Viva Republica’s $7.4 billion valuation springs from substantial user acquisition opportunities and a potentially lucrative exit—and uplifts the country’s whole fintech ecosystem.
Wells Fargo plugs into Akoya data-sharing network: The banking giant, already an investor in the API provider, will use the network to make customer data available to aggregators and fintechs—it’s a milestone for Akoya in the fragmented US open banking space.
Toss plans neobanking foray: The South Korea-based financial app will launch a neobank in September and focus on underwriting loans via existing users’ data—and it could end up resembling the likes of Alipay, Venmo, and Revolut.
The planned acquisition of Provide—which caters to healthcare providers with loans and savings products—gives the US regional bank access to a large market and a professional niche.
Health passports could leave travelers homesick
Payers iron out wrinkles in social determinants of health programs: Priority Health launched a project alongside three leading SDOH startups that could solve a major pain point in social health projects: quantifying health factors like food insecurity.
Hims&Hers puts more skin in the D2C healthcare game: The telehealth company is acquiring teledermatology startup Apostrophe—here’s how its telehealth expansion strategy across specialties will help it meet consumer demand.
The medium screen: New data on ad impressions shows that more YouTube viewing is happening on TVs, suggesting the platform will soon become an increasingly popular place to reallocate TV ad dollars.
Facebook Shops features drop: WhatsApp integration, better targeting capabilities, and AR try-on round out the company's latest social commerce update.
SpaceX expects its constellation of 1,800 Starlink satellites will be able to provide global internet coverage by this fall. Though far ahead of competitors, SpaceX still faces pressure from traditional ISPs and regulators in several countries.
TikTok minis: The platform's new third-party integration system Jump allows users to embed mini apps in their videos and marks an important step toward TikTok becoming a super app like WeChat.
India cracks down on ecommerce giants: The country proposed regulations that would ban ecommerce sites from hosting flash sales or listing affiliated entities as sellers on their platforms, which could spell trouble for players like Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart.