In 2019, Swedish coworking space and investment fund Norrsken Foundation announced the launch of its first entrepreneurship hub outside the Scandinavian nation in Rwanda. The center, located in Kigali, has finally opened up to the region, though it is happening in two phases. The first, which took place yesterday, will welcome 250 entrepreneurs. The second phase […]
American Express taps Opy for its first US third-party BNPL offering
Credit card companies are seeking to push further into the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) market. American Express (Amex) announced today that it plans to partner with Opy, the U.S. subsidiary of Australian fintech Openpay, to allow all of its U.S. cardmembers to pay in installments for qualifying purchases in the healthcare and automotive segments. […]
Lessons we learned from the last week of fintech earnings
Let’s examine a series of winning fintech results from BNPL, consumer finance, proptech and corporate finance before turning to fintech’s earnings misses from Q3 2021.
Balancing risk: Modern architecture’s role in the BNPL playbook
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is an old form of payment that is new again in a big way. And that could mean trouble for BNPL fintechs that are just getting to know the world of lending.
Attest raises $60M to expand its no-code approach to research-surveys-as-a-service, which taps 110M consumers in 49 countries
Surveys have long been used by marketing teams and other business decision makers to learn how customers tick. But they can be costly to put together, hard to run at scale, and, at the end of the day, are only as credible as the data that gets put into them. Today, a London startup called […]
Klarna jets into travel with Inspirock acquisition
Though it might seem strange for a company like Klarna to get into travel, CMO David Sandstrom says travel is a pain point Klarna wants to solve for its consumers.
Mission-driven ventures are growing fast during the pandemic
You’ve heard of SPACs, meme stocks and buy now, pay later, but have you heard of the LTSE, First Women’s Bank and Upsolve?
Extra Crunch roundup: DTC strategy, IPO analysis, Zoom’s future product plans
TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 is underway! Tickets are still available for the three-day virtual event, which encompasses everything from Ryan Reynolds’ lessons on “fast-vertising” to Startup Battlefield.
Really, this market isn’t good enough?
Klarna’s CEO says he’s ‘nervous’ to take the company public. But the public market for BNPL companies actually feels pretty strong at the moment.
Extra Crunch roundup: BNPL bonanza, scraping Toast’s S-1/A, early-stage SaaS pricing
Are founders in fundraising mode short-sighted when it comes to working with Chinese venture funds? Runa Capital’s Asia business development manager Denis Kalinin studied data from iTjuzi, a database of Chinese venture capitalists, and found: “…Chinese funds invested around $250 billion in 2020 (three times higher than the figure reported in Crunchbase). This figure puts […]