As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers to use their faces to move the cursor and perform common click-like actions on desktop, and now it’s coming to Android. The project lets people […]
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Over the weekend, Instagram announced that it is expanding its creator marketplace to 10 new countries — this marketplace connects brands with creators to foster collaboration. The new regions include South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain, Israel, Turkey, Mexico, Argentina and Indonesia. Meta first introduced this marketplace to facilitate paid partnerships in the U.S. to […]
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In an effort to capture more ad dollars, despite the looming U.S. ban, TikTok is introducing new advertising products and opportunities that will allow marketers to better control what sort of content their ads appear against.
The company says it will use generative AI to curate trending, brand-safe content; expand its selection of “tentpole” moments, like the Paris Olympics and Met Gala; and allow advertisers to buy slots with specific networks and content offerings.
The company introduced the “Pulse Premiere” ad slot last year, and it is now adding new partners to it. The offering focuses on bringing in more premium ad dollars by letting advertisers position their ads directly after publisher and media content in over a dozen categories including lifestyle, sports, entertainment and education. The ads would appear on content from select publishers on the app’s ‘For You’ feed.
The slot is meant to appeal more to TV advertisers who are used to being able to buy ads that run alongside specific programs.
TikTok had earlier partnered with companies like NBCU, Condé Nast, DotDash Meredith, BuzzFeed, Hearst Magazines, Major League Soccer, UFC, Vox, and others. Now, it is adding Paramount Global and NHL to its list of Premiere partners.
The former partnership gave advertisers the option to buy ads that run alongside content from, for example, NBCU — think Saturday Night Live, America’s Got Talent, TODAY Show, Bravo, and others. The new partnership with Paramount Global, for instance, will let advertisers place ads against content from MTV, CBS Sports, The Daily Show, Entertainment Tonight, and more.
TikTok said it will also work with Nielsen ONE Ads and iSpot.tv to give advertisers the ability to measure how their TikTok ads add “incremental and complementary reach” to their TV campaigns, the company said.
TikTok is presenting these new ad options at this year’s IAB NewFronts 2024, where a number of media companies and social apps market themselves to advertisers. TikTok took the opportunity to share some stats on its ad offerings’ success, noting, for example, that the TikTok Pulse suite — which guarantees ads next to the top 4% of trending videos, seasonal moments, or premium content — increases ad recall by 9.8%.
The company also touted its ability to reach users who may not have seen TV ads, saying that 58% of all TikTok campaign impressions reached a unique audience “unexposed” to the TV portion of the campaign. Plus, it said advertisers who added TikTok to their TV campaigns reached an additional 22% of their audience.
TikTok’s announcement is seemingly business as usual for the company, since it represents deals that were finalized long before the U.S. ban went through, but the fate of the app’s future in the country is uncertain. Though the company’s parent, ByteDance, has vowed to fight the ban, it has also threatened to pull out of the country rather than divest. Obviously, that would not be great for its ability to bring in ad dollars.
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Google is bringing passkey support to its Advanced Protection Program (APP), which is used by people who are at high risk of targeted attacks, such as campaign workers, candidates, journalists, human rights workers, and more.
APP traditionally required the use of hardware security keys, but soon users can enroll in APP with passkeys. Users will have the option to use passkeys alone, or alongside a password or hardware security key.
“In a critical election year, we’ll be bringing this feature to our users who need it most, and continue to work with experts like Defending Digital Campaigns, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, Asia Centre, Internews, and Possible to help protect global high-risk users,” Google’s VP of Security Engineering, Heather Adkins, said in a blog post.
Google says passkeys have been used to authenticate users more than one billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts since the company launched passkey support in 2022. Google says passkeys are used on Google Accounts more often than legacy forms of two-step verification, such as SMS one-time passwords and app-based one-time passwords combined.
Passkey logins make it harder for bad actors to remotely access your accounts since they would also need physical access to a phone. Passkeys also remove the need to rely on username and password combinations, which can be susceptible to phishing.
