This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Welcome to my new weekly fintech focused column. 2021 was a record year for venture capital fundraising, and fintechs were the largest recipients of funding worldwide, with about 21% of all venture dollars last year going into fintech startups. And fintech, last year’s rising star of venture, is not immune.
The global downturn has impacted every sector, but fintech bore the brunt of it as public-market valuations fell off a cliff last year. However, it appears that even though VCs are proceeding more cautiously than before and taking their time with duediligence, they are still investing.
By Katherine Maslova This has been a year of rapid progress and high expectations for the fintech sector. So, despite being a sector with a strong concentration of AI leaders, fintech like 74% of companies across industries struggles to scale value. There’s also been lots of buzz and hard, painful truths learned.
Grant Easterbrook Contributor Share on Twitter Grant Easterbrook is a fintech consultant based in Amsterdam. Much has been written about the success of fintech and how this wave of technological innovation has changed consumers’ lives. He also co-founded Dream Forward, which was acquired in 2020.
Techstars , a network of startup accelerators and an investment company, is launching a new accelerator in Paris called Techstars Sustainability Paris. With this sustainability-focused accelerator, Techstars is hitting the reboot button. Every year, Techstars Sustainability Paris plans to accept 24 startups across two batches.
Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Weekly News.
When it comes to sustainable infrastructure development, technology is making terrific leaps and bounds. Streamlined, and indeed sustainable, it ain’t. Streamlined, and indeed sustainable, it ain’t. The theory is that it will make investment in sustainable infrastructure a more attractive proposition, too.
Maxim Kharchenko is the director of fintech products at Rakuten Viber and is an expert in product leadership in the financial technology sector. Yet, many businesses cannibalize this valuable asset by selling it to third parties when they should be using it to make their businesses stronger and more sustainable.
Many tech workers have never experienced a job market like this one. Last year, 1,044 tech companies let go of 159,786 employees, according to Layoffs.fyi. I surveyed six seed- and early-stage investors to get their tactical advice for laid-off tech workers who are thinking about starting up. “IP is important to us.
Eindhoven might not immediately spring to mind as a high-tech hub, but the Netherlands city is keen to position itself as a center for deep tech in Europe. Philips launched in Eindhoven in 1891 and played no small part in the municipality’s ambitions to become a tech hub. What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in?
While Madrid and Barcelona tend to attract the buzz when it comes to tech startups in Spain, Valencia is slowly and surely making a name for itself as a growing tech ecosystem. The city appears to be strong in areas such as travel, AI, cybersecurity, fintech, agritech, travel tech, biotech, sports tech, and VR.
Melalite Ayenew is the firm’s tech partner. “Our process is very hands-on; by working with the co-founders over several months, we get the opportunity to help shape the business models and perform extensive duediligence before investing,” Nielsen said to TechCrunch.
Our survey respondents said the city was strong across a broad range of tech industries, particularly those with practical applications: cybersecurity, energy and sustainability, fintech, health care and medtech, edtech and silver tech among others. Lukas Inokaitis , business development, NFQ Technologies.
Priyanka Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Live Green Co , a Chilean food tech startup that uses artificial intelligence to suggest plant-based alternatives for meat and artificial additives in food. Priyanka Srinivas. Contributor. Share on Twitter. More posts by this contributor. Aiming to create a gender-equitable startup landscape?
We envision You.com becoming a search platform that is open and allows others to build on top of all of the search technology that we’ve created,” Richard Socher told Kyle for his story about You’s $25 million fundraise. One star, would buy for mortal enemy : Customer reviews are a well-known and powerful way to influence shoppers.
In 2020, Scottish startups collectively raised £345 million, according to Tech Nation, and with nearly 2,500 startups, it has the highest number of budding tech companies outside London. However, the city’s tech scene is apparently lackluster when it comes to legal tech, blockchain and consumer-facing technology.
Since then, the company tweaked its credit origination and is now growing at 25% month over month this year “in sustainable growth.” Constrafor also joined in on the AI trend by launching some initiatives using embedded generative AI related to automating manual reviews, for example, of insurance.
Its lead investment in Flutterwave, which valued the fintech at $1 billion in March 2021, was a return from a long hiatus in investing in Africa. In the aughts, Tiger Global participated in just 30 deals, according to The Generalist , a newsletter on topics around tech and crypto. Fintech brings the Tiger back.
But on top of that, Sesamm also offers a web-based dashboard where companies can access data analysis, visualizations, and push notifications for various duediligence, compliance and ESG scenarios. Elsewhere, private equity firms can use Sesamm for duediligence on potential acquisition or investment targets.
But it’s also one of the more expensive places to start a business, due to its high cost of living, salary expectations and relatively small labor market. The country’s Federal Commission for Technology and Innovation (KTI) supports CTI-Startup and CTI-Invest, providing startups with investment and support. Andreas Iten , partner, F10.
Other users review the posts before listing on the platform, either by upvotes or downvotes. They can also review others and earn redeemable points for helping build the community. The trio met over six years ago at a Zikoko, an Africa-focused youth publication, and their careers in tech and digital media branched out from there. .
After more than a 12-year bull run for tech in the global markets supported by low interest rates, since the beginning of 2022, we have witnessed a significant slowdown in capital flows. Focus on growth with good economics and don’t “buy” growth, as that will come with poor economics and hence is not sustainable.
