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Thanks to everyone who wrote about the format changes to the newsletter this week! The feedback is largely divided into two subject areas: some people like the more narrative format, and some people really want a link list style missive. What follows is an attempt to reconcile both perspectives.
From today we will bold Company names to help you select startups faster, add more bullet points to sections, and according to another feedback, include more regular descriptions of companies that aren’t well-known names.
That said, we won’t stop chatting with you every day as TechCrunch is nothing if not full of things to say. Here’s a mix of what the new, updated Daily Crunch team was up to and your notes. A big thank you to everyone who wrote!
Alex – @alex on Twitter
A mega exit for American fintech
The news that public fintech company Bill.com is going to buy Divvy, a Utah-based startup helping small and medium-sized businesses manage their expenses, was perhaps the biggest startup story of the week. Late Thursday, the $ 2.5 billion deal was long awaited. Divvy had raised more than $ 400 million PayPal Ventures, New corporate partners, Insight partner and Pelion Venture Partner.
TechCrunch covered the upcoming sale, rumored of which arose before Bill.com reported its first quarter results. It was no surprise the company dropped the news at the same time as the outcome. For the burgeoning corporate payment room (more on startups in the room like ramp, Air base and Brex).
I’ve looked at the financial results that Bill.com detailed in relation to Divvy – they’re pretty important metrics for evaluating the startups that are competing to go public or find a similarly feathered nest of businesses. In short, the business spend startup cohort is doing well. It’s even spawning new startups that focus on Latin America Clarawho raised $ 3.5 million earlier this year.
On the whole, the fintech market had a huge first quarter and is well on its way to a record year for venture capital, like AI startups and the rest of the VC world.
Startups and venture capital
- Start-up employees should watch out for Biden’s capital gains tax plans – Vieje Piauwasdy, Director at Secfi, a company that helps start-up employees manage equity, reports on the current political climate in an important start-up market, the United States.
- Tiger Global believes that more schools will share future student income – Tiger Global invested in Blair, a startup committed to helping universities offer Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs) to students. Natasha has the latest on trend and of course the recently ubiquitous Tiger investment group.
- SoftBank leads $ 15 million for China’s industrial robot manufacturer Youibot – the well-known Japanese conglomerate SoftBank’s The Asian risk group is investing $ 15 million Youibot, a Chinese startup that builds “autonomous mobile robots,” reports Rita.
- GajiGesa, a Fintech Company Focusing on Indonesian Workers, Adds Strategic Investors and Launches New Small Business App – GajiGesa, a startup providing earned loan access (EWA) to the Indonesian market, raised an undisclosed amount of new capital following its venture round in February worth $ 2.5 billion, which was supported by Defy.U. and Quest Ventures.
5 investors discuss the future of RPA after UiPath went public
Lately, a lot of ink (um, pixels) has been spilled on robotic process automation (RPA), especially in the wake of UiPaths IPO last month.
But while some of the people Ron asked about the future of RPA believe the technology is in its “early infancy,” the pandemic has drawn attention to things that we can let robots do for us. And it’s hard to argue that repetitive tasks like billing, spreadsheets, and paper printing shouldn’t be outsourced to robots.
“With RPA, organizations can automate a group of everyday tasks and let a machine do the work instead of a human,” writes Ron. “Imagine you find an invoice amount in an email, place the number in a table, and send an Relaxed Message to Accounts Payable. You could have humans do it, or you could do it faster and more efficiently with a machine. We’re talking nerve-wracking work that lends itself well to automation. “
While RPA is the fastest growing category in enterprise software, the market remains surprisingly small. Ron spoke to five investors about where the sector is headed, where the opportunities and the greatest threats to the RPA startup ecosystem are.
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The technology giants
It was a quieter day for the tech giants who made a lot of news earlier in the week. The good news is that because of their relative calm, we can take a look at news from other big tech companies that haven’t quite crossed the $ 1 trillion market cap threshold:
- Walmart’s Flipkart To Cover Insurance For All Sellers In India And Avoid Additional Charges – Remember the American trading giant Walmart owns Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, This means “exempting the storage and cancellation fees for sellers in their market and also providing them insurance coverage” given the COVID-19 surge in the country. A good move.
- Credit Karma Reinvents Instant Payback Cash Back Rewards – American Consumer Credit Fintech Credit karmawho sells to Intuit tried to reinvent the cash-back reward system popular on credit cards for its debit card users for more than $ 7 billion last year, Matt Reports.
- A conversation with Bison Trails, the AWS-like service within Coinbase – Now a public company, Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange that has easy ramps into the mainstream fiat banking world, has a secret little company helping to power it from the inside out Bison trails that it bought back some time. Connie digs in.
- Twitch UX Teardown: The Anchor Effect and Risk Free Choices – Finally, UX guru Peter Ramsey from Built for Mars sticks into it Pull out, the popular streaming platform, the Amazon bought years ago.
Community
Some of us mourn Puzzel, so we asked … would you pay for it (and why)? Let us know what you think!