announced today it has added $100 million more to its Series D round, bumping its valuation up to $2.6 billion. The extension was led by Greenoaks, with participation from Grok Ventures and returning investors Skip Capital and ANZi Ventures. Co-founder and chief executive officer Jack Zhang told TechCrunch
Public App, a location-based social network that connects individuals to people in their vicinity, has raised $41 million in a new round, just six months after securing $35 million as the hyper-local Indian startup looks to expand its presence in the world’s second largest internet market. A91 Partners led the new round in Public App,
OneTrust, a late stage privacy platform startup, announced it was adding ethics and compliance to the mix this morning by acquiring Convercent, a company that was built to help build more ethical organizations. The companies did not share the purchase price. OneTrust just raised $300 million on a fat $5.1 billion valuation at the end
Augmented Reality pioneer Blippar – which has had a tortuous history after early investors pulled out and the company had to scramble for new backers – has now closed a $5 million funding round, after 18 months of re-positioning as a B2B company in the AR space. The pre-Series A round was co-led by Chroma
Cameras have long been the battleground on which the smartphone wars have been fought. Short of any left-field innovation like folding screens or strange form factors, that looks likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Year after year and generation after generation, companies tout imaging breakthroughs to set themselves apart. It
It’s that time again! Today is Demo Day for Y Combinator’s latest accelerator batch — its largest to date, with more than 300 teams getting a minute each to pitch their companies to an audience of investors. This is the third time YC has held its Demo Day via a Zoom livestream and the second
Today Bloomberg reported, and Axios confirmed that Robinhood has filed privately to go public. The well-financed Robinhood is an American fintech company that provides zero-cost trading services to consumers. Private IPO filings have become common in recent quarters, making Robinhood’s decision to file behind closed doors before showing its numbers to the public unsurprising. That
Clubhouse, the social audio app that first took Silicon Valley by storm and is now gaining much wider appeal, is an interesting user experience case study. Hockey-stick growth — 8 million global downloads as of last month, despite still being in a prelaunch, invite-only mode, according to App Annie — is something most startups would
When Amazon announced last month that Jeff Bezos was moving into the executive chairman role, and AWS CEO Andy Jassy would be taking over the entire Amazon operation, speculation began about who would replace Jassy. People considered a number of internal candidates viable, such as Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure at AWS and
U.K. challenger stockbroker Freetrade has raised a $69 million Series B round led by Left Lane Capital. The growth fund of L Catterton and existing investor Draper Esprit also participated. Freetrade operates a stock trading app and has managed to attract 600,000 users in the U.K. — they generated £1 billion in quarterly trade volume.