W elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. As a founder, it takes conviction not to pivot when it seems that everyone else is. But what if everyone was right? Also…
Flanks, a company that has developed an API for automated wealth management services, secured Series A capital of $8 million to democratize wealth management in Europe. Earlybird Venture Capital led this round, and was joined by existing investors JME Ventures & 4Founders Capital. Scalapay cofounder Raffaele Terrene and Upvest CEO and co-founder Martin Kassing participated…
The IRS will test a free tax filing service in 2024 for a subset of lucky taxpayers in as many as 13 states, the agency announced today. Direct File, as the service is called, is a shot across the bows of TurboTax, H&R Block and other paid tax prep services, whose owners have resisted free…
Nirvana Insurance — an insurance startup taking a new approach to insurance products for commercial fleets using artificial intelligence, telematics, internet-of-things technology and 15 billion miles of trucking data to calculate risk models — is taking on something else: new funding. The startup has raised an all-equity Series B of $57 million, money that it…
Moving from one country to another is difficult in many ways, not the least of which involves starting over financially. Nova Credit, which started out as a graduate research project out of Stanford University about seven years ago, was founded to help immigrants overcome the obstacles of applying for things like apartments or loans with…
Arjun Thyagarajan and Raghav Lal, the co-founders of fintech startup Solid, are pushing back on Series B investor FTV Capital, which filed a lawsuit against the company to get its $61 million investment back. Solid offers companies a way to provide their own financial products, for example, banking, payments and cards. At the time private…
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign up! We covered lots of happenings in the world of fintech this past week — including raises, a startup closure,…
Synapse and Evolve Bank & Trust on Friday addressed a lengthy Fintech Business Weekly post from October 8 that claimed the companies were at odds with each other after Evolve decided to end the relationship. Business banking startup Mercury, which was working with Evolve, also confirmed the termination of its relationship with Synapse. In the…
Stash, an investing app, is taking advantage of a tool that’s been around for some time – a convertible note. The company told TechCrunch exclusively that it just raised $40 million through one of these mechanisms, led by early and existing backer T. Rowe Price. It’s an interesting wrinkle for Stash. Convertible notes, also known…
Investing apps help anyone access the stock market to make trades. Alpaca, a San Mateo-based startup, offers stock and crypto brokerage trading services via API that enables investing fintech companies and others to embed this functionality into their apps. Today, the startup announced it has secured $15 million in the form of a convertible note…