It’s been described as “the largest merger in African e-commerce” by both companies.
When the planned merger was first announced, the B2B e-commerce players were active in eight countries.
These recent moves suggest the new entity will likely serve fewer than the 450,000 retailers quoted during the merger announcement.
As the merger nears completion, the CEOs from both companies will continue as full-time executives but function in different roles.
“Regarding our merger with MaxAB, it is important to state that this is progressing as expected and in accordance with the initial terms.
Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S.
The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.K., as well as 208 other countries and territories.
It uses AI to help generate summaries and answer questions from documents, transcripts, notes and other sources that users can upload.
Some early users of NotebookLM in the U.S. anticipated it would support traditional note-taking apps, including Evernote and Google Keep.
Gemini 1.5 Pro also lets NotebookLM have up to 50 sources in each notebook, with 500,000 words per source.
Tesla layoffs hit high performers, some departments slashed, sources say 'I lost 20% of my team, some really good players too'Tesla management told employees Monday that the recent layoffs — which gutted some departments by 20% and even hit high performers — were largely due to poor financial performance, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
High performers also cutMany of the laid-off employees were high performers, according to two sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity.
Some departments saw layoffs beyond the 10% outlined in the companywide email, according to sources.
In 2022, he told employees that he wanted a “clean robotaxi” with no steering wheel or pedals.
Patel told TechCrunch he decided Sunday evening to leave Tesla because of “[b]ig overall changes” at the company.
Tesla layoffs hit high performers, some departments slashed, sources say 'I lost 20% of my team, some really good players too'Tesla management told employees Monday that the recent layoffs — which gutted some departments by 20% and even hit high performers — were largely due to poor financial performance, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Its margins, however, took a hit after Tesla repeatedly slashed prices in a bid to drum up sales and undercut the competition.
High performers also cutMany of the laid-off employees were high performers, according to two sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity.
In 2022, he told employees that he wanted a “clean robotaxi” with no steering wheel or pedals.
Patel told TechCrunch he decided Sunday evening to leave Tesla because of “[b]ig overall changes” at the company.
Avendus, India’s leading investment bank for venture deals, is looking to raise about $300 million for its private equity unit, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
With its third private equity fund, Avendus plans to write larger checks more frequently, one of the sources said.
The firm raised its second fund, amounting to around $185 million, in 2021.
Avendus employs over 150 bankers and was the top financial advisor in India last year.
In the past decade, similar to financial advisors in other regions, Avendus has diversified its offerings, venturing into wealth management, credit financing, and private equity.
TechCrunch reported about Lightspeed Venture Partners engaging to invest in Pocket FM last year.
ADIA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, whereas Pocket FM said it refrains from commenting on market speculations.
Pocket FM operates on a freemium model, leveraging long-form episodic storytelling to give users the choice to pay only for content they prefer rather than the entire library.
The startup announced last month that it will invest $40 million to grow its online reading platform Pocket Novel.
More than 90,000 writers had signed up to the app in less than a month, Pocket FM co-founder Rohan Nayak wrote on LinkedIn this week.
In the last 12 months, reader apps have adopted AI to change how users consume news.
However, developer Nate Parrott’s app Feeeed (it’s four Es), which is available for iPhones and iPads, focus more on creating an algorithmic timeline to combine different sources.
The appJust like any reader app, Feeeed lets you add RSS feeds to your timeline.
“The whole idea of a news feed for yourself, on your own terms is still key to understanding the app, I think.
“The big challenge for Feeeed is giving people a feed that feels deeply personal without asking them to do too much work.
Credit bureaus relying on outdated third-party data are only getting a small piece of the puzzle, Georgina Merhom says.
User-permissioned data sources, that consumers provide with their permission, come from a variety of places.
In addition, user-permissioned data sources replace the self-reporting process, brokers trust between the institution and consumer and identifies opportunities that the bank would have otherwise overlooked, Merhom said.
Building a better credit bureau or finding new ways to verify data from people without a lot of credit is not a new concept.
“It costs banks $29 billion a year to process applications, and that’s not even including the money they pay credit bureaus,” Merhom said.
Binance will discontinue its naira (NGN) services in response to heightened regulatory scrutiny in Nigeria, it said in a blog post today.
The cryptocurrency exchange will begin delisting any existing NGN spot trading pairs by Thursday, March 7.
Any remaining NGN balances in users’ spot and funding wallets will be converted to USDT on Friday, March 8, it noted.
This development follows recent regulatory actions by the Nigerian government, which imposed restrictions on both local and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance.
What followed was the reported detention of two Binance officials after they were invited to Nigeria to discuss the regulatory restrictions.
A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how AI can be used to help people process news and information.
The startup was founded last year by former Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, who worked on products like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and conversations, and who spearheaded the experimental app, twttr.
She had been at Twitter from 2015 through 2021, growing her position from software engineering to that of a senior director of product management.
The premise behind Particle, as Beykpour explained last month, is to make it easier to keep up with news using AI.
We’re hoping to talk in more detail about how Particle vets its sources closer to a public launch.
