Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace and Hippo’s Assaf Wand discuss proptech’s biggest opportunities
What is the biggest opportunity for proptech founders? How should they think about competition, strategic investment versus top-tier VC firms and how to build their board? What about navigating regulation?
We sat down last week with Brendan Wallace, co-founder and general manager of Fifth Wall, and
Detroit-based Signal Advisors raises $10M Series A led by General Catalyst
Signal Advisors is building a specialized financial platform for financial advisors, and the company is announcing it raised a $10 million Series A led by Brian Ru and Hemant Taneja at General Catalyst. This funding is on top of the $6 million seed round it raised in 2020 from Detroit Venture Partn
China’s e-commerce giant JD.com starts paying some staff in digital yuan
China’s plan to introduce its digital currency is getting a lot of help from its tech conglomerates. JD.com, a major Chinese online retailer that competes with Alibaba, said Monday that it has started paying some staff in digital yuan (since January), the virtual version of the country’
PicPay, the Brazilian mobile payments platform, files for an IPO on Nasdaq
Brazilian mobile payments app PicPay filed on Wednesday an F-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO valued at up to $100 million. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PICS.
PicPay operates largely as a financial services platform that includes a cr
Amazon is bringing its Amazon One palm scanner to select Whole Foods as a payment option
Amazon is bringing its new biometric device, the Amazon One scanner, to Whole Foods store. The retail giant this past fall introduced the Amazon One scanner, which allows shoppers to enter a store by having their palm scanned. The customer’s palm signature can be associated with their payment
Expenses startup Pleo preps $100M Series C funding, launches new bill payments service
Late-stage fintech startup Pleo, which offers expense management tools and “smart” company Mastercards, says it plans to raise a Series C round of funding this summer. It's also launching a B2B bill payments service this week.
Co-founder and CEO Jeppe Rindom told me via a call: “W
Cleared of gender bias, Apple announces Apple Card Family for spouses and teens
Apple has been slowly building a position for itself as a financial services giant, banked around its digital wallet for storing a user’s payment cards and the launch of its own Apple Card in 2019. Today during Apple’s spring event, the company announced the newest chapter in that story
Clearbanc rebrands its way into a unicorn
After five years of providing non-dilutive financing for founders, Clearbanc is tired of being only a bank. So, it's rebranding, and has just raised a $100 million Series C at a $2 billion valuation off of its broader ambitions. The new valuation is five times larger than it was when Clearbanc
Alphabet's CapitalG leads $40 million round in fintech Mantl
Community banks and credit unions aim to be the heart of the, well, communities, they serve. But without the big budgets of larger institutions, keeping up technology-wise can be a challenge. And not only are they competing with legacy players, there is also a slew of digital banks that have emerge
Mastercard is acquiring identity verification company Ekata for $850M
As online identity management grows in importance, Mastercard swooped in this morning and bought identity verification company Ekata for $850 million.
Mastercard certainly sees the rapid digital transformation that is happening in online commerce, a move that was accelerated by COVID. It’s a
Once VMware is free from Dell, who might fancy buying it?
technewss has spilled much digital ink tracking the fate of VMware since it was brought to Dell's orbit thanks to the latter company's epic purchase of EMC in 2016 for $58 billion. That transaction saddled the well-known Texas tech company with heavy debts. Because the deal left VMware a p
Saltbox raises $10.6M to help booming e-commerce stores store their goods
E-commerce is booming, but among the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs of online businesses are finding a place to store the items they are selling and dealing with the logistics of operating.
Tyler Scriven, Maxwell Bonnie and Paul D'Arrigo co-founded Saltbox in an effort to solve that probl
Detroit’s native son, billionaire Dan Gilbert, makes the case for his town
Dan Gilbert loves his hometown of Detroit. He loves it so much that the billionaire founder of what would eventually become the mortgage lender Quicken Loans has poured at least $2.5 billion into rehabilitating buildings in the heart of the city.
He has also invested in many companies that are now
Altman brothers lead B2B payment startup Routable’s $30M Series B
We all know the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a number of areas, particularly in the financial services space. Within financial services, there are few spaces hotter than B2B payments.
With a $120 trillion market size, it's no surprise that an increasing number of fintec