This morning Codat, a startup that provides APIs to link small-business fintech data to external services, announced that it has closed a $40 million round led by Tiger Global. The company raised $10 million in a Series A around a year ago that Index led; Codat also raised some strategic capital in the interim, but […]
Monthly Archives: July 2021
Duolingo Director of engineering Karin Tsai talks opinionated development
Karin Tsai joined Duolingo in 2012 and is now the director of engineering. Yesterday, at TechCrunch’s City Spotlight: Pittsburgh, she spoke on the company’s extensive development process and unique culture. This interview was pre-recorded and aired a day after the company filed its SEC Form S-1 ahead of its initial public offering. As per SEC […]
Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil’s first crypto exchange, raises $200M from SoftBank
Mercado Bitcoin, a Latin American digital assets exchange, has raised $200 million in Series B funding from the SoftBank Latin America Fund. The round values 2TM Group, Mercado Bitcoin’s non-operating parent company, at $2.1 billion, ranking it among the top 10 unicorns in Latin America. The funding comes just months after São Paulo-based Mercado Bitcoin’s […]
Tiger Global in talks to back Indian fintech Yap
Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to back Indian embedded finance startup Yap, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with the matter. The New York-headquartered firm is in talks to lead a $35 million financing round in Yap — also known as YapPay and M2P — that values the Bangalore-headquartered […]
Your guide to what’s happening with vaccine passports in the US
A year ago, vaccines to tackle the covid pandemic seemed like a far-off idea. Today, though, doses have been delivered to almost one-quarter of the world’s people—and some are being asked to prove they’re among them, leading to the rise of so-called vaccine passports. The details of these credentials vary from place to place, but […]
Instant grocery startup Getir makes its first acquisition to expand into Spain and Italy
Getir, the startup based out of Turkey that has built a $7.5 billion business out a mobile app that lets consumers buy groceries and get them delivered in minutes, has grown its business up to now organically: targeting urban markets across Europe (and soon the U.S.) where it is disrupting the well-stocked cornershop with a […]
Goodbye CVs — As work went remote, companies flocked to a startup dumping CVs for skill tests
As companies scrambled to re-orient themselves last year during the pandemic, one thing was clear: the shift to remote working had come sooner than anyone expected. With this came a fundamental shift in how businesses would have to hire new talent. And the question was, were managers going to laboriously sift through CVs in a […]
Germany’s icon group VC bets $30M to back startups enabling traditional companies to pivot
Icon group is a new $30M VC fund being launched out of Germany’s iconmobile group, a WPP network agency. This means a reorganization of the company from a full-service innovation agency into also offering VC backing. iconmobile has garnered a reputation as an innovative technology, design, and sustainability agency, but the turnaround means it will […]
Rohlik raises $119M at a $1.2B valuation to grow its 2-hour grocery delivery service in Europe
“Instant” grocery delivery has been a big theme among food startups in Europe, where customers can order from a limited assortment of items and get their purchases packed from “dark stores” and delivered in sometimes as little as 10 or 15 minutes. But today a startup that’s built a much bigger proposition — a virtual […]
Uber’s first head of data science just raised a new venture fund to back nascent AI startups
Kevin Novak joined Uber as its 21st employee its seventh engineer in 2011, and by 2014, he was the company’s head of data science. He talks proudly of that time, but like all good things, it ran its course and by the end of 2017, having accomplished what he wanted at the company, he left. […]