The technology has been adopted by numerous other companies, including Apple, Amazon, X (formerly Twitter), PayPal, WhatsApp, GitHub and TikTok.
Google also announced that it’s expanding its Cross-Account Protection program, which shares security notifications about suspicious activity with the third-party apps you’ve connected to your Google account. The company says this helps prevent cybercriminals from gaining access to one of your accounts and using it to infiltrate others. Google notes that it’s protecting 2.4 billion accounts across 3.4 million apps and sites and that it’s growing its collaborations across the industry.
RevenueCat, a top subscription management platform for apps that monetize via in-app purchases, is now flush with new capital as it expands to the web. The company has closed on a $12 million Series C led by Adjacent, following the launch of a new product, RevenueCat Billing, that allows web app developers to integrate subscription purchases into any website. Later, it will also support Roku.
The timing of the product’s launch is notable, as it arrives amid the implementation of the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which is forcing Apple to open up the iPhone and the App Store to new completion. As a result, Apple initially blocked iPhone web apps (Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) in the E.U., likely fearing developers would abandon its App Store, before reversing that decision under regulatory pressure.
For RevenueCat, however, the changes ahead for iOS — not to mention Apple’s refusal to cut its default 15%-30% commission rate — mean there are now more developers who are looking to the web to monetize their apps.
“It could be for progressive web apps or any kind of customer that wants to take payments outside of the App Store,” explains RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, of the new web billing product. “It’s going to play within all the new [DMA] rules…it’s going to be a pretty significant product expansion for us,” he said.
The company says it moved in this direction because of the inbound interest from developers. Even if they didn’t have a web app, many developers wanted to shift their customers to the web to pay.
Though Stripe already enables this functionality, what developers were lacking was a system that’s specifically designed for consumer subscription apps. Now, even if developers are processing payments through Stripe or others, they’re getting their data and insights in the same format and within the same dashboard where they already manage their in-app purchase data. This makes it easier for them to focus on how their subscription apps are monetizing, overall, regardless of where the payment comes from — web or mobile.
Though Apple has historically not allowed app developers to steer customers to the web from inside their iOS apps, it has permitted steering from other channels — like the developer’s website or emails to customers. The E.U.’s DMA rules should also permit developers to steer customers to the web from inside their mobile apps, too.
With RevenueCat Billing, essentially a web SDK, developers can accept subscription payments from any website. It joins other recent product releases like Paywall, Targeting, and Experiments, which are all designed to help developers grow their revenue. Today, RevenueCat powers subscriptions in over 30,000 apps and handles over $2 billion in subscriptions annually, it says.
The new Series C from Adjacent (led by Nico Wittenborn — a Series A investor, now board member) totals $12 million. Other investors include Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Volo Ventures, and SaaStr Fund. Ahead of this round, RevenueCat had raised $56 million, bringing its total raise to $68+ million.
In addition to fueling its new products, the fundraise will help RevenueCat expand to new markets, including Japan and South Korea.
“Our main competitor is ‘cobbling together monetization technology yourself’,” said RevenueCat CTO and co-founder Miguel Carranza, in a statement about the fundraise and expansions. “In the U.S., we’ve done a good job at educating developers, product people, marketers, and CEOs on the challenges of building in-house. In many other regions, it’s unfortunately still the default for businesses to sink valuable resources into something that provides zero differentiation or value for that business’s end users. We’re investing in those regions by expanding our support for languages and local currencies later this year, deepening our relationships with local technology partners and agencies, as well as hiring in-market where possible,” he added.
Image Credits: RevenueCat
RevenueCat is not yet a profitable company, but Eiting says that profitability is always on the horizon. The company still has the money it raised in 2021 and now has over $40 million in the bank in addition to around $20 million in ARR. It has also halved its burn rate since last summer.
“There’s so much stuff we can build by deploying capital and doing it on a profitable basis would just slow us down right now. So while there’s access to capital, which isn’t always the case…the best thing for our customers and investors is to take more capital and deploy it faster,” he told TechCrunch.
