A Mexican businessman admitted in federal court this week to selling spyware and hacking tools from Italy and Israel to customers in the United States and Mexico. The Justice Department said Carlos Guerrero, who owns several businesses in the U.S. and Mexico, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to selling signal jammers, Wi-Fi interception tools, IMSI catchers…
Nigeria has an average of 4.8 bank branches and 19 ATMs per 100,000 adults, compared to the world average of 13 bank branches and 40 ATMs. Reports also say that less than one-third of Nigerian adults have access to a bank branch or ATM within one kilometer of where they live. This challenge in accessing…
Small businesses are the backbone of Southeast Asia’s economy, but many struggle to secure working capital loans because they don’t have traditional credit records or collateral, say the founders of Funding Societies. The fintech, which claims to be the region’s largest SME digital financing platform, uses alternative forms of credit-scoring and has disbursed more than…
Miles Jennings Contributor Miles Jennings is the founder and COO of Recruiter.com, a recruiting solutions platform helping startups hire talent. If you’re successful at raising capital, investors have jumped into the passenger seat with you, ready to be taken on a journey. It’s likely a long trip, with the average time to a liquidity event…
Itai Damti co-founded Unit in 2019 to help businesses integrate banking services into their consumer products. In 2020, Emmalyn Shaw, as Flourish’s managing partner, invested in Unit’s Series A round, and later, in the company’s B round. We’re excited to host both of them on an episode of TechCrunch Live taking place on February 16…
During the worst throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, very few people could travel. Meanwhile, both 2021 and 2022 were predicted to be the years of “revenge travel” where people would do a great deal more. Or at least plan more. In the background was a site that allowed people to travel virtually, either out of…
Mental wellness startup MindFi operates throughout APAC, but wants to deliver “culturally competent” care in each of its markets. To do that, it develops programs for its app, available as an employee benefit, with local providers that take into account religion, gender stereotypes, racial representation, communication style and values, co-founder and CEO Bjorn Lee told…
Yann Leretaille Contributor Yann Leretaille is the co-founder and CTO of Wingback, a SaaS growth infrastructure company. The very first hire at our SaaS startup was (surprise!) not an engineer. It might seem counterintuitive, but the first person on board at Wingback was a Fractional Head of Remote — and it was the best decision…
A leak site says it has received a cache of information, including about donors to the Ottawa truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest, after fundraising site GiveSendGo was targeted by hackers overnight. On Monday, GiveSendGo’s website said it was “under maintenance,” hours after the site was hijacked and redirected to a page believed to be controlled by…
Remedial Health has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding to digitize pharmacies, and stem the supply of fake and substandard pharmaceutical products, starting with Nigeria before expanding to the rest of Africa. The round was led by Global Ventures and Ventures Platform, with participation from Ingressive Capital, Voltron Capital, Opeyemi Awoyemi’s (Jobberman co-founder) Angel Syndicate…
