‘PayPal for Crypto’ wannabe Ramp raises $52.7M Series A round led by Balderton Capital

In the same way that PayPal and Stripe radically changed online payments by allowing any online service to embed payments, the race is on to have the same impact on crypto assets. To this end, players such as Wyre (raised $29.1M) and MoonPay (raised $555M) have risen to the fore. But in the Summer of […]

ShipBlu bags $2.4M for its e-commerce and fulfilment service in Egypt

African e-commerce fulfilment startups backed by Y Combinator seem to be piquing investors’ interest this year for their niche e-commerce play. Summer batch graduate ShipBlu is the latest on that list and confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised $2.4 million in seed funding. The company, founded by Ali Nasser, Ahmed ElKawass, Abdelrahman Hosny in […]

Stitch gets a $2M seed extension, hires Benjamin Dada to lead Nigerian expansion

Two months into 2021, South African fintech Stitch came out of stealth and raised $4 million in seed funding, allowing it to begin to make inroads into Nigeria some months ago. Today, Stitch formally announced the expansion into Nigeria and a seed extension of $2 million to go with it; the total seed investment now stands […]

China roundup: Tesla supplier CATL to buy Canada’s Millennial Lithium

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. China’s anti-competition tech crackdown continues to redefine the dynamics among the country’s internet giants, leading to collaboration between Alibaba and Tencent in the payments race. In […]

TrueLayer nabs $130M at a $1B+ valuation as open banking rises as a viable option to card networks

Open banking — a disruptive technology that seeks to bypass the dominance of card networks and other traditional financial rails by letting banks open their systems directly to developers (and new services) by way of APIs — continues to gain ground in the world of financial services. As a mark of that traction, a startup […]

China Roundup: Beijing is tearing down the digital ‘walled gardens’

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, China gets serious about breaking down the walled gardens that its internet giants have formed for decades. Two major funding rounds were announced, […]