But other bumps can be attributed to the quirks of the industry itself: It’s a labor intensive business that’s resistant to automation and heavily fragmented.
It is crazier than many other services industries,” Lee Kesheshian, founder and CEO of Civic Renewables, told TechCrunch.
To try to address the quality and consistency problem, Civic Renewables is buying small installers and rolling them up.
“Now let’s go and put those systems in place under this umbrella.”Each company that Civic Renewables buys will retain its branding but append the umbrella organization’s name.
Because solar has been around for a while, the business plan underpinning Civic Renewables could show a path for at least part of the climate tech market.
Two of the country’s prominent fabless AI chip startups, Rebellions and Sapeon, have agreed to merge, the companies said on Wednesday.
The merger is a strategic move by Rebellions and Sapeon aimed at leading the fabless AI chip market in South Korea to take on global rivals like Nvidia.
Indeed, the deal comes at a pivotal moment in the global chip industry.
Meanwhile, KT in 2023 incorporated Atom, Rebellions’ datacenter-focused AI chip, into its cloud-based NPU infrastructure.
Last November, the company launched a 7-nanometer AI chip, X330 NPU, for autonomous vehicles, and earlier this year, it said it would develop an on-device AI chip targeting the edge computing market.
BIRA also takes aim at Amazon’s “Buy Box,” claiming that Amazon manipulated which retailers were selected for the coveted placement.
BIRA and its legal team say that the claim is the biggest ever collective action to be launched by retailers in the country.
Making itself a must use for retailers, Amazon has then proceeded to cause damage and financial loss to retailers by misusing their confidential data that Amazon was entrusted to keep safe and by preferencing its own retail operations.
Retailers in the U.K. were entitled to be treated better and fairly by Amazon.
The U.K. is its largest international market, where it made $33.6 billion in revenues in 2023 (out of $575 billion in global revenues).
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.”
Inside LemFi’s play to be fintech to the Global South diaspora First, the Nigerian startup focused on migrants from Africa.
These events spotlight the company’s growing influence in Africa’s remittance market, fuelled by a $33 million Series A funding round and the launch of services in the U.S. corridor, both announced last August.
LemFi later expanded to serve other African diaspora communities in the country before entering the U.K. market in 2021 by acquiring RightCard for $2.5 million.
Additionally, Daiyaan Alam, formerly leading partnerships at Delivery Hero subsidiary Foodpanda in Pakistan, is spearheading LemFi’s expansion efforts into Pakistan and South Asia.
They join Allen Qu, former COO at Chinese-backed African fintech OPay, who leads the fintech’s growth among the Chinese diaspora.
UPI, built by a coalition of Indian banks, has become the most popular way Indians transact online, processing over 10 billion transactions monthly.
In February, a parliamentary panel in India urged the government to support the growth of domestic fintech players that can offer alternatives to the Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay apps.
The NPCI has long advocated for limiting the market share of individual companies participating in the UPI ecosystem to 30%.
The RBI is also weighing an incentive plan to create a more favorable competitive field for emerging UPI players, another person familiar with the matter said.
Indian daily Economic Times separately reported Wednesday that the NPCI is encouraging fintech companies to offer incentives to their users, promoting the use of their respective apps for making UPI transactions.
Tesla’s layoffs and executive departures took a bite out its share price this week.
The well-known electric vehicle company shed around 10% of its staff, impacting an estimated 14,000 staff or more.
It missed delivery estimates for the first quarter, has reportedly reduced hours for the production-line of its Cybertruck, and is seeing rivals in China stack market share with low-priced EVs.
Tesla, in other words, helped foster the global electric vehicle market, but is losing some of its primacy in that same market.
In human terms, for every dollar of car that Tesla sells, it generates far more company worth than its rivals.
Jio Financial and BlackRock to tap India’s wealth management and stock broking marketJio Financial Services, part of the Indian conglomerate Reliance, is forming a joint venture with U.S. asset manager BlackRock to set up a wealth management and stock broking business in India, the two firms said Monday.
The announcement follows BlackRock and Jio Financial launching a joint venture last year to offer asset management services in India.
The two companies plan to invest $150 million each in the joint venture, they said last year.
The expansion of BlackRock and Jio Financial’s partnership underscores Reliance’s growing ambitions in the financial services sector.
Since its public debut in August, Jio Financial Services has already expanded to insurance and lending businesses.
UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms.
To date, most legaltech startups that are deploying AI have concentrated on the big, juicy market of ‘Big Law’ — meaning large, either country-wide or global, law firms that are keenly pushing AI into their workflows.
These include Harvey (US-based; raised $106M); Robin AI (UK-based; raised $43.4M); Spellbook (Canada-based; raised $32.4M).
Lawhive targets its platform at small law firms or solo lawyers running their own shop.
That’s a very small number of big law firms in the US in the UK.
There’s a big difference between a “solution” and a “product” slide.
The biggest problem with the Xpanceo deck isn’t what is in there, but rather what isn’t.
The market sizing fallacyWhen assessing the potential market size for Xpanceo’s contact lenses, it’s crucial to differentiate the nature of the product from traditional contact lenses.
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