Midas, a fintech startup that allows people in Turkey to invest in U.S. and Turkish equities, says it has raised $45 million in a funding round led by Portage Ventures of Canada.
The startup is aimed at Turkey’s retail investor market and claims to have more than 2 million users.
That’s in a country of 80 million,” Egem Eraslan, CEO and founder of Midas, told TechCrunch.
The company has plans to expand beyond Turkey, and aims to target countries in the MENA region.
Globally, Portage invests in transformational financial technology and Midas is poised to lead that initiative in a region of early adopters.”
But Karma3 Labs is hoping to change that with $4.5 million in fresh capital backing its decentralized reputation protocol OpenRank.
This is the protocol’s first capital raise, Sahil Dewan, founder and CEO of Karma3 Labs, told TechCrunch exclusively.
“We are really obsessed with solving trust and safety issues for crypto,” Dewan said.
“We wanted to create a protocol and generalized system, not as a source of trust, but for anyone to come and build reputation systems,” Dewan said.
The OpenRank protocol allows any developer to use its “Reputation Graphs” for ratings, ranking or recommendations for applications or communities.
The payment landscape in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region is marked by significant fragmentation, with numerous payment providers and methods in each country, evolving regulations and diverse customer preferences.
This complexity is further compounded by challenges such as payment fraud, low checkout conversion rates, and high transaction failure rates.
Payment orchestration platforms streamline payment processes for merchants through unified payment APIs.
As merchants or companies launch their platforms, they often start by collaborating with one or two payment processing providers.
As their operations grow and expand into multiple regions, they onboard additional payment providers to meet their evolving needs.
Food tech investment may have declined along with overall venture capital, but Bluestein Ventures is not letting that slow it down.
The Chicago-based early-stage venture capital firm closed on $45 million in capital commitments for its Fund III.
Andrew Bluestein, co-managing partner of Bluestein Ventures, founded the firm in 2014 and brought on Ashley Hartman, also co-managing partner, eight years ago.
They join other venture capital firms, like Kost Capital, Supply Change Capital and Joyful Ventures, that have recently raised new funds to invest in food tech.
“When we started Bluestein Ventures, people would ask us why we were investing in food,” Bluestein told TechCrunch.
Bulk Exchange, a startup building a marketplace that lets construction companies and contractors buy and dispose materials in bulk, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
If Bulk Exchange can get enough providers on to its platform, estimators may be able to execute their work more quickly.
Second, once contracts are signed, Bulk Exchange can convert estimates into sales by linking buyers and sellers on the platform.
Instead, Bulk Exchange intends to charge for its services similar to a SaaS model.
If Bulk Exchange can scale and collect lots of data, it could have a second business and revenue stream in time.
SimSpace, a startup that creates digital replicas of organizations’ tech and networking stacks for cybersecurity training, has raised $45 million in a funding round led by L2 Point Management.
And it’s expanding its private-sector customer roster, having shored up contracts with the U.S. Cyber Command, FBI and national cyber defense teams in unnamed U.S.-allied countries.
We’ve had to make hard decisions and to tough it out.”SimSpace’s origins lie in U.S. Cyber Command, where Hutchison designed and led a joint tactical cyber training exercise, Cyber Flag, drawing on the expertise of tech staffer Lee Rossey at MIT’s Lincoln Lab.
At the time, Rossey was working on creating cyber “training ranges” to simulate the IT production environments of companies and critical infrastructure.
“With SimSpace, because training occurs outside of a company’s network, it’s possible to ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at cyber teams without breaking something in an actual production environment and disrupting vital operations,” Hutchison said.
Startups are recognizing three major trends in developed-world workforces: the digitalization of healthcare, platforming of employee services, and impacts of an aging workforce coupled with cost-of-living struggles for new parents.…
