Australia
Strong Compute raises $7.8M seed round to speed up ML training pipelines
Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that helps developers remove the bottlenecks in their machine learning training pipelines, today announced that it has raised a $7.8 million seed round. The…
Viola Credit closes $700M fund to provide asset-based lending to fintech startups
Fintech startup and alternative credit asset manager Viola Credit has closed its latest $700 million fund, which provides asset-based lending capital to fintech, proptech and insurtech startups. If this fintech play…
Despite recent swings in cryptocurrency values, many institutional investors appear undeterred. The growth of Babel Finance, which offers a suite of institution-facing crypto financial products, could be an indicator of…
PlanetScale expands its database service with built-in performance monitoring and more
PlanetScale, the highly scalable MySQL database service founded by the co-creators of the increasingly popular Vitess open source project, today announced a series of updates that push the platform beyond…
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‘Move-to-earn’ Solana app StepN is latest crypto gaming craze
Since its launch in December, StepN, an app that lets users walk and run to earn tokens, has quickly become a household name in the play-to-earn blockchain gaming, or GameFi, world. Two to three million users worldwide are now active on the app every month, StepN’s co-founder Jerry Huang recently told TechCrunch. That number is…
Melbourne-based Blinq wants to make paper business cards obsolete
Business cards feel almost as outdated as Victorian calling cards, but they are still a networking staple. Melbourne-based Blinq wants to do away with them altogether. The app generates a…
Curious Thing’s voice AI communication platform asks the right questions
Sydney-based Curious Thing is an aptly named startup. The voice AI communication platform can call people and ask them questions like “How are you feeling today?” and then follow up…
WeAre8 launches crowdfunder for its social media app, where users are paid to watch ads
With Elon Musk’s recent interest in Twitter, Facebook’s growth flattening and TikTok’s meteoric rise, it feels like the world of social media is back into some kind of inflection point…
Luxus wants the crown jewel of your portfolio to be an actual diamond
A much-anticipated market downturn may finally be here, and investors have been preparing for it by diversifying their portfolios away from the traditional stock and bond holdings, and into alternative…
UK’s Big Tech regulator ‘to boost switching, cut killer acquisitions’
Just over a year after launching a dedicated unit focused on digital markets inside the national competition watchdog, the UK government has put some meat on the bones of what…
Meta faces years of tougher antitrust oversight in Germany
Facebook’s rebranded parent, Meta, has become the next tech giant to be confirmed as subject to a special competition abuse control regime in Germany, following a 2021 update to its…
Daily Crunch: US dangles reward up to $10M for info on 6 elite Russian military hackers
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Daily Crunch: Since December 2021, Better.com has laid off nearly half of its workforce
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Salsify secures $200M as the boom in e-commerce catapults its valuation to $2B
E-commerce is booming, but it’s become increasingly apparent over the years that the businesses that are able to capitalize on that trend — and contribute to that growth — are…
Wagestream, a financial super app for waged workers, raises $175M, passes 1M users and doubles down on the U.S.
Front-line workers and those paid in hourly wages rather than salaries have become a prime target in the world of business IT, with a wave of apps helping them find…
Spotify continues testing a TikTok-like discovery feed
Spotify is experimenting with yet another new discovery feature, following last week’s test of an “audio news feed” for podcasts. Now, the streaming service is testing a personalized feed on…
Porsche hits the gas on synthetic fuel with $75M investment
Porsche announced Wednesday a $75 million investment in the industrial production of eFuels, a synthetic low-carbon complement to its plans to electrify 80% of its model lineup by 2030. Porsche,…
Papaya Global to buy Azimo for $150M-$200M to expand its payroll payments to more markets
Six months after raising $250 million, Papaya Global is making a key acquisition to expand its cloud-based HR and payroll platform globally on the heels of major surge in remote working.…
Australian fintech Zepto raises $25M AUD Series A to enhance payment infrastructure
Zepto, an Australian real-time account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments platform, said Monday it raised a $25 million AUD Series A (about $18.8 million USD) co-led by AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners.…
Samsara Eco wants to help end global plastic crisis with enzyme-based technology
Global plastic use is expected to double by 2040, with most plastic sent to landfills and only 13% recycled. According to CIEL (Center for International Environmental Law), plastic production and incineration…
Twitter leads call for EU lawmakers to ‘think beyond Big Tech’
In a formalization of an earlier Twitter-led push to try to exert influence over fast-forming European digital regulations, the social media firm has used its Twitter Spaces platform to host…
Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has instigated proceedings against Facebook owner Meta for allowing the spread of scam ads on its platforms and — it alleges — not taking…
How much is ‘link in bio’ real estate worth? Linktree’s new valuation says $1.3 billion
Who would’ve thought that an entire swath of startups would spring up all because Instagram, TikTok and Twitter only let you link to one website in your bio? Apparently, Linktree…
Google dials up focus on portability ahead of rule changes
Google has signalled it’s dialling up efforts around portability, announcing a plan yesterday to spend $3 million and “hundreds of hours” of its engineers’ time over the next five years…
Training neural networks takes a lot of time, even with the fastest and costliest accelerators on the market. It’s maybe no surprise then that a number of startups are looking…
Daily Crunch: Thousands of Google Play users download Android banking trojan
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Australian fintech Zeller raises $100M AUD Series B at $1B AUD valuation
Zeller, the Australian neobank for SMBs, has raised a $100 million AUD Series B (about $72.7 million USD), doubling its valuation to more than $1 billion AUD (about $727 million…
Australia’s CryptoTaxCalculator helps traders demystify the decentralized
Just in time for tax season in the United States, Australian startup CryptoTaxCalculator (CTC) announced it has raised seed capital to expand its automated crypto tax reporting tool further into…
Is your startup more like Affirm or more like its smaller competitors? And if you are priced more like Affirm, why? Do you deserve the premium?
TikTok pushes bundle of teen safety measures internationally
TikTok is making a promotional push in Europe and Australia around a bundle of safety-focused features, some of which it announced in the US earlier this month, and which it…
