Indian ride-hailing giant Ola is shutting down its operations in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, six years after expanding to international markets as it shifts focus to shoring up its domestic business ahead of an initial public offering.
An Ola spokesperson told TechCrunch that the SoftBank-backed ride-hailing startup sees “immense opportunity for expansion in India,” where it operates in hundreds of cities and offers a range of transportation options, including two-wheelers.
“With this clear focus, we’ve reassessed our priorities and have decided to shut down our overseas ride-hailing business in its current form in the UK, Australia and New Zealand,” the spokesperson added.
The startup plans to file for an initial public offering after the public listing of Ola Electric, the leading electric two-wheeler brand in India that spun out of Ola.
Ola Electric is looking to raise $662 million from its IPO in India, according to paperwork it filed late last year.
India’s largest audio and wearables brand BoAt is investigating a possible data breach after hackers advertised a cache of alleged customer data online.
A sample of alleged customer data was uploaded on a known cybercrime forum, which includes full names, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses and order numbers.
In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, BoAt said it was investigating the matter but did not disclose specifics.
At BoAt, safeguarding customer data is our top priority,” the company said.
The brand, however, postponed its public listing plans later, after seeing a slowdown in the public market.
VNV Global attributes its fair value estimate to a valuation model based on trading multiples of public peers rather than historical funding rounds.
Funding and interest in B2B startups took off in the last decade and saw a bump in the wake of COVID-19.
African startups, including B2B e-commerce platforms like Wasoko, have followed the same playbook as their counterparts further afield: layoffs; cost cuts; and closures are not uncommon.
In the lead-up to its merger with MaxAB, Wasoko shuttered hubs in Senegal and Ivory Coast and laid off staff in Kenya.
It operates a food and grocery B2B e-commerce platform in Egypt and Morocco, expanding to the latter following its acquisition of YC-backed WaystoCap in 2021.
Multinational technology giant Fujitsu confirmed a cyberattack in a statement Friday, and warned that hackers may have stolen personal data and customer information.
Fujitsu also did not say what kind of personal information may have been stolen, or who the personal information pertains to — such as its employees, corporate customers, or citizens whose governments use the company’s technologies.
Headquartered in Japan, Fujitsu has about 124,000 employees and serves government and private sector customers globally.
Fujitsu said it reported the incident to Japan’s data protection authority, Personal Information Protection Commission, “in anticipation” that personal information may have been stolen.
The company has not said whether it has filed required data breach notices with any other government or authority, including in the United States.
Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation.
Notably, the valuation represents a 30% increase compared to what Stripe was valued at last March when it raised $6.5 billion in Series I funding at a $50 billion valuation.
But it is also still lower than the $95 billion valuation achieved in March of 2021.
A Stripe IPO has been long anticipated and was widely expected to happen in 2024.
But with this deal, it appears that an initial public offering may not take place until next year.
A spokesperson for Change Healthcare did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Change Healthcare is an American healthcare tech giant and one of the country’s largest processors of prescription medications, handling prescriptions and billing for more than 67,000 pharmacies across the U.S. healthcare system.
The healthcare tech giant handles 15 billion healthcare transactions annually — or about one-in-three U.S. patient records.
Change Healthcare merged with healthcare provider Optum in 2022 as part of a $7.8 billion deal under UnitedHealth Group.
The cyberattack at Change Healthcare began on February 21 early on the U.S. East Coast, causing widespread outages at pharmacies and healthcare facilities.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday said it will ban the antivirus giant Avast from selling consumers’ web browsing data to advertisers after Avast claimed its products would prevent its users from online tracking.
Avast also settled the federal regulator’s charges for $16.5 million, which the FTC said will provide redress for Avast’s users whose sensitive browsing data was improperly sold on to ad giants and data brokers.
But the FTC alleged that Avast sold consumers’ browsing data through its now-shuttered subsidiary, Jumpshot, to more than a hundred other companies, making Avast tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
The regulator said that the browsing data that Jumpshot sold revealed consumers’ religious beliefs, health concerns, political leanings, their location, and other sensitive information.
The reports found Jumpshot was also selling access to its users’ click data, including the specific web links that its users were clicking on.
Frost Giant, a venture-backed startup building a real-time strategy (RTS) game called Stormgate, is turning to its community to top up its coffers ahead of the game’s launch this year.
The venture capital market for gaming companies has retreated sharply since Frost Giant last raised money (a $25 million Series A back in 2022).
Thus far, Frost Giant has picked up $611,421 in reservations for its community fundraise on its Start Engine page.
Reg CF offerings are limited to $5 million, so Frost Giant has a hard cap on how much it can raise.
We got a similar peek into Substack’s financials when it raised capital from its community last year, and we’ll get a similar influx of data from Frost Giant.
U.S. healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyberattack on its systems.
Most of the login pages for Change Healthcare are inaccessible or offline when TechCrunch checked at the time of writing.
Michigan local newspaper the Huron Daily Tribune is reporting that local pharmacies are experiencing outages due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack.
Change Healthcare is one of the largest healthcare technology companies in the United States.
Both Optum and Change Healthcare are owned by health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group.
The agency alleges that the edtech firm was using unlicensed software, printing fake invoices, and falsifying data to get fiscal benefits. The financial irregularities are said to have caused the…
