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.
Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation said on Friday that it experienced a cyberattack earlier this week.
A person with knowledge of the cyberattack told TechCrunch that efforts at Heritage were underway to remediate the cyberattack, but said that it wasn’t immediately known what, if any, data was taken.
Politico, which first reported the news of the cyberattack on Friday, cited a Heritage official as saying the organization “shut down its network to prevent any further malicious activity while we investigate the incident.”The news outlet quoted the Heritage official as saying that the cyberattack likely came from nation-state hackers, but did not provide evidence of the claim.
Founded in 1973, Heritage is based in Washington DC, and supports and lobbies on conservative issues.
Heritage was hit by a cyberattack in 2015 in which hackers stole internal emails and the personal information of its donors.
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How PayJoy built a $300M business by letting the underserved use their smartphones as collateral for loansLerato Motloung is a mother of two who works in a supermarket in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Then, in February 2024, she saw a sign about PayJoy, a startup that offers lending to the underserved in emerging markets.
Motloung is one of millions of customers that San Francisco–based PayJoy has helped since its 2015 inception.
And, unlike other startups offering loans to the underserved, it’s doing so in a way that’s not predatory, it says.
Last September, PayJoy announced that it had secured $150 million in Series C equity funding and $210 million in debt financing.
AT&T has begun notifying U.S. state authorities and regulators of a security incident after confirming that millions of customer records posted online last month were authentic.
According to AT&T the records contained valid data on more than 7.9 million current AT&T customers.
AT&T took action some three years after a subset of the leaked data first appeared online, which prevented any meaningful analysis of the data.
The full cache of 73 million leaked customer records was dumped online last month, allowing customers to verify that their data was genuine.
AT&T eventually acknowledged that the leaked data belongs to its customers, including about 65 million former customers.
Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models?
News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.
Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.
Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.
Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps.
Anticipation is building for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024, where industry leaders and budding entrepreneurs alike are eagerly awaiting a bevy of startup-focused sessions.
Attendees can expect to be inspired by Oliver Palnau’s entrepreneurial journey, which began at the age of 23 with his venture into the real estate market.
During the session, Palnau and Romano will detail how to ignite interest from customers and investors, build a minimum viable product (MVP), raise initial capital, and assemble a winning team.
Attendees will leave the session empowered and equipped with practical advice to embark on their own entrepreneurial journeys with confidence and determination.
We can’t wait for this session and all the other early stage–focused content at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024.
Built World Startup Happy HourHosted By: Suffolk Technologies and TriNetTime: April 23, 430pm to 630pmDescription: Calling all innovators shaping the built environment!
So enjoy our historic city before TechCrunch Early Stage and join fellow founders following in the footsteps of our nation’s early founders.
We welcome startup founders seeking innovative solutions to maintain wellness while achieving the optimal point of productivity for those crucial momentum moments throughout your startup journey.
Startup Happy Hour with OnshapeHosted By: Onshape (PTC Inc.)Time: April 24, 630pm to 9pmDescription: Join us the week of TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 at PTC’s headquarters for an exciting happy hour for founders!
The party will start at 5:30pm, immediately following TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 on April 25th.
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Happy Eclipse Day for everyone celebrating!
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NASA has given three space companies the chance to design the next-generation moon buggy — but only one design will go to space.
Footage obtained by TechCrunch shows the catastrophic ending that Astra’s Rocket 3.0 suffered during prelaunch testing in March 2020.
The tech world is incredibly focused on AI and its applications today, but artificial intelligence is hardly the only place where progress is being made.
If you want to get really into the weeds, pay attention to the progress that quantum computing is making, as made evident recently by an announcement from Microsoft and Quantinuum.
The pair of companies made what TechCrunch described as a “major breakthrough in quantum error correction,” which could make quantum computing systems far more usable than before.
The gist is that they encoded several physical qubits into a single logical qubit, which made it easier to detect and correct errors.
The error rate in quantum computing is a material issue to the technology’s performance, making the news that the two companies managed “run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error” pretty big news.
