Vietnamese financial services app MFast gets $1.5M pre-Series A led by Do Ventures
MFast founders Phan Thanh Long and Phan Thanh Vinh MFast, a mobile app that lets Vietnamese users in remote areas access financial services, announced today it has raised a $1.5 million pre-Series A. The round was led by Do Ventures, with participation from JAFCO...
GrowSari, a B2B platform for small stores in the Philippines, adds investors like Temasek’s Pavilion Capital and Tencent
Sari-sari stores are neighborhood stores in the Philippines that usually sell daily necessities and sometimes serve as community hubs, too. Today GrowSari, a startup that is digitizing sari-sari stores with features like pricing tools, inventory management and working...
Crypto finance startup Amber Group raises $100M at $1B valuation
More mainstream venture capital firms are jumping on the crypto bandwagon as investors increasingly consider bitcoin an investable asset, despite the recent massive price drops of a few major cryptocurrencies. Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency trading...
Dollars, deals and the importance of nondilutive capital
Today, on Juneteenth, we recognize the efforts this nation still needs to put toward addressing structural racism and disparities, including in the world of tech. This week, HBCUvc, a nonprofit that aims to diversify the world of venture capital, launched a...
This Week in Apps: Spotify debuts a Clubhouse rival, Facebook tests Audio Rooms in US, Amazon cuts Appstore commissions
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...
Tiger Global in talks to back BharatPe at $2.5 billion valuation
Indian fintech startup BharatPe is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $250 million in a new financing round led by Tiger Global, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The new round, a Series E, is giving the three-year-old New...
UK’s ICO warns over ‘big data’ surveillance threat of live facial recognition in public
The UK’s chief data protection regulator has warned over reckless and inappropriate use of live facial recognition (LFR) in public places. Publishing an opinion today on the use of this biometric surveillance in public — to set out what is dubbed as the...
Industrial cybersecurity startup Claroty raises $140M in pre-IPO funding round
Claroty, an industrial cybersecurity company that helps customers protect and manage their Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) assets, has raised $140 million in its latest, and potentially last round of funding. With the new round of Series D...
Nylas, maker of APIs to integrate email and other productivity tools, raises $120M, passes 40k developers
Companies like Stripe and Twilio have put APIs front and center as an effective way to integrate complex functionality that may not be core to your own technology stack but a necessary part of your wider business. Today, a company that has taken that model to create...
Airspeeder wants to make electric flying racing cars a reality in 2021
While much of the eVTOL industry has its sights set on urban air taxis or cargo transportation, entrepreneur Matthew Pearson had another idea: electric flying race cars. So in 2019, he founded two companies, Alauda Aeronautics to manufacture the aircraft and...