Technology
Unsexy industries can also appeal to investors
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’ll take a take a look at some popular fintech startups in Africa, how the shutdown of Mint helped Copilot, and why VCs doubled down on a specific spend management startup.
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Big story
While enterprise funding in Africa (as elsewhere on the planet) has declined recently, the past week has been a superb one for the regional fintech ecosystem. TC reporter Tage Kene-Okafor shared how Uber invested $100 million in African mobility fintech Move up when the startup’s valuation reached $750 million. He also wrote about how Zone raised $8.5 million to scale its decentralized payments infrastructure. And Annie Njanja reported on how the Tanzanian payments company NalaThe company’s successful transition to a money transfer service in 2021 also led to the constructing of a B2B payments platform.
Weekly evaluation
Intuit’s decision to shut down its budgeting app Mint created opportunities for startups within the space. Christine Hall wrote about how to do that Co-pilot has grown more within the last 4 months than within the previous 4 years, and the startup was able to translate that growth right into a $6 million Series A funding round led by Nico Wittenborn’s Adjacent. TC previously reported on Copilot when it first launched the service with $250,000 in angel funding, and nevertheless when it added Apple Card support. Monarch Money co-founder Ozzie Osman also told TechCrunch that Mint’s loss was their gain.
Dollars and cents
Unsexy industries can also appeal to investors. Launching expense management Coast preys on firms with so-called real field staff and fleets to manage. It claims to have grown revenue 550% within the last 12 months and has just raised one other $25 million in equity financing.
Digital bank Private onyx switches to B2B. The YC-backed startup raised $4.1 million last 12 months to serve top-earning millennials and Gen Z. But last week it told customers it was ending its banking operations and shutting their accounts.
Swiss fintech Sorrywhich makes banking in Switzerland available to residents of nations with an unstable banking sector or in countries fighting high inflation, has raised $4 million in seed capital.
What else will we write?
Despite all of the recent growth within the fintech industry, Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO Ramp, believes the industry and firms like his are only scratching the surface. Glyman recently told the TechCrunch Found podcast that despite how much his unicorn card and spending startup has grown to date, it has only captured 1% of its potential market share. Fun Fact: Both Ramp and Deel turned five years old this week – just at some point apart.
In its wide-ranging antitrust criticism against Apple and its iPhone business, the US Department of Justice has taken specific aim against Apple’s massive financial activities.
Other headlines of great interest
Unexpected call: Bolt and Checkout.com team for hassle-free trading
Startup Fetch takes advantage of the private lending boom by raising $50 million from Morgan Stanley
Wealthfront postpones IPO plans
Affirm Holdings CEO Keith Rabois sells over $318,000 price of shares. dollars
Cloud banking technology provider nCino acquires DocFox
Marco raises $12 million to support trade finance in Latin America
PayPal-backed NX Technologies raises $24 million to improve automotive payments
The prize pool receives a cease-and-desist order from the FDIC for false and misleading statements
DLocal appoints Pedro Arnt as CEO as Sebastián Kanovich steps out
Ryan Zauk has joined OMERS Ventures as a fintech investor
ICYMI: Klarna targets Visa and Mastercard as a part of open banking
Technology
Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.
Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.
In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.
The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.
The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.
Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.
The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.
Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.
If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.
Google’s answer
In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.
“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.
Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.
He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI race.
“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.
The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.
Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.
Technology
Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo
Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.
Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.
Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.
Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.
With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.
“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”
Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”
Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.
However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.
Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.
Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.
Technology
Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud
FBI yesterday he unveiled the indictment which accused Joanna Smith-Griffin, founding father of the bogus intelligence startup AllHere Education, of engaging in “securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” of nearly $10 million. The FBI alleges that from a minimum of November 2020 through June 2024, she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base and money to investors.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the corporate is in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If convicted, Smith-Griffin faces prison sentences that include a maximum sentence of 20 years for securities fraud, a maximum sentence of 20 years for wire fraud, and a compulsory sentence two years for a professional identity thief. Smith-Griffin couldn’t be reached for comment.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has change into a meme over the past few years as several winners have been accused of fraud. The The Forbes-for-scam pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of (*30*) Research; Fintech founder Frank, Charlie Javice, and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.
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