Kakao Mobility, the South Korea-based mobility as a service (MaaS) startup behind Kakao T, a ride-hailing app, said it has raised an additional $55 million (65 billion won) from strategic investor GS Retail. This brings its total raised to about $941.4 million (1.11 trillion won) and values it at more than $4.2 billion, a spokesperson…
A new study claims that Amazon makes far more from fees on its Marketplace platform than even the cash cow known as AWS. The report says that Amazon’s fees for participating effectively on its store have grown to the point where sellers now give the company about 34% of their earnings — and this has…
One of the reasons artificial intelligence is such an interesting field is that pretty much no one knows what it might turn out to be good at. Two papers by leading labs published in the journal Nature today show that machine learning can be applied to tasks as technically demanding as protein generation and as…
Back in February, Ember’s new consumer CEO (ex-Dyson) Jim Rowan outlined for TechCrunch the company’s plans to expand beyond the temperature-controlled smart mugs that bear its name. At the time, the executive cited the cold chain – specifically medicine transport – as a potentially important category for the startup, going forward. Seems Ember is now…
With key ESG reporting regulations such as the EU Taxonomy and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) covering more than 75 percent of European companies, across the EU and the UK, the regulatory environment is evolving fast. Non-financial data, such as carbon emissions, is catching up with financial reporting burdens. And it’s not just the…
South Korea-based peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform PeopleFund announced today it has closed a $63.4 million (75.9 billion won) Series C round led by Bain Capital with participation from Goldman Sachs. Returning investors in the round include CLSA Lending Ark Asia and 500 Global. The latest funding brings the total raised by PeopleFund to about $83.6…
At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced that four of its cloud-based analytics services, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon MSK and Amazon Kinesis, are now available as serverless and on-demand services. That’s something AWS’s customers have been asking for, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in today’s keynote. These new services are now available as public…
In a significant push against big tech’s ability to maintain market dominance through sheer buying power, the UK’s competition watchdog has ordered Facebook (now Meta) to reverse its acquisition of animated GIF platform, Giphy — confirming the Financial Times‘ earlier reporting. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said its phase 2 investigation cemented its earlier…
GajiGesa’s earned wage access feature user flow GajiGesa, a fintech company focused on services for Indonesian workers, announced today that it has raised $6.6 million USD in pre-Series A funding. The round was led by MassMutual Ventures, with participation from January Capital, European earned wage access company Wagestream (EWA is GajiGesa’s flagship feature), Bunda Group,…
Is this the end of ‘founder-led’ startups? When Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced today his plans to step down as CEO, he didn’t go quietly. “There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,’” he wrote. “Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard…
