How PayJoy built a $300M business by letting the underserved use their smartphones as collateral for loansLerato Motloung is a mother of two who works in a supermarket in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Then, in February 2024, she saw a sign about PayJoy, a startup that offers lending to the underserved in emerging markets.
Motloung is one of millions of customers that San Francisco–based PayJoy has helped since its 2015 inception.
And, unlike other startups offering loans to the underserved, it’s doing so in a way that’s not predatory, it says.
Last September, PayJoy announced that it had secured $150 million in Series C equity funding and $210 million in debt financing.
Privacy-focused consumer tech company DuckDuckGo launched a new Privacy Pro subscription on Thursday that bundles a VPN service, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration.
This is the company’s first move towards a subscription service built into the DuckDuckGo browser.
With personal information removal service, DuckDuckGo scans dozens of data broker sites to find details like your name and address.
(At that time, Removaly’s founder, Kyle Krzeski, posted on X that a privacy company acquired the startup without naming it.)
The third feature of DuckDuckGo’s privacy pro plan is identity theft restoration, where an advisor would help you recover your identity-related loss around the clock.
By default, children will be able to read, but not write, comments under both of these content settings modes.
(This option is generally the first step into the main YouTube experience, after using the dedicated YouTube Kids app as a younger child.)
Parents can view and change their child’s settings from the parent settings on YouTube or via Google’s Family Link parental controls app, YouTube notes.
More recently, however, the Kids Online Safety Act has gained steam, demanding more robust parental controls from platform makers.
After launching parental controls in 2021, YouTube rolled out a handful of product updates to make YouTube safer for teens in November 2023.
“When we think about our nation’s IP and leadership globally, it’s synonymous with leadership in space,” Stricklan told me in an interview before the occasion.
To that end Space Workforce 2030 has started with the basics: collecting and understanding the data in order to establish a baseline.
Stricklan told me that thousands of teachers have signed on and they expect to see a lot of engagement next month.
They have different touchpoints to get to those that just don’t understand there could be a future for them in a STEM-related career.” Stricklan told me.
You can learn more about the Space Workforce 2030 effort here.
Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models?
News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.
Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.
Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.
Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps.
Ah, spring has sprung here in the Northeast United States, and it’s not only flowers that are blooming.
Today on Equity’s startup-focused Wednesday show, we dug into the Multiverse-Searchlight deal, which reminded us of the Wonderschool-Early Day transaction that we covered on the show a few weeks ago.
Startup Land is feeling quite busy and high-dollar again, and that’s a lot of fun!
We wrapped up the show with a cool discussion of this new venture capital fund that’s targeting growth-rounds in Africa.
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
The transactions include a trading card commercial agreement that aims to provide trading enthusiasts a seamless buying, selling, grading, and storage experience.
As part of the partnership, eBay and PSA plan to introduce a “customer-centric product experience” over the coming months.
Additionally, eBay acquired Collectors’ auction house Goldin, a significant move that will greatly benefit collectors.
eBay is also selling the eBay vault to Collectors, creating a new offering that merges the existing vault services.
Launched in 2022, the eBay vault allows collectors to store trading cards that are valued at more than $750 in a secure, temperature-controlled vault.
It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans.
For a while now, Collaborative Robotics founder Brad Porter has eschewed robots that look like people.
As the two-year-old startup’s name implies, Collaborative Robotics (Cobot for short) is interested in the ways in which humans and robots will collaborate, moving forward.
When his run with the company ended in summer 2020, he was leading the retail giant’s industrial robotics team.
AI will, naturally, be foundational to the company’s promise of “human problem solving,” while the move away from the humanoid form factor is a bid, in part, to reduce the cost of entry for deploying these systems.
Guesty — which has built a platform for accommodation managers to manage all aspects of their business on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and directly to travellers — has raised $130 million.
Guesty’s close competitor Hostaway raised $175 million in May last year (its first ever big funding round).
And Mews, which like Guesty builds SaaS but for hoteliers, raised $110 million at a $1.2 billion valuation last month (March 2024).
First of all, Guesty wants to continue expanding its existing platform for current customers.
Third of all, Soto said that Guesty wants to consider more acquisitions.
Venture capitalists’ appetite for fusion startups has been up and down in the last few years.
The road to true fusion power remains long, but the kicker is that it’s no longer theoretical.
He added the timeline was to be able to get to fusion energy by the mid-2030s.
If we manage to get to that then the middle of the 2030s is possible.”The startup’s investors are equally convinced.
And there are at least 43 other companies developing nuclear fusion technologies.
