Nala set out to offer remittance services, it’s building a B2B payment platform too It says, this is to guarantee reliability to its app users and businesses making payments into and out of AficaPayments company Nala pivoted to offer remittance service in 2021, tapping the growing money transfer market in Africa, and demand for reliable and affordable services.
For markets like Kenya, they have integrated with mobile money service M-Pesa enabling users living in the diaspora to pay local bills directly.
However, building the service on the payment rails of other providers meant that the fintech could not guarantee dependability.
This drove the decision to develop its own platform that directly integrates with banks and mobile money providers.
The remittance business growth coincides with reports that remittance flows to sub-Saharan Africa will continue on a growth trajectory.
Stripe is sufficiently large that when we consider its growth we have to weigh it against the overall growth in the payment space more generally.
Major growth pointsIn its annual missive, Stripe noted that it crossed the $1 trillion total payment volume metric in 2023, a figure that is large, and round, if imprecise.
Certainly the threshold is notable, but when paired with recent growth figures becomes all the more impressive.
Stripe said that in 2023 its payment volume rose 25%.
Any company processing that much total payment volume through Stripe could build their own in-house stack, or pursue a more DIY option.
Teachers’ Venture Growth, the late-stage venture and growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, is investing $80 million in Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit underwriting solutions to banks and other financial institutions.
The new investment values Perfios at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Bengaluru-based Perfios provides real-time data aggregation and analysis tools to financial institutions, enabling them to streamline their customer journeys and make more informed decisions.
Perfios said it delivers 8.2 billion data points to banks and other financial institutions every year to facilitate faster decisioning, and processes 1.7 billion transactions a year with an AUM of $36 billion.
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, one of Canada’s largest pension funds, has ramped up its interest in India in recent years.
The long-running dearth of IPOs could be coming to a close, partly due to Reddit’s upcoming public debut.
Expected to list this month, Reddit saw its valuation soar during the pandemic.
If Reddit’s IPO does well, it could wiggle open the public-offering window just a little bit wider than we’ve seen in quarters and quarters.
Of course, the public offering could also fizzle out like an unpopular opinion downvoted to hell on the site.
But with an AI-friendly growth story to tell, Reddit may have timed its ramp towards the public markets just right.
Profitable car rental service Turo is still ready for an IPO, but its growth cratered in 2023Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing.
The company has put the capital to good use, posting quick revenue growth since 2019, positive operating income since 2021 and net profit since 2022.
In 2021 Turo’s growth rebounded from 2020’s pandemic-driven woes impressively, rising 213% that year to $469 million.
However, triple-digit growth was short-lived at the car rental company, which saw its revenue growth slow to 59% in 2022 when it recorded $746.6 million worth of total revenue.
TechCrunch calculates that its Q3 2022 to Q3 2023 growth rate was 13.6%, while its Q4 to Q4 growth over the same time frame was a slightly sharper 14.3%.
Reddit announced today that it’s launching a suite of tools, called Reddit Pro, to help businesses grow an organic presence on the platform.
With this new suite of free tools, Reddit is likely seeking to add more brands it to its platform and possibly convert them into paying advertisers.
Reddit Pro is currently in its beta testing phase and gives businesses access to an interface with multiple tools.
Reddit says more than 200 businesses have started using Reddit Pro, including Taco Bell, Wendy’s, the NFL, The Wall Street Journal, Kate Somerville and Atlas Headrest.
The company plans to launch additional Reddit Pro features this year, but didn’t share details about what they may look like.
That’s impressive revenue growth no matter what time period we’re talking about — but especially these days.
Those prior disclosures allow us to frame Databricks’ recent growth cleanly.
Partially fueled by the rapid ascent of Databricks SQL, Databricks’ growth rate of more than 50% makes it a one-off company in enterprise software growth terms among companies of its size.
Among public software companies tracked by the Bessemer Venture Partners’ Cloud Index, the fastest growing public software company today is SentinelOne, which grew at 42% in its most recently reported quarter.
That presumes, of course, that its growth rate continues to increase and doesn’t decelerate too much further.
Mews, one of the startups building tools to help hotels manage IT better is announcing a growth round of $110 million to capture more business.
The funding — led by Kinnevik — is coming in at a $1.2 billion valuation post-money.
That is a slight up-round on the Series C that Amsterdam-based Mews announced at the end of 2022, when Mews raised $185 million on an $865 million valuation.
It said it now has more than 5,000 hotel customers, compared to 3,253 hotels a year ago.
Mews nominally looks after hotels and hospitality, but that could be hostels or Airbnbs or services for people in mixed-use real estate.
Bumble, a once-powerful force in online dating, is facing a reckoning.
CEO Lidiane Jones announced that 37% of Bumble’s workforce, or about 350 employees, would be let go, and that Bumble would embark on an app overhaul targeted at reviving growth.
And many of the capabilities introduced in Bumble’s apps in the past 18 months haven’t resonated with the user base, Jones said during the call.
Jones, who joined from Slack in January, appointed four new C-suite executives at Bumble in the last week alone.
Dating apps generally — including Match Group’s — have seen declining revenue from users reluctant to fork over cash for premium add-ons.
Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyper-local and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has raised $100 million in a new funding round as it clocks an yearly growth of 35%.
Shadowfax says it makes over 2 million packages delivery each day and has amassed over 3.5 million registered users.
Shadowfax operates a logistics and delivery network of over 125,000 monthly active delivery personnels, and works with numerous firms including Flipkart, Meesho and many direct-to-consumer brands.
Shadowfax is Mirae Asset’s first investment in India and the venture firm has participated in each subsequent round.
“We believe that logistics is fundamental to ecommerce and hyperlocal commerce and that it enables the growth of these markets.