“RevenueCat is too important to too many apps to risk the company driving towards a financial cliff. This may be counter to the prevailing narrative of how venture-backed companies should be built, but our investors are aligned with us and know that Miguel and I are leading the company to maximize the value for developers. Investors make more money when developers make more money,” the CEO added in a blog post. “To that end, we’re still aiming to take the company public in this decade,” he said.
TikTok Shop, TikTok’s social commerce marketplace, is launching a secondhand luxury category in the U.K., putting it in closer competition with The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, Depop, Poshmark, and Mercari, among others. The offering has already existed in TikTok Shop U.S. for over six months.
The new category allows customers in the U.K. to purchase pre-owned high-end clothing, designer handbags, and other accessories, all without leaving the TikTok app. At launch, only five U.K. brands are available, including Sellier, Luxe Collective, Sign of the Times, HardlyEverWornIt, and Break Archive.
Since launching TikTok Shop in 2022, the platform has sold around $1 billion or more worth of products. However, despite its success, some argue that TikTok Shop is ruining the short-form video-sharing app, claiming fakes and poor-quality products are flooding the marketplace. Counterfeits are the biggest risk when buying pre-owned luxury goods online, with even the largest e-commerce giants (Amazon, eBay, and others) facing authenticity issues.
Like all resale marketplaces, TikTok Shop has an anti-counterfeit policy that guarantees a full refund if a seller is proven to have sold a counterfeit product. Bloomberg recently reported that the company is in talks with luxury goods company LVMH to help crack down on counterfeiting.
All secondhand brands on TikTok Shop U.S. are required to have certificates from third-party authenticators. TikTok partnered with authentication services Entrupy and Real Authentication to ensure that designer handbags on the platform are genuine.
Meanwhile, a TikTok spokesperson told TechCrunch that the five U.K. brands all have their own in-house authentication process. They wouldn’t say when it would begin accepting other secondhand brands.
The launch of TikTok Shop’s secondhand luxury category is a strategic move to tap into the growing market of preowned luxury items. The secondhand luxury market is a thriving multibillion-dollar business, with an estimated $49.3 billion (€45 billion) worth of secondhand designer items sold worldwide in 2023.
Additionally, this expansion aligns with the increasing trend of people embracing preloved fashion, and it opens up new avenues for secondhand brands in the U.K. to reach a wider customer base. The popularity of secondhand fashion on TikTok is evident, with over 144,000 TikTok posts using the hashtag #secondhandfashion, which has garnered approximately 1.2 billion views.
Today’s announcement arrives on the heels of the U.S. House of Representatives passing a bill that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the U.S., a bill that appears to be gaining support in the Senate. A ban would be a serious blow to American merchants selling on the app. According to the company, the short video-sharing app generated $14.7 billion for small- to mid-size businesses in 2023.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at Ramp’s big raise and valuation jump, Mercury’s move into personal banking, Klarna’s new credit card, global funding rounds and more!
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here.
Ramp, a spend management startup rivaling the likes of Brex, Navan and Airbase, told TechCrunch exclusively last week that it had raised $150 million at a post-money $7.65 billion valuation. Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund co-led the round, which represented a 31.9% bump in valuation from its August 2023 raise. It’s an impressive feat in a challenging market full of down rounds. Also, notably, Ramp is one of the few larger fintechs that hasn’t had to lay off staff. What’s driving all the investor interest in Ramp? CEO Eric Glyman believes it’s the company’s continued growth and emphasis on AI.
Business banking startup Mercury is expanding into consumer banking. The seven-year-old company today serves more than 100,000 businesses, many of which are startups, via its B2B practice. CEO and co-founder Immad Akhund tells TechCrunch that Mercury hopes to convert many of its business clients into customers, rather than go after the masses. Onyx Private, with a similar offering, recently did a reverse move, pivoting from B2C to B2B. Industry experts I talked to emphasize business and personal banking are “two different beasts,” but also, Mercury is not starting completely from scratch.
