Ingrid Lunden In January, localized payments provider PPRO became the latest fintech-as-a-service startup to hit a billion-dollar valuation when it closed $180 million in funding. https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/25/ppro-extends-latest-round-to-270m-adding-jpmorgan-and-eldridge-to-grow-its-localized-payments-platform/

Jonathan Shieber The Brazilian-based pan-Latin American food delivery startup iFood has announced a series of initiatives designed to reduce the company’s environmental impact as consumers push companies...

Zack Whittaker Clothing giant FatFace had a data breach, but doesn’t want you to tell anyone about it. https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/25/fatface-data-breach-strictly-private/

Darrell Etherington The home medical supply market in the U.S. is significant and growing, but the way that Americans go about getting much-needed medical supplies,...

Mary Ann Azevedo Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than...

Darrell Etherington The latest in a string of space tech SPACs announced this year is Redwire, an entity created by a PE firm in 2020,...

Manish Singh Indian edtech giant Byju’s, which raised over a billion dollars last year as the pandemic accelerated the adoption of online learning services in...

Joshua Foust In February, the video game publisher Victura announced it would launch what it described as a realistic video-game portrayal of the Second Battle...

Katie Greifeld The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust free fall highlights the extent to which the latest leg of the retail-driven crypto craze is cooling. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/3/25/bitcoin-selloff-takes-a-bite-out-of-cryptocurrencys-biggest-fund

Claire Ballentine Ark Investment Management’s new space ETF could debut as soon as the start of next week, based on regulatory filings, which would cap...

Jonathan Shieber The partners at MaC Venture Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that has just closed on $103 million for its inaugural fund, have spent...

Steve O'Hear Everybody says they want to build user-centric companies and products, but how exactly is that achieved? Talking and listening to users, of course — a...

Steve O'Hear Meniga, the London fintech that provides digital banking technology to leading banks, has closed €10 million in additional funding. https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/25/digital-banking-solutions-provider-meniga-closes-additional-e10m-investment/

Connie Loizos Outlets that follow the crypto industry have been observing a trend, which is that according to Google search data, the rise in interest in non-fungible tokens,...

Catherine Shu Hong Kong-based viAct helps construction sites perform around-the-clock monitoring with an AI-based cloud platform that combines computer vision, edge devices and a mobile app. https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/24/hong-kong-based-viact-raises-2m-for-its-automated-construction-monitoring-platform/

Rita Liao While the governments of the United States and China are pushing policies for technological decoupling, private tech firms continue to tap resources from...