On 11 June, Pleo told finance teams that AI agents would soon free them from administrative work. The next day came the Pleo layoffs: the Danish spend-management fintech had cut around 50 of its own staff, most of them in engineering and data. The prod…
Alibaba Group is offering $1.5 billion to acquire Pupu, one of China’s last independent online grocery platforms, according to Bloomberg. The bid is more than double a $600 million proposal from Sun Art Retail, the former Alibaba affiliate now backed b…
Coinbase has launched an AI agent that can execute crypto trades and pay for premium research data on behalf of users. The agent integrates with a user’s main Coinbase account or can operate in a separate sandbox. It trades spot crypto and derivatives …
A German startup wants to rebuild online commerce for shoppers who are not human. ShopAgentic has raised a €1.9mn pre-seed to do it. May Ventures and Greenfield Capital co-led the oversubscribed round. What ShopAgentic is building ShopAgentic calls its…
OpenAI is wiring a payment network into ChatGPT. Under an expanded partnership announced at the Visa Payments Forum on Wednesday, AI agents inside OpenAI’s products will be able to shop and pay on a user’s behalf at, in principle, any of the more than …
Satispay, the Milan-based mobile payments company that became Italy’s second unicorn in 2022, is reportedly planning to raise up to €120 million ($139 million) in fresh funding. The round would fuel the fintech’s expansion beyond payments into stock an…
Poetic, an AI startup that has been operating in stealth, has emerged with $50M in funding and a $500M valuation to automate some of finance’s most sensitive back-office work, from insurance underwriting to compliance and fraud checks. Its backers incl…
Capsa AI, a London and New York startup building what it calls an “AI operating system” for private capital, has raised $18M in Series A funding. The round was co-led by TX Ventures and Pivot Investment Partners, with participation from Bek Ventures, a…
The European Central Bank quietly moved to rein in Revolut last year, restricting Europe’s most valuable fintech from launching new products across the European Economic Area over concerns about how fast it approved them, the Financial Times reported o…
Vinted, the Lithuanian secondhand marketplace valued at €8 billion after an €880 million secondary share sale in April, is pushing into the United States and sees an “enormous opportunity” in the American resale market, according to marketplace CEO Ada…