The startup, which sells everything from sneakers to sports cards over livestream, is raising again barely a year after an $11.5bn round, as live commerce catches on in the West. Whatnot, the livestream-shopping platform where hosts sell sneakers, trad…
The energy firm is the first live test case for Lava Network’s tokenization sandbox, which says it has fielded 40-plus institutional applications since June. Germany has a battery problem. Last year, the country curtailed more than 2,700 GWh of solar g…
Shein wanted its Hong Kong listing to be about growth. Instead, the filing meant to sell that story revealed a US regulator is investigating the company, and Shein will not say why. The disclosure sits in the draft prospectus for Shein’s planned IPO, R…
PayPal finally addressed the $53bn offer sitting on its table. Its answer was: not at that price. The company gave its first public response on Tuesday’s Q2 earnings call, alongside a beat. Chief executive Enrique Lores would not comment on Stripe and …
Apple has a new answer to the complaint that its products cost too much. Do not buy them. Lease them. On Tuesday the company launched Apple Upgrade in the US, a leasing programme run by the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna. It covers the iPhone, Apple Wat…
Visa is cutting about 2,600 jobs, roughly 7% of its staff, and it is cutting them mostly from the teams that build its technology. The money it saves is going into the payment methods that could one day make those rails matter less. The payments networ…
Two hotel groups moved into ChatGPT this week, a day apart and at opposite ends of the market. Radisson Hotel Group launched an app on Tuesday, built with Accenture, covering more than 1,000 hotels in over 100 countries. G6 Hospitality launched a plugi…
Cover Genius has acquired Friendsurance, the Berlin company that invented peer-to-peer insurance. The deal took effect immediately, and neither side disclosed a price. Friendsurance built its name on a simple idea. Small groups of policyholders pool to…
X Money went live on Monday. Buried in its support pages is a rule that no ordinary bank applies to a current account. “If your X account is suspended for violating Child Safety or Violent and Hateful Entities policies, you will lose Money access,” the…
A development bank has just minted a unicorn, and it took two years. Ominimo, a Budapest-based motor insurance startup founded by Serbian and Hungarian entrepreneurs, has closed a Series B led by the venture arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction …