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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.

 
Inside fintech startup Upstart’s IPO filing
While the world awaits the Airbnb IPO filing that could come as early as next week, Upstart dropped its own S-1 filing. The fintech startup facilitates loans between consumers and partner banks, an operation that attracted around $144 million in capital prior to its IPO. First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, Third Point Ventures, Rakuten and The Progressive Corporation led rounds in the startup, according to Crunchbase data. There’s quite a lot to like in Upstart’s IPO filing, including rapidly...

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Vivid Money raises $17.6 million for its...
German fintech startup Vivid Money has raised a $17.6 million Series A funding round (€15 million). Ribbit Capital is leading the investment. Today’s funding round gives Vivid Money a valuation of $117 million (€100 million). Vivid Money is quite a young startup as the company started accepting customers just a few months ago. Built on top of Solarisbank for the banking infrastructure, Vivid Money is a challenger bank with a few nifty features. When you sign up, you get...

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B2B marketplaces will be the next billion-dollar e-commerce...
Merritt Hummer Contributor Merritt Hummer is a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, where she invests in the fintech, e-commerce and proptech sectors. Startups involved in B2B e-commerce such as Faire and Mirakl have burst out of the gates in 2020. Almost overnight, these startups transformed into consequential platforms, earning billion-dollar valuations along the way. The B2B e-commerce industry has broad reach, encompassing everything from commerce infrastructure and payments technology to procurement and supply-chain solutions. But one area of the...

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Daily Crunch: China postpones Ant Group IPO
Yes, there’s a high-stakes presidential election underway, but tech news doesn’t stop completely: Chinese regulators pull the brakes on Ant Group’s IPO, Spotify adds standalone streaming support on Apple Watch and PayPal outlines its plans for 2021. This is your Daily Crunch for November 3, 2020. The big story: China postpones Ant Group IPO The Shanghai stock exchange has postponed Ant Group’s IPO a day after Chinese regulators held a closed-door meeting with Jack Ma and other company executives....

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Pulled Ant Group IPO costs Alibaba nearly...
News today that Ant Group’s IPO is suddenly on hold in both Shanghai and Hong Kong caused a sell-off of Alibaba shares. This afternoon, equity in sister-company Alibaba is off around 8% in the wake of the delayed offering and news that Ant had run into regulatory issues with the Chinese government. Ant was spun out of Alibaba, which owns a one-third stake in the financial technology powerhouse. Ant’s IPO was on track to be among the largest in...

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PayPal details its digital wallet plans for...
PayPal this week laid out its vision for the future of its digital wallet platform and its PayPal and Venmo apps. During its third-quarter earnings call on Monday, the company said it plans to roll out substantial changes to its mobile apps over the next year to integrate a range of new features, including enhanced direct deposit, check cashing, budgeting tools, bill pay, crypto support, subscription management, buy now/pay later functionality and all of Honey’s shopping tools. While PayPal...

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4 takeaways from fintech VC in Q3...
Fintech has been a key startup story in recent quarters, with leading players in the genre raising titanic rounds at eye-popping valuations. Consider companies like Robinhood, and its epic capital run this year on the back of huge revenue growth, or Chime, which also raised huge sums while riding a tailwind provided by the savings and investing boom. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday....

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China postpones Ant’s colossal IPO after closed-door...
The Shanghai stock exchange announced postponing Ant Group’s colossal initial public offering, a day after Chinese regulators weighed a slew of new fintech rules and summoned Jack Ma and other top executives to a closed-door meeting. The rare talk between China’s top financial regulators and Ant, which revealed “major changes in the fintech regulatory environment,” may disqualify the firm from listing on November 5, the bourse said in a statement on the evening of November 3. It’s unclear what...

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Crypto wallet app ZenGo to launch debit...
ZenGo, a mobile app to manage your cryptocurrencies, is about to launch a Visa debit card in the U.S. This isn’t the first crypto-powered debit card — Coinbase announced a U.S. expansion for its debit card just last week. But ZenGo is a non-custodial wallet, which means that you’re in control of your crypto assets. When you leave your crypto assets on an exchange, somebody could log in to your account and send your assets to other wallets. Sure, there...

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PayPal’s earnings don’t excite Wall Street, but...
PayPal’s stock is down in after-hours trading after reporting third-quarter earnings that beat expectations. It’s not immediately clear why PayPal is losing ground, although it could stem from retail investor having higher expectations than what analysts estimated for the high-flying company. Despite failing to delight the investing public, it’s possible to see continued strength for the broader fintech industry in its results. PayPal reported revenues of $5.46 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $1.07 in the third quarter...

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UK’s Marshmallow raises $30M on a $310M...
When it comes to using algorithms and other formulae to determine what kinds of services you might offer to specific customers and at what price, the insurance industry is one of the oldest in the book. But that legacy position masks the fact that some of its determinations might leave a lot to be desired, with customers who don’t fit typical profiles unable to get competitive rates. Now, a UK startup called Marshmallow that’s aiming to take on those...

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Starling Bank founder Anne Boden says new...
Penguin Business describes Starling Bank founder Anne Boden’s “Banking On It” as the “first-hand account of one woman’s quest to rebuild Britain’s broken banking system.” Written with the help of a ghost writer, Boden relates how she came up with the idea to found a challenger bank and the many obstacles she faced along the way. Fewer than 300 pages, the book parachutes the reader immediately into a cab journey in Ireland that Boden is taking post-financial crisis, when...

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Is fintech’s Series A market hot, or...
Ryan Falvey Contributor More posts by this contributor Fintech’s $138 billion opportunity Theo Katsoulis Contributor According to industry reports, venture capital deal-making has notably rebounded since dropping off briefly in March as shelter-in-place orders gripped much of the country. As seed-stage fintech investors, this has certainly been our experience: “Hot” deals are getting funded faster than ever, and we increasingly see the large multistage global funds competing for the earliest access to companies. However, in our experience and anecdotal...

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Is Wall Street losing its tech enthusiasm?
This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here. Over the past few months the IPO market made it plain that some public investors were willing to pay more for growth-focused technology shares than private investors. We saw this in both strong tech IPO pricing — the value set on companies as they debut — and in resulting first-day valuations, which were...

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This Week in Apps: Facebook Gaming skips...
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544...

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