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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Uber’s first head of data science just...
Kevin Novak joined Uber as its 21st employee its seventh engineer in 2011, and by 2014, he was the company’s head of data science. He talks proudly of that time, but like all good things, it ran its course and by the end of 2017, having accomplished what he wanted at the company, he left. At first, he picked up the pace of his angel investing, work he’d already begun focusing on during weekends and evenings, ultimately building a...

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Daily Crunch: Insecure server exposes Byju’s students’...
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 30, 2021. It’s the last day of the quarter. It’s the last day of the first half of the year. It’s the halfway mark for your New Year’s resolutions. The kickoff of Q3 means that we are heading into yet another earnings season. To close the second quarter,...

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Daylight raises millions to build a digital...
Over the past year, there has been a surge of newly formed digital banks aimed at specific demographics. The banks in nearly all cases are trying to meet the needs of certain populations that they believe are feeling left out or underserved by traditional financial institutions. The latest such neobank to emerge is New York-based Daylight, which describes itself as the first LGBTQ+ digital banking platform in the United States. (There is a digital bank in Brazil with a...

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Sequoia Capital India unveils fifth group of...
Sequoia Capital India has selected 23 early-stage startups for its fifth cohort of Surge, its accelerator program for India and Southeast Asia, at a time when dealflow activity is at its peak in the region. The new cohort, Surge’s largest to date, have collectively raised $55 million, the storied investment firm said Wednesday. The group also includes 10 women founders, another record for the accelerator program which started its journey in March 2019. The Surge program has enabled Sequoia...

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Orum raises $56M to help speed up...
Orum, which aims to speed up the amount of time it takes to transfer money between banks, announced today it has raised $56 million in a Series B round of funding. Accel and Canapi Ventures co-led the round, which also included participation from existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, Inspired Capital, Homebrew, Acrew, Primary, Clocktower and Box Group. The financing comes barely three months after Orum announced a $21 million Series A, and brings its total raised to over $82...

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Daily Crunch: SpaceX announces tentative plans to...
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, June 28. How much time did you spend on your phone this weekend? Too much? Not a lot? According to recent data on consumer app spending, you probably spent a pretty fair amount. Consumer spending on apps hit a new record in the first half of the year,...

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Fleet software startup LocoNav raises $37 million...
LocoNav, an India-based startup that is helping drivers and fleet owners in over two-dozen nations run their vehicles more efficiently and save money, said on Monday it has raised $37 million in a new financing round. Five-year-old LocoNav’s new financing round, a Series B, was funded by Quiet Capital, Anthemis Group, Foundamental, Sequoia Capital India, RIT Capital Partners, Uncorrelated Ventures, Village Global and others. The new financing round brings the to-date raise of LocoNav, which has offices in San Francisco...

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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is coming to...
Brian Armstrong, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, is coming to Disrupt this September 21-23, and given how much there is to discuss, we couldn’t be more excited to host him. As some industry observers will know, Armstrong, a native of San Jose, Calif., whose parents were both engineers, nabbed two degrees from Rice University in Texas before joining Airbnb as a software engineer in 2011 as a technical product manager focused on fraud prevention. The role...

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How WesternUnion is fighting back against fintech...
The saying goes that, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” That may or may not be true, but at least one “old dog” is working hard to disprove that saying. Western Union has been operating in the cross-border payments space for nearly 150 years (yes, you read that right – 150 years) and today, globally, it serves almost 150 million customers – representing senders and receivers. In recent years, a number of fintech startups have emerged to...

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Slice raises $20 million to go after...
Slice, an Indian fintech startup that has built a “super card” for millennials in India, said on Monday it has raised $20 million in a new financing round and is adding new features to change how people engage with their credit cards. Existing investors Gunosy, Blume Ventures and others financed the new round in the Bangalore-headquartered startup, it said. Even as hundreds of millions of Indians today have a bank account, only about 30 million have a credit card....

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This Week in Apps: Android apps on...
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of...

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8 founders, leaders highlight fintech and deep...
The U.K. is gaining in popularity as a great place to start a tech firm. The country is quickly catching up to China on the tech investment front, with VC investments reaching a record of $15 billion in 2020, according to TechNation. A global health crisis notwithstanding, London remained a favorite for investors. U.K. cities made up a fifth of the top 20 European cities, with names such as Oxford, Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge rising to the fore in...

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Equity Live: This is what leadership smells...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we did something fun and different and good: a live show! A good number of people came, and asked questions, and altogether, it was a blast. Danny, Natasha, and Alex had a lovely time with the regular work, while Grace and Chris and Kevin made the whole operation function. We’ll likely post a bonus episode of the Q&A on Saturday...

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Circle wants to help companies access DeFi...
Cryptocurrency company Circle has announced that it plans to launch a new API for companies using Circle accounts to manage crypto assets — and in particular USDC stablecoins. The new API will let companies access decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols starting with Compound lending pools. Circle is better known as one of the founding members of the Centre consortium with Coinbase. Along with other crypto partners, they have issued USD Coin (USDC), a popular stablecoin. As the name suggests, stablecoins...

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Daily Crunch: Google and Jio Platforms unveil...
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 24, 2021. There’s an ocean of tech news to get through today, but up top if you care about the advertising market, head here first. Google is pushing back cookiegeddon, and the decision could impact companies from the smallest startup to, well, Google. — Alex The TechCrunch Top...

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