I’m learning the ropes of Week in Review to make sure y’all stay up to date with the latest in tech. Few seem eager to leave tech altogether — but they’re certainly more cynical than they used to be. While he enjoys time with his beautiful, healthy newborn (what better gift for the holidays, eh?),
It was a much-needed success for the African music scene, and though it didn’t appear so, it was a boost for its tech scene. . Over the past couple of years, there’s been an overlap between tech and art, fueling a growing interest of movie, music and sports stars investing in tech startups. Europe and globally. .
The fintech, which claims to be the region’s largest SME digital financing platform, uses alternative forms of credit-scoring and has disbursed more than $2 billion in financing to MSMEs since it launched in 2015. BukuWarung, a fintech for Indonesian MSMEs, scores $60M Series A led by Valar and Goodwater.
What China’s new data privacy law means for US tech firms. Fintech is transforming the world’s oldest asset class: Farmland. Fintech is transforming the world’s oldest asset class: Farmland. It’s not just venture capitalists and Big Tech who are beefing up their presence in the region. Walter Thompson.
Ben Borodach, a former Deloitte fintech strategist and the CEO of tax service provider April , believes this points to the need for taxpayers to change their behavior from thinking about taxes as a once-a-year obligation to a “continual,” yearlong assessment. Most Americans dread doing their taxes. Surveys show as much.
While Amsterdam garners the lion’s share of attention in the Netherlands tech ecosystem, the not-so-far-away region around Utrecht has its fair share of tech startups and investors, as is evidenced by our latest survey of locals, below. However, they seem to think it’s weaker in design, hardware, fintech, robotics and agritech.
Almost half of all Americans play mobile games, so Alex reviewed Jam City’s investor deck, a transcript of the investor presentation call and a press release to see how it stacks up against Zynga, which “has done great in recent quarters, including posting record revenue and bookings in the first three months of 2021.”
The new firm will invest in 30 to 40 early-stage companies in the real estate technology world, with check sizes ranging from $500,000 to $2 million. So far, the firm has made five investments, backing startups such as construction tech startups Cottage and FlockHome s , and a Brazilian fintech company still in stealth.
We don’t need to tell you about the layoffs that are defining the tech landscape right now, concentrated particularly in late-stage companies that are struggling to raise extension rounds and grow into existing valuations. The first wave was in preparation and fear; this wave feels like a pullback after a surge. Some nuance.
. “Even though brands were marking up their retail price at 75% to 80% margins, they were still making only around 8% to 10% profits and losing money due to high inventory wastage or going out of stock. They] struggled with … opacity due to multiple middlemen and their manufacturers being thousands of miles away.”
Barely a day goes by without news of layoffs emerging from the tech world — from cybersecurity to gaming , no industry is impervious. And closer to home, a bunch of smaller European tech companies have also extended their reach out across the English Channel with their first U.K. Cross-border investments. In the U.K.,
. “In Mexico, only 1 in 10 people have access to a credit card, generally because they earn less than what traditional banks require or because they work in the informal economy due to a lack of formal sources of employment,” Merlos said. Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here. We’d love to hear from you.
Before fintechs became the standouts of the African tech ecosystem, it was startups in the online logistics and transport space in Africa linking on-demand apps to move people and goods around the continent that was all the rave. He also detailed how the company faced them and its current state of stable growth and sustainability.
As the name suggests, Urban Innovation Fund invests in companies building technology to shape the future of cities, while VMG targets commerce. They each kept trying to recruit the other into starting a company in their respective industries before coming together around a love of startups and the urban tech space. in half a year.
Is Southeast Asia about to hit an inflection point for tech startups? E-commerce, fintechs and the rapid digitization of the region’s SME workforce are a few of the factors reshaping the landscape for Southeast Asia’s startups, but supply chain technology is also a major opportunity, Anand says. Walter Thompson.
Some companies ascend rapidly but struggle to sustain their momentum WeWork ‘s dramatic journey from a $47 billion valuation to bankruptcy in 2023 serves as a good example. More than 100 companies reached this milestone during each of these peak years, with years four to five seeing the highest concentration.
Covering tech startup IPOs generally involves writing about companies that lose money. But in most cases, even the most valuable one-time venture-backed technology companies went public before turning profitable. Meanwhile Palantir Technologies , which was founded in 2003, took 20 years to post its first annual profit in 2023.
“The key is to focus on scaling sustainably by tapping into more overlooked and underrated sources of revenue ,” says Paddle CEO Christian Owens. Dear Sophie, I am considering leaving my current, steady job for a job with a big name in tech. So, what’s the plan? Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members.
Until 2023, startups tended to prioritize “growth at any cost,” often operating at a loss due to successive venture capital investments. He is an accomplished entrepreneur and business leader with deep roots in the technology market. Greg Waisman is a co-founder and COO at global payments platform Mercuryo.
It’s clear that the make-insurance-great-again mission heavily depends today on technology adoption. Young prodigies prefer to join technology, consulting, or other financial companies rather than insurance. As a result, companies frequently don’t have enough technically-skilled employees to follow changes let alone drive them.
Here comes a tech startup accelerator. In the context of launching and maintaining tech startups, Atlanta is one of the most favorable and nurturing cities. We’ve already described Atlanta tech events and hubs to visit. Ideation and pre-seed tech startups accelerators. Atlanta Ventures Studio.
I’m currently in the USA to attend some tech conferences: the Nexus Conference by Nearshore Americas in New York and later, the MIT Symposium in Boston. Also, traveling allows us to connect with peers and build up our network in the tech industry. There are over 950 million results for “tech conferences 2019” in Google.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 49,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content