The pure hell of managing your JPEGs

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris were joined by none other than TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo, in her first-ever appearance on the show. She’s pretty much the best person and we’re stoked to have her on the pod. And it was good that […]

Taktile makes it easier to leverage machine learning in the financial industry

Meet Taktile, a new startup that is working on a machine learning platform for financial services companies. This isn’t the first company that wants to leverage machine learning for financial products. But Taktile wants to differentiate itself from competitors by making it way easier to get started and switch to AI-powered models. A few years […]

Shares is a new stock trading app with a focus on social features

Meet Shares, a new European startup that wants to add a social twist to financial investment — in that case, the company means ‘social’ as in ‘social network’. The startup has been developing its product under the radar for a few months already. It is also moving at a fast pace. It has assembled a team […]

With investors like Lightspeed and The Chainsmokers, Mexican neobroker Flink raises $57M to boost financial inclusion in LatAm

Flink, a Mexico City-based neobroker, has raised $57 million in a Series B round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The financing comes just over six months after Flink raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Accel. Existing backers Accel, ALLVP, Clocktower and new investor Mantis Venture Capital (founded by The […]

Brazilian fintech Cora raises $116M Series B as Tiger Global, Tencent sign on as investors alongside Greenoaks

Cora, a Brazilian digital lender to small-and-medium-sized businesses, has raised $116 million in a Series B round led by Greenoaks Capital. This is a large Series B by any standards, but particularly so for a Latin American startup. It’s also notable that São Paulo-based Cora only raised its $26.7 million Series A round — led […]

Ramp raises $300M at a $3.9B valuation, makes its first acquisition

Less than five months after raising $115 million, spend management startup Ramp announced today it has raised $300 million in a Series C round of funding that values the company at $3.9 billion. That’s more than double the $1.6 billion that New York-based Ramp was valued at in April at the time of its Series […]

Blockchain startup XREX gets $17M to make cross-border trade faster

A substantial portion of the world’s trade is done in United States dollars, creating problems for businesses in countries with a dollar shortage. Blockchain startup XREX was launched to help cross-border businesses in emerging markets perform faster transactions with products like a payment escrow service and crypto-fiat exchange platform. The Taipei-headquartered company announced today it has […]