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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.

 
Daily Crunch: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns
Twitter addresses questions of bias in its image-cropping algorithms, we take a look at Mario Kart Live and the stock market takes a hit after President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. This is your Daily Crunch for October 2, 2020. The big story: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns Last month, (white) PhD student Colin Madland highlighted potential algorithmic bias on Twitter and Zoom — in Twitter’s case, because its automatic image cropping seemed to consistently highlight Madland’s face over that of a...

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Which neobanks will rise or fall?
Denis Barrier Contributor Denis Barrier is co-founder and CEO of Cathay Innovation, a global venture capital firm investing across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Alex Lazarow Contributor Alex Lazarow is an author, a global venture investor with Cathay Innovation and is an adjunct professor with the Middlebury Institute for International Studies MBA program. More posts by this contributor The innovation supply chain: How ideas traverse continents and transform economies The neobank, or digital bank, phenomenon continues to take...

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Plaid improves its account linking flow
Plaid, the company building a universal banking API that lets you connect an app or service with a bank account, has updated Plaid Link. Plaid Link is the interface you see when you add your bank account to any app or service that uses Plaid, such as Venmo, Acorns or Chime. Given that 3,000 apps have been using Plaid, chances are you’ve seen Plaid Link in the past. According to the company, one in four people in the U.S....

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Coinbase lets you withdraw funds to your...
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is adding a new way to withdraw funds from your Coinbase account. If you’ve added a compatible debit card to your account, you can transfer USD, EUR or GBP to your bank account nearly instantly. There are some drawbacks, and the main one is that you’ll pay a lot of fees. In the U.S., Coinbase deducts 1.5% from the transaction, or a minimum $0.55 if it’s a small transaction. In the U.K. and Europe, you pay...

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Spain’s startup ecosystem: 9 investors on remote...
As reported in the first half of our Spain-focused VC survey, the nation’s startup ecosystem continues to grow and is keeping pace with ecosystems in more developed European countries such as U.K., France, Sweden and Germany. While main hubs Madrid and Barcelona bump heads politically, tech ecosystems in each city have been developing with local support. According to this regional investor database, Spain is home to 62 angels, 84 seed funds and 19 Series A and beyond institutional funds. As...

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Daily Crunch: Google commits $1B to pay...
Google is paying a lot of money for its news licensing program, Microsoft announces an affordable laptop and Facebook says it won’t accept ads casting doubts on the election. This is your Daily Crunch for October 1, 2020. The big story: Google commits $1B to pay publishers Specifically, CEO Sundar Pichai said today that the company will be paying $1 billion to news publishers to license their content for a new format called the Google News Showcase — basically,...

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What if the kernel is corrupt?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s VC-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week, Alex is on a much-deserved vacation (but not from Twitter, it seems) so Danny Crichton and I chatted through the news and happenings of the week. Somehow we winded our way through the latest tech controversies, gave Chris Wallace a shout out and ended with some funding rounds. I’ll be out next week so don’t miss me too...

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Working for social justice isn’t a ‘distraction’...
Eileen Burbidge Contributor Eileen Burbidge is a partner at Passion Capital, an early-stage technology venture fund based in London, and is also the UK Treasury’s Special Envoy for Fintech. In case you missed it: On Monday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote a company blog post titled “Coinbase is a mission focused company” which drew both praise and critique that has continued throughout the week. Personally, I wasn’t terribly impressed. I limited my reaction on Twitter to one retweet, a...

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Investors give Baltimore’s Facet Wealth $25 million...
Yesterday, Baltimore-based fintech company Facet Wealth said it raised $25 million in financing as it readies a new business line pitching financial planning as an employment benefit to businesses looking to recruit top talent. Employment benefit packages are expanding beyond the basic gym membership and healthcare to include subscriptions to Netflix, discounts on delivery and rideshare services, and other perks. So why not financial wellness? The thesis certainly managed to attract a big-money backer, with Warburg Pincus, the multi-billion-dollar...

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The roadmap to startup consolidation in Southeast...
While Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystems are still young compared to those in China or India, it has matured over the last five years. Unicorns like Grab, Gojek and Garena are continuing to grow, and more competitive startups are emerging in sectors like fintech, e-commerce and logistics. That leads to the question: Will consolidation start to pick up? The consensus by investors interviewed by Extra Crunch is: Yes, but slowly at first. In the meantime, there are still roadblocks to...

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Gusto is expanding from payroll into a...
When we caught up with Gusto last year, the small business payroll startup had just raised $200 million and was launching a new office in New York City. Over the past few years though, Gusto has also been accruing new features outside of its original payroll product, features that redefine the borders between payroll and financial wellness, and in the process, are blurring the lines of the classic fintech market map. Today, the company announced a slew of new...

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After breach, Twitter hires a new cybersecurity...
Following a high-profile breach in July, Twitter has hired Rinki Sethi as its new chief information security officer. Sethi most recently served as chief information security officer at cloud data management Rubrik, and previously worked in cybersecurity roles at IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and Intuit. In the new role at Twitter overseeing the company’s information security practices and policies, Sethi will report to platform lead, Nick Tornow, according to her tweet announcing the job move. Sethi also serves as...

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Rally raises $17M to expand a platform...
When people ponder the investment opportunity around collectibles, they probably think about things like wine auctions, sales of very expensive, old cars or baseball cards, or maybe a pocket watch that made an unlikely appearance on an antiques TV show, hoping that their piece of treasured tat might one day also be worth millions. But a startup announcing some funding today is hoping that you might add another kind of more realistic kind of collectibles investment into the mix:...

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New program wants to be the Y...
Rolling funds, the rise of solo capitalists, crowd syndicates, and team-based seed funds all scream one thing in unison: venture capital is growing and getting unbundled at the same time. While the asset class remains largely exclusive and skewed white and male, innovation does have the potential to usher in a new, far more inclusive generation of investors. The question is how to ensure that these newer investors survive and thrive and are able to scale their operations in...

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Crypto exchange Bitpanda closes $52M Series A...
Bitpanda, a crypto assets platform, has closed a $52 million Series A funding round form Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel. Vienna-based VC Speedinvest also participated, alongside other unnamed investors. Claiming 1.3 million users, Bitpanda has previously been trading digital assets and tokenizing precious metals. The Vienna-based company will use the cash to expand internationally. It expanded to France, Spain and Turkey in 2020 and plans to enter additional European markets this year and next. It has 300...

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