Tag: finance
Citing Star Wars, Kleiner Perkins closes a $700M fund for early-stage companies
After going “back to the future” with a $600 million fund last year, VC firm Kleiner Perkins is aiming for some “returns of the Jedi” with its freshest (and refocused) fund. With Star Wars references on the forefront in its announcement, the firm today announced that it has closed its…
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Did African startups raise $496M, $1B or $2B in 2019?
Five years ago, it was hard to come by any numbers for annual VC investment in Africa. These days the challenge is choosing which number to follow. That’s the case for three venture funding studies for Africa that turned up varied results. The numbers and variance Investment stats released by…
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Lunchr becomes Swile to expand beyond corporate lunch cards
Lunchr has rebranded to Swile in order to expand its product offering beyond meal vouchers. The company wants to focus on everything that happens at work but that isn’t technically work — money pots for a birthday, paying back your coworkers, creating team-building events and more. At heart, Swile provides…
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Robinhood blames record trade volume & itself for outages
It wasn’t the leap year, a coding blip, or a hack that caused Robinhood’s massive outages yesterday and today that left customers unable to trade stocks. Instead, the co-CEOs write that “the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure — which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn…
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Africa Roundup: TLcom closes $71M fund, Jumo raises $55M, AWS partners with Safaricom
VC firm TLcom Capital closed its Tide Africa Fund at $71 million in February, and announced plans to invest in 12 startups over the next 18 months. The group — with offices in London, Lagos and Nairobi — is looking for tech-enabled, revenue-driven ventures in Africa from seed-stage to Series…
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Leap Finance raises $5.5M to democratize financing for foreign-bound Indian students
Tens of thousands of Indians move to the United States to pursue higher education each year. But like many others who have arrived from a foreign land, they can’t secure education loans or personal loans from the banks at interest rates on par with those levied on local students. The…
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