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.
Apple SVP Greg “Joz” Joswiak just confirmed via the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that the company’s annual World Wide Developer Conference is set for June 10-14.
In what is no doubt a nod to the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions, the exec is promising that the event will be “Absolutely Incredible.”Mark your calendars for #WWDC24, June 10-14.
pic.twitter.com/YIln5972ZD — Greg Joswiak (@gregjoz) March 26, 2024As the name “D” in WWDC suggests, the event is heavily focused on developers for Apple’s various operating systems.
WWDC seems like the most likely platform for such an announcement — and, perhaps, details on a rumored Google Gemini partnership for the iPhone.
As ever, the event will include a small cohort of “winners,” 50 of whom will be invited to the in-person event in Cupertino.
Crypto exchange OKX is ceasing services for users in India, it said in an email to customers Thursday, advising them to withdraw their funds by April-end.
The move follows Apple and Google pulling the eponymous app of OKX in the country after an Indian government agency said many crypto exchanges were operating illegally in the South Asian market.
Financial Intelligence Unit, the government agency, named Binance, Kraken, Huobi and Gate.io among apps operating “illegally” in India but hadn’t named OKX in its public statement.
OKX has advised customers in India to close all their active margin positions and withdraw all funds by April 30.
While India-based crypto exchanges continued to require rigorous know-your-customer verifications before onboarding new users, the same hasn’t been true of many global platforms.
MIT professor Mike Stonebreaker has been at the forefront of database technology for over 50 years.
Now 80, he knows a thing or two about database technology and launching companies.
His latest project, DBOS, puts the database at the center of the software stack, reducing the operating system to a small kernel of low level functions.
“The genesis of the project was OLTP (online transaction processing) database systems have gotten a lot faster in the last 15 years.
And so the thesis was that they would be competitive as a new operating system stack,” he told TechCrunch.
Founded in 2006, over the years Lensrentals got the edge over BorrowLenses, both in terms of number of staff and overall number of customers.
We look forward to all BorrowLenses customers getting to experience what I mean by that,” says Beckman.
Similar to Lensrentals, BorrowLenses boasts an extensive inventory.
BorrowLenses has established a strong presence in certain regions, complementing Lensrentals’ national reach.
Of course, Beckman told TechCrunch that Lensrentals was kept on its toes by the competition from BorrowLenses.
Meet BlueLayer, a new European startup that is building a software platform specifically designed for carbon project developers.
This system of carbon offsetting with carbon project developers is sometimes also called beyond value chain mitigation.
BlueLayer acts as the software backend for carbon project developers.
BlueLayer aims to focus exclusively on project developers.
You might think that there is a limited pool of potential clients, but BlueLayer has already held talks with over 200 carbon project developers.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander is still operating on orbit, with the company saying there is “growing optimism” that the spacecraft could survive in space longer than the current estimate.
The Pittsburgh-based startup has been releasing a series of updates to social media platform X since the spacecraft’s launch in the early hours of Monday morning.
Shortly after separating from the launch vehicle, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, engineers immediately started encountering issues.
But despite all odds, Peregrine has been operational in space for more than four days, and the estimated operational time remaining continues to extend.
The remaining 10 payloads on board are passive, and do not require power or communications from the spacecraft.
The Amazon-owned livestreaming platform will cut 35% of its staff, or roughly 500 employees, Bloomberg reports, and will announce the reduction as early as this week.
Shortly after Twitch co-founder and longtime CEO Emmett Shear handed the reigns to its now-CEO Dan Clancy, the company laid off 400 employees.
Twitch faces steep operating costs to support livestream content at such a large scale.
In a 2022 blog post, Clancy stated that each high-volume streamer on Twitch costs the company about $1,000 per month, citing Amazon Web Service’s interactive video rates.
“Delivering high definition, low latency, always available live video to nearly every corner of the world is expensive,” Clancy wrote.
Verto said the acquisition will help it to better serve startups and small businesses in Africa and the MENA region, while also expanding its customer base beyond traditional banking channels.…