You can listen to the Equity crew discuss this week’s fintech news here:
Berlin-based embedded fintech startup finmid has raised $24.7 million in a Series A round at a $107 million post-money valuation to further build out its product and enter new markets.
Since 2015, Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets. So far, the insurtech has supported 15.4 million farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America to get insured, and it is eyeing more following a $20 million Series B funding round.
Midas, a fintech startup that allows people in Turkey to invest in U.S. and Turkish equities, says it has raised $45 million in a funding round led by Portage of Canada.
Rumor has it that HR/fintech startup Rippling is raising $200 million, with another $670 million worth of shares being sold by existing stockholders.
Klarna has launched its credit card in the United States, the Swedish fintech giant told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. With the Klarna credit card, the company is now competing with the likes of Apple and more recently, Robinhood, as well as rival BNPL player Affirm in offering a credit card in the United States.
More stories for you:
Google Wallet appears in India, with local integrations, but Pay will stay
India scrambles to curb PhonePe and Google’s dominance in mobile payments
Jio Financial, BlackRock to tap India’s wealth management market
Inside LemFi’s play to be fintech to the Global South diaspora
Pipe launches embedded capital-as-a-service for small business
Kamina raises $3.2M in Ecuador’s largest pre-seed round
Finix launches tool to onboard merchants for payment acceptance
This fintech wants to finance the middle class. SRM Ventures “lent” R$40M to the idea
Forage and Uber Eats partner on SNAP EBT grocery delivery (TC previously covered Forage here.)
Public acquires Stocktwits trading accounts
Bolt co-founder pulled strings on unusual stock buyback, suit alleges
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Lawmakers passed legislation early Saturday reauthorizing and expanding a controversial U.S. surveillance law shortly after the powers expired at midnight, rejecting opposition by privacy advocates and lawmakers.
The bill, which passed on a 60-34 vote, reauthorizes powers known as Section 702 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the government to collect the communications of foreign individuals by accessing records from tech and phone providers. Critics, including lawmakers who voted against the reauthorization, say FISA also sweeps up the communications of Americans while spying on its foreign targets.
White House officials and spy chiefs rallied behind efforts to reauthorize FISA, arguing the law prevents terrorist and cyber attacks and that a lapse in powers would harm the U.S. government’s ability to gather intelligence. The Biden administration claims the majority of the classified information in the president’s daily intelligence briefing derives from the Section 702 program.
Privacy advocates and rights groups rejected the reauthorization of FISA, which does not require the FBI or the NSA to obtain a warrant before searching the Section 702 database for Americans’ communications. Accusations that the FBI and the NSA abused their authority to conduct warrantless searches on Americans’ communications became a key challenge for some Republicans initially seeking greater privacy protections.
Bipartisan efforts aimed to require the government obtain a warrant before searching its databases for Americans’ communications. But these failed ahead of the final vote on the Senate floor.
Following the passage in the early hours of today, Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that FISA was “indispensable” to the U.S. intelligence community.
The bill now goes to the President’s desk, where it will almost certainly pass into law.
FISA became law in 1978 prior to the advent of the modern internet. It started to come under increased public scrutiny in 2013 after a massive leak of classified documents exposed the U.S. government’s global wiretapping program under FISA, which implicated several major U.S. tech companies and phone companies as unwilling participants.
The Senate was broadly expected to pass the surveillance bill into law, but it faced fresh opposition after the House passed last week its version of the legislation that critics said would extend the reach of FISA to also include smaller companies and telecom providers not previously subject to the surveillance law.
Communications providers largely opposed the House’s expanded definition of an “electronic communications service provider,” which they said would unintentionally include companies beyond the big tech companies and telecom providers who are already compelled to hand over users’ data.
An amendment, introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden, to remove the expanded measure from the bill failed to pass in a vote.
Wyden, a Democratic privacy hawk and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused senators of waiting “until the 11th hour to ram through renewal of warrantless surveillance in the dead of night.”
