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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.

 
Fintech is transforming the world’s oldest asset...
Artem Milinchuk Contributor Artem Milinchuk is the founder and CEO of FarmTogether, a fintech platform channeling funding into natural assets, starting with U.S. farmland. Farmland as an asset class has proven itself to be a stable investment decade after decade. Farmland’s negative correlation with the Dow Jones Industrial Average sits at an eye-popping -43% for a three-year hold period, making it an excellent hedge against market volatility. The asset has also been a steady appreciator since 1987, when institutional...

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SEC wants to regulate Coinbase’s crypto yield...
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has reacted strongly to the company’s current relationship with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to him, the SEC is threatening to sue the cryptocurrency exchange if it launches its yield-generating product called Coinbase Lend. With this new product, Coinbase wants to compete with popular decentralized finance (DeFi) products, such as Compound and Aave. The company wants to operate a lending pool focused on USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin that is pegged to USD....

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Twitter wants you to tweet to interest-based...
Twitter is a useful place for following breaking news and keeping up with what the people you’re already interested in are doing, but its relative dearth of discovery features and a lack of organized community spaces make it pretty hard to connect with anyone you aren’t actively seeking out. The company is thinking about changing that. Twitter is on a tear with new features lately and its latest experiment, called Communities, is designed to make it easier to connect...

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‘Thin file’ loans startup Koyo closes $50M...
Koyo, a fintech startup using open banking to offer loans to people with poor credit histories, has closed a Series A funding round of $50 million in debt and equity led by Force Over Mass, with participation from existing investors Forward Partners, Frontline Ventures and Seedcamp. New investors in Koyo include Force Over Mass, Matt Robinson (founder of GoCardless, co-founder of Nested), and angel investors from the banking and lending sectors. It last raised $4.9 million in 2019. With...

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UK’s Marshmallow raises $85M on a $1.25B...
Marshmallow — a U.K.-based car insurance provider that has made a name for itself in the market by providing a new approach to car insurance aimed at using a wider set of data points and clever algorithms to net a more diverse set of customers and provide more competitive rates — is announcing a milestone today in its life as a startup, as well as in the bigger U.K. tech world. The London company — co-founded by identical twins...

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Daily Crunch: Hyundai to provide hydrogen fuel...
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 back to the Daily Crunch for Tuesday, September 7, 2021! Your regular host Alex Wilhelm is AFK for the next few days, so I (Greg Kumparak) will be handling his newsletter duties. Alex may be smarter, nicer and generally a better human than I am, but I’m at least more … well, more...

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Locals share why Vilnius, Lithuania is becoming...
There are plenty of reasons why Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital city, has an increasingly visible startup sector. The country’s startup-friendly regulatory environment, a beautiful medieval town center, over 20 business hubs and accelerators and strong rankings in intellectual property production are most obvious at a high level. But what are the locals excited about on the ground? Our survey respondents said the city was strong across a broad range of tech industries, particularly those with practical applications: cybersecurity, energy and...

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Equity Monday: Women’s employment drops, as Delta’s...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff to catch up on weekend news and prep for the days ahead. We’re here on Tuesday this week since us folks in the United States had off for Labor Day. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and while you’re at it, throw me a follow too. Jobs report: Over the weekend, the U.S. government...

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Jetty raises $23M to help give renters...
Jetty, a fintech company which aims to give renters flexibility when paying rent, has raised $23 million in a funding round co-led by Citi and Flourish Ventures. The financing brings Jetty’s total raised since its 2016 inception to $78 million. Other investors participating in the latest growth round include Credit Ease and K5. Previous backers include Farmers Insurance Group, Khosla and Ribbit Capital, among others. The 100-person New York City-based startup has come up with a way to help...

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Sequoia Heritage, Stripe and others invest $200M...
Francophone Africa has its first unicorn, and if you’ve been following tech on the continent, you will be very unsurprised to hear that it’s coming from the world of fintech. Wave, a U.S. and Senegal-based mobile money provider, has raised $200 million in Series A round of funding. The investment is the largest-ever Series A round for the region, and it values Wave at $1.7 billion. Four big-name backers jointly led the round — Sequoia Heritage, a private investment...

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Financial comparison “super app” Jeff raises $1.5M...
Financial services, especially those for people who don’t have access to traditional bank accounts or lines of credit, are proliferating in Southeast Asia. Jeff App wants to give consumers a “super app” where they can compare many financial products and apply for them using the startup’s proprietary data-scoring models. For service providers, Jeff serves as a distribution channel, helping them find and retain customers. The startup announced today it has raised a seed extension of $1.5 million, led by...

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A.ID closes Pre-Seed funding for ID verification...
A.ID, an identity and compliance platform with a focus on high-risk clients, has closed a pre-seed investment round of $500,000 from angel investors including former employees of RobinHood, Square and Snap. The startup says it is addressing a market that traditional Fintech companies and banking instutions can’t seem to deal with: namely the rise of apparently ‘risky’ customers who are simply dealing in products deemed problematic. A case in point is that the legal cannabis industry grows by 67%...

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Financial automation startup Aurelia raises $3M Seed...
Financial automation platform, Aurelia has raised $3 million in seed funding, led by Blossom Capital. Billing itself as a sort of “IFTTT for finance” aimed at small businesses that want to integrate their bank accounts with financial tools, Aurelia says this then gives them greater control over cash flow, taxes etc to automate normally manual tasks, with no knowledge of code needed. Angel investors include Guillaume Pousaz (Founder & CEO at Checkout.com) through his Zinal Growth investment vehicle and...

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The Station: Lyft, Uber take action in...
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Before you jump into the transportation news of the week, a bit of TechCrunch company news! Private equity firm Apollo Global Management completed its acquisition...

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This Week in Apps: Another App Store...
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 live TV per...

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