Vietnamese investment app Infina lands $2M seed round

The pandemic has spurred interest in saving and investment apps around the world, especially ones geared toward newer investors. In Southeast Asia, startups in this space that have raised funding over the past few months include Ajaib, Bibit and Stashaway—and that's just a (very) partial list

Slice raises $20 million to go after the credit card industry in India

Slice, an Indian fintech startup that has built a “super card” for millennials in India, said on Monday it has raised $20 million in a new financing round and is adding new features to change how people engage with their credit cards. Existing investors Gunosy, Blume Ventures and others finance

Egypt’s Minly raises $3.6M to connect celebrities and fans through personalized experiences

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a growing trend of creators adopting digital and social media, not just as a supplement to their media presence but also as a cornerstone of their personal brand. The pandemic has surely accelerated creator economy trends. Many popular artists and figur

Do tech mafias need a modern refresh?

Rumor has it, if you whisper mafia to a venture capitalist or tech reporter, a seed investment and headline appears within minutes. That process quickly turns into seconds if the mafia reference includes the letters S, T, R, I, P and E before it. Tech mafias, otherwise known as a group of early emp

Startup leaders need to learn how to build companies ready for crisis

It's been a tough year for business. From ransomware attacks and power outages to cloud downtime and supply-chain disruptions, it's never been more important to communicate to customers and stakeholders about what's going wrong and why. Yet, with partial data and misinformation often sp

8 founders, leaders highlight fintech and deep tech as Bristol’s top sectors

The U.K. is gaining in popularity as a great place to start a tech firm. The country is quickly catching up to China on the tech investment front, with VC investments reaching a record of $15 billion in 2020, according to TechNation. A global health crisis notwithstanding, London remained a favorit

Another US investor — Activant Capital — is opening an office in Europe as the continent heats up

Earlier this week, we caught up with Steve Sarracino the founder of the growth-equity firm Activant Capital in Greenwich, Conn., We’d last talked with Sarracino back in early April of last year, as people around the world were being forced into their homes by the pandemic, and his firm was ju

On TikTok, Black creators’ dance strike calls out creative exploitation

There’s a new Megan Thee Stallion music video out in time for triple digit temperatures. But instead of launching a fresh viral TikTok dance for summer, the single inspired an informal protest among Black creators tired of thanklessly launching trends into the social media stratosphere. With

Daily Crunch: With Wickr purchase, AWS enters the encrypted messaging business

To get a roundup of technewss's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 25, 2021. We have a great block of startup news and Amazon coverage for you today. But before we get into all of that,

Extra Crunch roundup: Unpacking BuzzFeed’s SPAC, curb your meeting enthusiasm, more

Meetings should have a clear purpose, but instead, they’ve become a way to measure status and reinforce what is colloquially referred to as CYA culture. There’s a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, “This meeting could have been an email!” you can bet t

Nanofabricated ‘tetrakaidecahedrons’ could out-bulletproof kevlar

Researchers at MIT and Caltech have created a nanoengineered material that could be tougher than the likes of kevlar or steel. Made of interconnected carbon “tetrakaidecahedrons,” the material absorbed the impact of microscopic bullets in spectacular fashion. The study, led by MIT’

Why is Didi worth so much less than Uber?

Years ago, U.S. ride-hailing giant Uber and its Chinese rival Didi were locked in an expensive rivalry in the Asian nation. After a financially bruising competition, Uber sold its China-based business to Didi, focusing instead on other markets. The two companies are coming head-to-head again, howev

To end cyberterrorism, the government should extend a hand to the private sector

It is said that the best way to lose the next war is to keep fighting the last one. The citadels of the medieval ages were an effective defense until gunpowder and cannons changed siege warfare forever. Battlefield superiority based on raw troop numbers ceded to the power of artillery and the machi

Deep Science: Keeping AI honest in medicine, climate science and vision

Research papers come out far too frequently for anyone to read them all. That's especially true in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect some of the more interesting recent discoveries and pa