“Time after time anti-reformers pledge that their band-aid changes to the law will curb abuses, and yet every time, the public learns about fresh abuses by officials who face little meaningful oversight,” said Wyden in a statement.
In the end, the bill passed soon after midnight.
Despite the last-minute rush to pass the bill, a key provision in FISA prevents the government’s programs under Section 702 from suddenly shutting down in the event of lapsed legal powers. FISA requires the government to seek an annual certification from the secretive FISA Court, which oversees and approves the government’s surveillance programs. The FISA Court last certified the government’s surveillance program under Section 702 in early April, allowing the government to use its lapsed authority until at least April 2025.
FISA will now expire at the end of 2026, setting up a similar legislative showdown midway through the next U.S. administration.
Business banking startup Mercury, founded in 2020, is now launching a consumer banking product. Mercury today serves more than 100,000 businesses, many of which are startups, via its B2B practice.
The expansion is a natural move for the company and one that has been in the works for a couple of years, according to Immad Akhund, Mercury’s co-founder and CEO.
“We already have a few hundred thousand users of our business banking product, and a lot of people have expressed that they want a personal banking product,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.
While there are plenty of neobanks, many of them “focus on the underbanked. It’s not a great market for power users” who need features like wire transfers or support for multiple users, features that Mercury’s service offers, according to Akhund. Other features are of the type expected by banking power users: multiple debit cards with custom spending limits, access up to $5 million in FDIC insurance through its partner banks and their sweep networks, and interest-bearing savings accounts.
Essentially, Mercury hopes to convert many of its business clients into customers. It’s not going after the masses like say Chime or Dave.
The expansion into personal banking comes at an interesting time for Mercury, which recently made headlines for being the target of federal scrutiny around its practice of allowing foreign companies to open accounts through one of its partners, Choice Bank.
According to a report by The Information, the FDIC was “concerned” that Choice “had opened Mercury accounts in legally risky countries.” Officials also reportedly chastised Choice for letting overseas Mercury customers “open thousands of accounts using questionable methods to prove they had a presence in the U.S.”
And that’s not all. The FDIC also wasn’t happy that Choice hadn’t “vetted a compliance system Mercury was using, which the agency said was flagging a curiously low number of suspicious transactions.”
Adding fuel to the fire, Mercury also earlier this year reportedly told users with Evolve Bank & Trust-issued debit cards that those cards would no longer work where the merchant has a legal address in 41 countries, including Turkey, Ukraine, Cuba and Iran. (Evolve is also a partner of Mercury’s.) When TechCrunch asked about these allegations, the company declined to comment.
When asked about The Information’s report, a Mercury spokesperson emphasized that the company is investing in its risk and compliance teams. The person also said the fintech partner banking market as a whole has been the target of more regulatory scrutiny.
Alexey Likuev, who led the buildout of the consumer offering for Mercury, acknowledges there are “definitely more rigorous regulations around consumer protection” and said the company has been mindful of those regulations when it built out its consumer product.
But success in B2B banking doesn’t automatically queue up Mercury to handle consumer banking. Each has differing regulations and compliance issues, noted Gartner analyst Agustin Rubini. Risk management for personal banking, for instance, is about assessing the individual’s financial stability, “which can be less predictable compared to businesses,” he said.
More than that, adhering to stringent regulatory requirements can be “challenging” for startups, he warns. “The complexities increase when partnering with a bank due to the additional layers of regulation that apply to banking services,” he said. “This includes everything from anti-money laundering (AML) protocols to meeting capital requirements.”
Rubini added that partnering with a bank can help the startup by providing an initial platform and compliance framework, but then scaling up operations to a larger customer base can open up a different can of worms. Startups need “substantial capital and strategic planning” to do that well while staying competitive, and without running afoul of regulators.
Cesare Fracassi, associate professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin, also told TechCrunch that business and consumer banking are “two different beasts, two different types of services.” But he’s a bit more bullish on fintechs trying their hand at both because he does see “obvious synergies involved in owning both the business and person” in the banking space.
