Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has since 2015 been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets, shielding them against losses from pests, diseases and/or extreme weather events like floods and droughts.
“Partnering with this group of like-minded investors to boost the growth of Pula globally is a very exciting milestone in driving our triple 100 vision, through which we intend to bring insurance to 100 million smallholder farmers.
Pula embeds insurance in partners’ productsInstead of selling insurance directly to farmers, Pula has built a distribution channel of over 100 partners, including charitable organizations, banks, governments and agricultural input companies, to serve even the hard-to-reach farmers, by embedding insurance, for instance, in farm input costs or credit.
Each product Pula offers is customized to suit the demands of its clients, and the needs of the beneficiary farmers.
Pula, through insurance partners, has been offering rural families in Nigeria comprehensive coverage against banditry, disease and death of animals.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
This week, we’re looking at how two fintech companies serving the underserved are faring, and more!
The big storyPayJoy is an example of a company with positive unit economics and a mission to help the underserved.
It last raised a $50 million Series C funding round in 2021.
And with fintech funding on the decline, this could perhaps partly explain YC’s lack of LatAm interest.
This week in Las Vegas, 30,000 folks came together to hear the latest and greatest from Google Cloud.
What they heard was all generative AI, all the time.
Google Cloud is first and foremost a cloud infrastructure and platform vendor.
From Google’s perspective, the company has built generative AI tools to more easily help data engineers build data pipelines to connect to data sources inside and outside of the Google ecosystem.
Executives, IT pros, developers and others who went to GCN this week might have gone looking for what’s coming next from Google Cloud.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Ron has been working from home as a writer for almost as long as I’ve been alive.
Moar transpoLook, I’m trying my best to have a balance of everything here on Startups Weekly.
The Apple falls far from the car: Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
I’d pay good money to see the prototypes …Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
They can both sell out Madison Square Garden (… and also, their fans kind of hate Ticketmaster now).
Dropout’s Dungeons & Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20, is getting pretty close to selling out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after ticket sales opened to the general public.
When I was playing D&D in the early eighties, I would have never believed that there was a future where people would watch live D&D at Madison Square Garden.
About an hour after the Madison Square Garden tickets went on sale, the few dozen upper bowl tickets left were $800.
Creators can sell out Madison Square Garden.
Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation said on Friday that it experienced a cyberattack earlier this week.
A person with knowledge of the cyberattack told TechCrunch that efforts at Heritage were underway to remediate the cyberattack, but said that it wasn’t immediately known what, if any, data was taken.
Politico, which first reported the news of the cyberattack on Friday, cited a Heritage official as saying the organization “shut down its network to prevent any further malicious activity while we investigate the incident.”The news outlet quoted the Heritage official as saying that the cyberattack likely came from nation-state hackers, but did not provide evidence of the claim.
Founded in 1973, Heritage is based in Washington DC, and supports and lobbies on conservative issues.
Heritage was hit by a cyberattack in 2015 in which hackers stole internal emails and the personal information of its donors.
Currently, Exponent Energy has 60 charging stations in six cities: Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Hyderabad.
Vinayak told TechCrunch that Exponent Energy’s charging stations offer 10x efficiency by charging 20 to 30 vehicles daily, whereas other EV charging stations typically charge two vehicles.
Similarly, setting up an Exponent charging station costs nearly $6,000 (500,000 Indian rupees), while a CNG station demands hundreds and thousands of dollars.
This has restricted the availability of CNG to around 60 stations in Bengaluru, while Exponent Energy already has 40 charging stations in the city, the executive said.
It is also looking to deploy its charging tech on electric buses in India later this year.
Last year, Elon Musk-owned social network X rolled out a feature for paid users to hide their checkmarks from others.
Just like a lot of decisions taken by X, there is no definite timeline as to when the hide your checkmark feature will go away.
I liked being a X Premium subscriber, but I didn't like the dumb checkmark.
pic.twitter.com/9vfarfOySV — Haje (@Haje) April 11, 2024BREAKING: #X seems to be removing the ability to hide the verification checkmark!
The company also started offering its Premium subscription to these users and Premium+ subscription to users with more than 5,000 verified followers.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, just got a big upgrade.
OpenAI announced today that premium ChatGPT users — customers paying for ChatGPT Plus, Team or Enterprise — can now leveraged an updated and enhanced version of GPT-4 Turbo, one of the models that powers the conversational ChatGPT experience.
It was trained on publicly available data up to December 2023, in contrast to the previous edition of GPT-4 Turbo available in ChatGPT, which had an April 2023 cut-off.
“When writing with ChatGPT [with the new GPT-4 Turbo], responses will be more direct, less verbose and use more conversational language,” OpenAI writes in a post on X.
Our new GPT-4 Turbo is now available to paid ChatGPT users.
As Walmart works to remain competitive, it’s taking a more piecemeal approach to automation, through partnerships with a range of different robotics firms.
On Thursday, the mega-retailer announced a partnership with Fox Robotics, which brings 19 of the Austin-based startup’s robotic forklifts to its distribution centers.
Today’s news follows a 16-month pilot, which found Walmart trialing the technology in Distribution Center 6020.
DC 6020 is the place where Walmart began trials with Symbotic’s package sortation and retrieval technologies.
Following that successful trial, Walmart announced plans to roll out the technology to all 42 of its Regional Distribution Centers — that was nearly double the original target of 25.
