Author: TechBrunch
Payments company Nara pivoted to providing remittance services in 2021, tapping Africa's growing remittance market and demand for reliable and affordable services. Nala founder Benjamin Fernandez said he intended to build the product on this premise from the beginning. Over the past two years, Tanzanian fintechs have enabled consumers in the diaspora, including the EU, UK and US, to send money to their loved ones through 249 banks and 26 mobile money services across 11 African markets through consumer fintech apps. I've been doing this. In markets like Kenya, it has been integrated with mobile money service M-Pesa, allowing users…
Link-in-bio startup Linktree today introduced new features including featured layouts to better highlight your links, the ability to get the latest posts from Instagram, and support for more prominent profile photos. The company said the new featured layout is perfect for highlighting specific links. When you select Featured Layout for your links, content previews for links from YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Instagram will automatically expand. Featured links look like this Image credit: Linktree In January, Linktree introduced the ability to automatically pull the latest posts from YouTube and TikTok. The company is now expanding its support for Instagram to support…
Is the grass greener next door? I'm not sure, but I'm sure the sky is bluer. It's been more than a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now known as X) and people started setting up shop on alternative platforms. Mastodon, Post, Pebble (now defunct), and Spill have been mentioned as possible replacements, but apart from Meta's Threads, few companies have achieved the speed of growth that Bluesky achieved. Bluesky has been invite-only for almost a year, but is now open to anyone who wants to join. Bluesky expects to gain about 800,000 new users within one day, and the…
Cross-border transactions typically occur in fintech, where companies send money to another country. But David Yee and Simon Singh are applying that concept to the world of venture capital. Yi and Xin founded Ethos Fund two years ago to bridge opportunities and startup communities between Vietnam and the United States. Yee said the five-person firm is one of the few, if not the only, fund focused solely on strengthening opportunities between the two countries. They are backed by a $12 million capital commitment from Elite Education Group, i-Scream Edu, Orions Bridge Capital, Strong Ventures, and a group of limited partners…
TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband, CTO Ralph Gootee, built their former startup PlanGrid into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $850 million in 2018. But despite their success, they always felt like the business remained done. Not included in the table because changes in the business cannot be accurately predicted. After leaving PlanGrid in 2020, the couple kept coming back to this business forecasting problem as they considered what to do next. They decided to start a company and build the product they wanted back in the PlanGrid days, and the result is…
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Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X), where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech; now, it’s the one-year anniversary since he made his dramatic entrance to the company in October 2022, and the platform has changed so much that even its name is different. “This is just my strong, intuitive sense that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the…
Caller ID app Truecaller currently blocks 38 billion to 40 billion spam calls annually for more than 374 million users. The company is currently upgrading its filtering technology in hopes of getting more people to sign on to the premium tier. A new 'Max' update for Android Premium subscribers uses AI to block all calls from authorized contacts or calls that the AI determines may be spam, TechCrunch investigates. I found out. database. Previously, blocks and other actions were guided by how the number was listed in its database, combined with prior screening of the individual. This update is Android…
SAN JOSE — “I want you to understand that this is not a concert,” Nvidia President Jensen Huang said before an audience large enough to fill San Jose's SAP Center. This is how he introduced his GTC event at the company, which is perhaps the exact opposite of a concert. “You've come to a developer conference. There's going to be a lot of science explaining algorithms, computer architecture, mathematics. You feel a very heavy weight in the room. Suddenly you've come to the wrong place. It is.” It may not have been a rock concert, but the 61-year-old CEO of…
Analysts say this is likely more a one-off than a sign of LP interest in the venture waning. The Los Angeles County Employees and Retirement Association (LACERA) voted at its March 13 meeting to reduce its allocation to venture capital. The Investment Committee resolved to reduce the range of allocations to venture capital and growth stocks from 15-30% of the pension plan's private equity portfolio to 5-25%. LACERA's venture portfolio currently represents 10.8% of his PE portfolio. This subset has been very successful, with TVPI (a measure of both realized and unrealized gains on fund investments) of 2.08x at the…