online payments
The shocking decline in the value of Upstart and Affirm is only part of the story. There are myriad startups in the BNPL market, meaning that a large piece of…
Egyptian fintech Paymob raises $50M led by PayPal Ventures and Kora Capital
Egyptian fintech Paymob, which enables merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store, announced today it has raised $50 million in Series B funding. PayPal Ventures, the global corporate venture…
Stripe flexes its fintech muscle with Financial Connections to pull banking data automatically
Stripe, the payments behemoth valued at $95 billion a year ago and now reportedly inching closer to an IPO, today announced a new product that fills in some significant gaps…
Affirm’s CTO talks transparency and the tech that makes BNPL possible
TechCrunch sat down with Libor Michalek, president of technology at Affirm, to understand just how the company differentiates itself from its plethora of competitors.
In the wake of Fast’s collapse, Volume thinks it can crack the payment checkout conundrum
Online payment methods can be expensive for merchants, who have to pay between 2% and 8% of every sale to debit and credit card, e-wallet and BNPL facilitators. Much of…
PayU doubles down on LatAm fintech, acquires Ding and leads $46M investment in ‘superapp’ Treinta in Colombia
PayU, the fintech business controlled by Prosus with operations in 50+ countries — it’s been described as the PayPal of emerging markets — announced a double-deal today to expand its…
Ant Group buys Singapore’s 2C2P to further global payments ambitions
Quietly, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group has been building a global cross-border payments network by partnering with or investing in third-party e-wallets, banks, remittance services and other ecosystem players. The…
PayPal’s new credit card pays 3% cash back on all PayPal purchases
PayPal is revamping its co-branded PayPal Cashback Mastercard credit card, issued by Synchrony, which will now give users 3% cash back when they check out using PayPal and 2% cash…
ZirooPay raises $11.4M to scale its mobile POS solutions for retailers across Nigeria
The number of POS terminals in Nigeria grew from 150,000 in 2017 to 543,000 in April 2021, according to Statista. During that period, the volume of POS payments in the country also…
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.…
Payrails emerges from stealth with $6.4M led by a16z to build the OS for payments
Payments — taking and paying out money — remains a fragmented and complex area for merchants, marketplaces and others that do business with multiple parties online. As it grows —…
Headless commerce company fabric sews up unicorn milestone following new round
Fabric offers over 300 commerce APIs and associated framework to connect a company’s sales channel to one place and the ability to use the entire commerce suite or individual products.
African fintech Flutterwave triples valuation to over $3B after $250M Series D
African fintech Flutterwave has raised $250 million in a Series D round that tripled the company’s valuation to over $3 billion in just twelve months. In March 2021, the San…
MoneyHash gets $3M to build a super-API for payment operations in Africa, Mideast
Large merchants, particularly those that operate in more than one geography, have to support an array of payments methods. Each payment integration requires in-house technical work and the remodeling of…
Banked raises $20M Series A led by Bank of America and Edenred for US expansion
Banked is a fintech startup that offers an alternative to card schemes. Consumers are able to pay without entering financial data, no need to create an account, no financial details…
Stitch raises $21M for its API infrastructure and embedded finance platform
Open finance continues to be a significant theme in the world of fintech as businesses tap APIs to access customers’ financial accounts and provide a gamut of integrated and embedded…
TechCrunch+ roundup: Stealth recruiting, virtual sales kickoffs, Google Cloud’s Q4
“You’ve got to spend money to make money” is a cliché, but if you’re building a company that hopes to compete in the cloud, it’s just a fact.
PalmPay raised $100M Series A last August, claims to have 5 million users
Africa-focused payments startup PalmPay raised a $100 million Series A round last year. TechCrunch spotted this news in Partech Africa’s latest end-of-year report on venture capital investments in Africa. Further…
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Fintech outperformed the market in 2021, and it’s set to do even better
We were bullish on fintech when we launched the Matrix Fintech Index in 2017, but even we underestimated the magnitude of the growth to come.
Routefusion raises $10.5M round to simplify cross-border payments
Routefusion co-founders Colton Seal and Richard Scappaticci attempted to launch a neobank in 2016, but they ran into significant hurdles when trying to integrate with banks to help their customers…
Block’s Cash App adopts Lightning Network for free bitcoin payments
Late last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from his position in order to give his full attention to his other company, Square (now called Block), which had become…
China’s digital yuan wallet now has 260 million individual users
One of the fastest-growing apps in China right now, by installs, is the central bank’s digital yuan wallet: 261 million individual users (as opposed to enterprises), about one-fifth of the…
Fresh round of $355M lifts online checkout company Bolt into decacorn territory
This newest raise comes just three months after Bolt took in a sizable $393 million in Series D funding.
Payment orchestration platform Gr4vy pulls in another $15M in a Series A extension
Retailers often build their own “orchestration” platforms for payment processing and routing, but these can be complex to maintain. Spreedly plays in this space, and, last year, new startup Gr4vy…
Ivorian e-commerce startup ANKA, formerly Afrikrea, raises $6.2M pre-Series A
A study by McKinsey & Company on general e-commerce activities in Africa says consumer spending will reach over $2 trillion in the next three years. Much of this spending falls…
Nigeria’s ThankUCash secures $5.3M to build infrastructure for cash back, deals and BNPL services
Loyalty, deals and rewards services are a rarity in most African markets. The unit economics and other factors such as currency instability make such businesses hard to pull off in…
Regulating crypto could create American super apps
Regulating crypto could be the key to the emergence of the first American super apps and an opportunity to build a new digital-first financial ecosystem
Cash App now lets users ‘gift’ stock and bitcoin using their USD balance or a debit card
There are already a number of ways to gift cryptocurrencies, but today Cash App will make doing so simpler with a new feature rolling out to its peer-to-peer payments app.…
Egyptian fintech Sympl raises $6M for its ‘save now, pay later’ service
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) offerings have existed for a long time, but increased in popularity as the pandemic made more people shop online and conserve cash. Though BNPL has…
Afterpay unveils BNPL subscription offering for US customers
The service will launch in both the U.S. and Australia beginning early in 2022 and will be free for customers who pay on time.
