Author: TechCrunch News

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, August 2, 2021. What a day. Square kicked off this week’s news cycle with a megadeal, Google popped up with new hardware, and there…

In a blockbuster deal that rocks the fintech world, Square announced today that it is acquiring Australian buy now, pay later giant Afterpay in a $29 billion all-stock deal. The purchase price is based on the closing price of Square common stock on July 30, which was $247.26. The transaction is expected to close in…

Indian online learning platform Unacademy has raised $440 million in a new financing round as investors double down on the South Asian market and elsewhere following a widening series of regulatory crackdowns in China that wiped hundreds of billions of dollars last month. Temasek led the Bangalore-based startup’s new financing round — Series H —…

Kuda Bank, the London-based, Nigerian-operating startup that is taking on incumbents in the country with a mobile-first, personalised and often cheaper set of banking services built on newer, API-based infrastructure, has been on a growth tear in the last several months, and to fuel its expansion, it has now raised another round of funding. TechCrunch…

Indian online insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar has filed for an initial public offering in which it is seeking to raise $809 million, becoming the fourth startup in the past two months from the South Asian market to explore public markets. In papers submitted to the market regulator in India, PolicyBazaar said it is looking to raise…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.…

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. The tech industry in China has had quite a turbulent week. The government is upending its $100 billion private education sector, wiping billions from the…

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by what the weekday Exchange column digs into, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.  Our work this week kicked off in China, dug into African startup activity, dealt with China once…

Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business’ stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range, and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can…

Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle technology startup backed by Ford and VW, has landed a permit in California that will allow the company to give people free rides in its self-driving vehicles on the state’s public roads. The California Public Utilities Commission issued the so-called Drivered AV pilot permit earlier this month, according to the…