Voyager Innovations, the Manila-based owner of PayMaya, one of the Philippines’ most popular payment and financial services apps, announced today it has raised $167 million in new funding to launch more financial services, including a digital bank. The raise includes $121 million in new funding, and $46 million from previously committed funds. Voyager announced in […]
The pandemic has spurred interest in saving and investment apps around the world, especially ones geared toward newer investors. In Southeast Asia, startups in this space that have raised funding over the past few months include Ajaib, Bibit and Stashaway—and that’s just a (very) partial list. Now Infina, which calls itself the “Robinhood of Vietnam,” […]
Slice, an Indian fintech startup that has built a “super card” for millennials in India, said on Monday it has raised $20 million in a new financing round and is adding new features to change how people engage with their credit cards. Existing investors Gunosy, Blume Ventures and others financed the new round in the […]
In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a growing trend of creators adopting digital and social media, not just as a supplement to their media presence but also as a cornerstone of their personal brand. The pandemic has surely accelerated creator economy trends. Many popular artists and figures have had to postpone concerts and […]
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 using apps on Android devices […]
Rumor has it, if you whisper mafia to a venture capitalist or tech reporter, a seed investment and headline appears within minutes. That process quickly turns into seconds if the mafia reference includes the letters S, T, R, I, P and E before it. Tech mafias, otherwise known as a group of early employees within […]
It’s been a tough year for business. From ransomware attacks and power outages to cloud downtime and supply-chain disruptions, it’s never been more important to communicate to customers and stakeholders about what’s going wrong and why. Yet, with partial data and misinformation often spreading faster than official word, it’s also never been harder to deliver […]
Hey Equity fam, we have a small clip of extra goodness for you today. After our live show — listen to the recording here, it was good fun — we got to take a few questions from the audience, audio that was not included in the main episode, as we didn’t have the time. But […]
Bristol proved especially popular among tech investors last year — local businesses raked in an impressive $414 million in 2020, making it the third-largest U.K. city for tech investment.
Earlier this week, we caught up with Steve Sarracino the founder of the growth-equity firm Activant Capital in Greenwich, Conn., We’d last talked with Sarracino back in early April of last year, as people around the world were being forced into their homes by the pandemic, and his firm was just closing its third fund […]
There’s a new Megan Thee Stallion music video out in time for triple digit temperatures. But instead of launching a fresh viral TikTok dance for summer, the single inspired an informal protest among Black creators tired of thanklessly launching trends into the social media stratosphere. With the release of the video for “Thot Shit,” some […]
There's a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, "This meeting could have been an email!" you can bet that some small part of them meant it sincerely.
Researchers at MIT and Caltech have created a nanoengineered material that could be tougher than the likes of kevlar or steel. Made of interconnected carbon “tetrakaidecahedrons,” the material absorbed the impact of microscopic bullets in spectacular fashion. The study, led by MIT’s Carlos Portela, aimed to find out whether nanoarchitected materials — that is, designed […]
The Chinese ride-hailing giant appears set to be valued at a discount to its U.S. counterpart. By several tens of billions of dollars, it turns out. And we can’t quite figure out why.
The reality is that while companies can get smarter about cyber defenses and users can get more vigilant in their cyber hygiene practices, only the government has the power to end this behavior.
This week, we'll explore a number of projects aimed at identifying or confirming bias or cheating behaviors in machine learning systems, or failures in the data that support them.
Mega-rounds are no longer an exception in Latin America; in fact, they have become a trend, with ever-larger rounds being announced over the last few months.
Mercuryo, a startup that has built a cross-border payments network, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of funding. The London-based company describes itself as “a crypto infrastructure company” that aims to make blockchain useful for businesses via its “digital asset payment gateway.” Specifically, it aggregates various payment solutions and provides fiat and […]