That’s one of the main reasons Mercury is expanding in this direction. It could leverage much of the software powering its B2B product for its consumer offering, Akhund said.
It’s also not the only fintech thinking like this. Onyx Private, with a similar offering, recently did a reverse move, pivoting from B2C to B2B.
Besides earning revenue off of interchange fees and the interest rate spread, Mercury will make money by charging users an annual subscription fee of $240 upon the first deposit and then annually after that. Last year, it touted a big bump in business following the SVB crisis, and a recent report from Kruze Consulting showed that 40% of startups created after the SVB crisis have an account with Mercury.
The company said it’s had seven consecutive quarters of cash flow and EBITDA profitability as of March 2024. While it would not reveal hard revenue figures, it also claims that its new revenue grew by 180% last year while its customer base climbed by 60% and transaction volume by 90% to $95 billion as of January 2024.
With that growth, the startup has been hiring. Presently Mercury has 620 employees, compared to 440 at the start of 2023.
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OpenAI is expanding a program, Custom Model, to help enterprise customers develop tailored generative AI models using its technology for specific use cases, domains and applications.
Custom Model launched last year at OpenAI’s inaugural developer conference, DevDay, offering companies an opportunity to work with a group of dedicated OpenAI researchers to train and optimize models for specific domains. “Dozens” of customers have enrolled in Custom Model since. But OpenAI says that, in working with this initial crop of users, it’s come to realize the need to grow the program to further “maximize performance.”
Hence assisted fine-tuning and custom-trained models.
Assisted fine-tuning, a new component of the Custom Model program, leverages techniques beyond fine-tuning — such as “additional hyperparameters and various parameter efficient fine-tuning methods at a larger scale,” in OpenAI’s words — to enable organizations to set up data training pipelines, evaluation systems and other supporting infrastructure toward bolstering model performance on particular tasks.
As for custom-trained models, they’re custom models built with OpenAI — using OpenAI’s base models and tools (e.g. GPT-4) — for customers that “need to more deeply fine-tune their models” or “imbue new, domain-specific knowledge,” OpenAI says.
OpenAI gives the example of SK Telecom, the Korean telecommunications giant, who worked with OpenAI to fine-tune GPT-4 to improve its performance in “telecom-related conversations” in Korean. Another customer, Harvey — which is building AI-powered legal tools with support from the OpenAI Startup Fund, OpenAI’s AI-focused venture arm — teamed up with OpenAI to create a custom model for case law that incorporated hundreds of millions of words of legal text and feedback from licensed expert attorneys.
“We believe that in the future, the vast majority of organizations will develop customized models that are personalized to their industry, business, or use case,” OpenAI writes in a blog post. “With a variety of techniques available to build a custom model, organizations of all sizes can develop personalized models to realize more meaningful, specific impact from their AI implementations.”
Image Credits: OpenAI
OpenAI is flying high, reportedly nearing an astounding $2 billion in annualized revenue. But there’s surely internal pressure to maintain pace, particularly as the company plots a $100 billion data center co-developed with Microsoft (if reports are to be believed). The cost of training and serving flagship generative AI models isn’t coming down anytime soon after all, and consulting work like custom model training might just be the thing to keep revenue growing while OpenAI plots its next moves.
Fine-tuned and custom models could also lessen the strain on OpenAI’s model serving infrastructure. Tailored models are in many cases smaller and more performant than their general-purpose counterparts, and — as the demand for generative AI reaches a fever pitch — no doubt present an attractive solution for a historically compute-capacity-challenged OpenAI.
Alongside the expanded Custom Model program and custom model building, OpenAI today unveiled new model fine-tuning features for developers working with GPT-3.5, including a new dashboard for comparing model quality and performance, support for integrations with third-party platforms (starting with the AI developer platform Weights & Biases) and enhancements to tooling. Mum’s the word on fine-tuning for GPT-4, however, which launched in early access during DevDay.
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