Francophone Africa has its first unicorn, and if you’ve been following tech on the continent, you will be very unsurprised to hear that it’s coming from the world of fintech. Wave, a U.S. and Senegal-based mobile money provider, has raised $200 million in Series A round of funding. The investment is the largest-ever Series A […]
BP Ventures, the investing arm of oil and gas giant BP, has announced a €10 million (~$11.9 million) investment in Ryd, a German in-car digital payments provider. The fresh funds will help Ryd expand its service into international markets and build out its offering, according to a statement. Ryd’s service allows users to lump together […]
Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber is in advanced stages of talks to raise a new financing round at up to $2 billion in valuation, several sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. If the talks materialize in a deal, CoinSwitch Kuber will become the second crypto startup in the world’s second largest internet market to […]
Financial services, especially those for people who don’t have access to traditional bank accounts or lines of credit, are proliferating in Southeast Asia. Jeff App wants to give consumers a “super app” where they can compare many financial products and apply for them using the startup’s proprietary data-scoring models. For service providers, Jeff serves as […]
Every startup founder faces the same issue — how do you manage your cap table and equity plans in a transparent and lightweight manner? If you’re based in the U.S., chances are you’re using an equity management solution like Carta. But if you’re not based in the U.S., you don’t have a ton of options. […]
For many manufacturers and freight forwarders, managing logistics is still a very manual process: tracking shipments with a call or online lookup, and entering that data into an Excel spreadsheet. Portcast, which describes itself as a “next-generation logistics operating system,” makes the process more efficient by gathering data from myriad sources and not only track […]
In the latest quasi-throwback toward ‘do not track‘, the UK’s data protection chief has come out in favor of a browser- and/or device-level setting to allow Internet users to set “lasting” cookie preferences — suggesting this as a fix for the barrage of consent pop-ups that continues to infest websites in the region. European web […]
ShopUp, a startup that is digitizing neighborhood stores in Bangladesh, has raised $75 million in a new financing round that is also the largest in the South Asian market. Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures led ShopUp’s $75 million Series B round. Prosus Ventures as well as existing investors Flourish Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, and VEON Ventures […]
The pandemic has triggered more demand for contactless and staff-less operations in the hospitality sector, and now H2O Hospitality, the unmanned hotel management company, has closed a $30 million round on the back of that boost. The South Korea and Japan-based startup automates front and backend processes including accommodation reservation, room management and front desk […]
A.ID, an identity and compliance platform with a focus on high-risk clients, has closed a pre-seed investment round of $500,000 from angel investors including former employees of RobinHood, Square and Snap. The startup says it is addressing a market that traditional Fintech companies and banking instutions can’t seem to deal with: namely the rise of […]
Financial automation platform, Aurelia has raised $3 million in seed funding, led by Blossom Capital. Billing itself as a sort of “IFTTT for finance” aimed at small businesses that want to integrate their bank accounts with financial tools, Aurelia says this then gives them greater control over cash flow, taxes etc to automate normally manual […]
The manufacturing industry took a hard hit from the Covid-19 pandemic, but there are signs of how it is slowly starting to come back into shape — helped in part by new efforts to make factories more responsive to the fluctuations in demand that come with the ups and downs of grappling with the shifting […]
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Before […]
Berlin-based Mobius Labs has closed a €5.2 million (~$6.1M) funding round off the back of increased demand for its computer vision training platform. The Series A investment is led by Ventech VC, along with Atlantic Labs, APEX Ventures, Space Capital, Lunar Ventures plus some additional angel investors. The startup offers an SDK that lets the […]
ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses […]
Indian logistics firm Delhivery has courted one more high-profile investor before its expected IPO in the next two quarters: Lee Fixel’s Addition. The Gurgaon-headquartered firm has disclosed in a regulatory filing that Addition has invested $76.4 million in the startup. The new investment is part of a Series I round, according to the filing, provided by […]
UK tech accelerator Founders Factory is joining forces with a European counterpart to launch the Founders Factory Sustainability Seed program. Launched in partnership with G-Force (the G is for Green) based out of Bratislava, Slovakia, the program will look to invest in and accelerate climate-tech startups. The program will invest in entrepreneurs with startups that […]
Nigerian automotive tech company Autochek today is announcing the acquisition of Cheki Kenya and Uganda from Ringier One Africa Media (ROAM) for an undisclosed amount. Per a statement, Autochek will finalize the deal in the coming weeks. With the acquisition, Autochek completes its expansion into East Africa and follows the first acquisition made almost a […]
Factorial, a startup out of Barcelona that has built a platform that lets SMBs run human resources functions with the same kind of tools that typically are used by much bigger companies, is today announcing some funding to bulk up its own position: the company has raised $80 million, funding that it will be using […]
Dukaan, a one-year-old Bangalore-based startup that enables merchants to set up online stores and sell products digitally, said on Monday it has raised $11 million in a new financing round as it looks to broaden its offerings and deepen footprints in the South Asian market. The new financing round, a Pre-Series A, was led by […]
