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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.

 
Affirm targets up to $38 per share...
Today Affirm, a fintech startup that offers payment options to e-commerce customers, released a new S-1/A filing. The new document follows a late-December filing of a similar nature, though that update focused on changing the language of Affirm’s reported results, tweaking its language to remove some adjusted metrics and hewing closer to generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. The company’s more recent filing details what could be its first IPO price interval, indicating that Affirm may price its shares...

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Jack Ma’s absence from public eye sparks...
The world’s attention is on Jack Ma’s whereabouts after reports noted the billionaire founder of Alibaba and Ant Group had been absent from public view since late October. On October 24, Ma delivered fiery remarks against China’s financial system to an audience of high-rank officials. Days later the Chinese authorities abruptly halted Ant’s initial public offering, an act believed to be linked to Ma’s controversial speech. The Chinese government subsequently told the fintech behemoth, which had thrived in a...

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The cauldrons of gold theory of media...
Another week, another email newsletter. This time, the story is Punchbowl, a politics-centric newsletter founded by a crop of recent Politico alums including Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan. Ben Smith has the story, as does Maxwell Tani at the Daily Beast with some more juicy details. Why do we need another newsletter analyzing Beltway politics in a world of Politico Playbook, Axios, The Daily 202 and a hundred others? In fact, why do we need the voluminous...

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One Way Ventures, a firm focused on...
One Way Ventures, a venture capital firm that backs immigrant founders, has closed its second fund at $57.5 million. The close comes three years after One Way announced its debut fund, a $28 million investment vehicle. The new fund will allow One Way to grow their check size from $500,000 to $1 million, giving them the ability to lead institutional seed rounds at a faster clip, says founding partner Semyon Dukach. The bigger fund is par for the course...

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Venmo adds a check cashing feature, waives...
Venmo this morning announced it will begin to offer a new check cashing service, “Cash a Check,” in the Venmo mobile app. The feature, which is being rolled out to select users starting today, can be used to cash printed, payroll and U.S. government checks, including the new stimulus checks, the company says. Though typically there will be fees associated with the Cash a Check feature, Venmo says these are being waived on stimulus funds for a limited time....

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India’s CRED raises $81 million, buys back...
Bangalore-based CRED is kickstarting the new year on a high note. The two-year-old startup, led by high-profile entrepreneur Kunal Shah, said on Monday it has raised $81 million in a new financing round and bought shares worth $1.2 million (about 90 million Indian rupees) from employees. The Series C financing round, as first reported by TechCrunch in late November, was led by DST Global. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, and General Catalyst also participated in the...

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Extra Crunch’s top 10 stories of 2020
I edited hundreds of stories in 2020, so choosing my favorites would be an exercise in futility. Instead, I’ve tried to gather a sample of Extra Crunch stories that taught me something new. (Which means this top 10 list betrays my ignorance, a humbling admission for a know-it-all like myself.) While narrowing down the field of candidates, I realized that we’re covering each of the topics on this list in greater depth next year. We already have stories in...

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Activist hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb takes...
Third Point, the activist hedge fund run by Daniel Loeb, is busy in the waning days of 2020. It’s had great returns despite huge turbulence early in the pandemic — Reuters says that it is up 12.3% for the year as of earlier this month — and the firm clearly sees more and more potential for growth in the tech sector. First, we learned via Asa Fitch at the Wall Street Journal yesterday that the hedge fund sent a...

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Understanding Europe’s big push to rewrite the...
European Union lawmakers have set out the biggest update of digital regulations for around two decades — likening it to the introduction of traffic lights to highways to bring order to the chaos wrought by increased mobility. Just switch cars for packets of data. The proposals for a Digital Services Act (DSA) to standardize safety rules for online business, and a Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will put limits on tech giants aimed at boosting competition in the digital markets...

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EarlyBird’s new app lets families and friends...
A new fintech startup called EarlyBird wants to help families invest in their children’s financial futures. Through the EarlyBird mobile app, parents in just a few minutes can create a custodial account, also known as a UGMA (Uniform Gifts to Minors Act) account. These accounts typically allow a parent, aka the “custodian,” to invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other securities on behalf of the minor child. When the child comes of legal adult age, the investments become...

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From the US to China, Korea, India...
After decades of global expansion and consolidation in the tech sector, antitrust is now a headline issue for the industry across the world. What has been a slow and sputtering series of disparate actions over the past decade has coalesced in just the past few weeks into a rapid and comprehensive series of actions against the industry, with the United States being a notable laggard worldwide. Nowhere are these actions more prominent than in China, where the competition authorities...

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Seattle-based Madrona raises $320M for its eighth...
Madrona Venture Group has been a mainstay of the Seattle and northwest United States startup ecosystem for years now, and it looks like it is going to continue that legacy going forward. In a filing with the SEC, the firm announced its eighth venture capital fund, raising $320 million. That’s up slightly from the firm’s past two funds, both of which were $300 million vehicles. The filing comes roughly a year and a half after the firm’s last fundraise...

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Daily Crunch: China presents ‘rectification’ plan for...
The Chinese government could reshape Ant Group’s business, Tesla plans to launch in India next year and the FAA announces a new ID requirement for drones. This is your Daily Crunch for December 28, 2020. The big story: China presents ‘rectification’ plan for Ant Group Less than two months ago, Chinese authorities halted the planned IPO of Ant Group, the payments and fintech company that spun out of Alibaba nearly a decade earlier. Now the government has laid out...

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Global investors flee from Chinese tech stocks...
Global investors are running from Chinese tech stocks in the wake of the government’s crackdown on Ant Group and Alibaba, two high-flying businesses founded by Ma Yun (Jack Ma) that were once hailed as paragons of China’s new tech elite. Shares of major technology companies in the country have fallen sharply in recent days, with Bloomberg calculating that Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com and Meituan have lost around $200 billion in value during a handful of trading sessions. Already reeling from...

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Tappity raises $1.3M for its interactive and...
When kids today want to learn about a new topic they’re interested in, they’ll often turn to YouTube. But the quality of the educational content on the platform can be hit or miss, depending on what specific videos kids happen to come across. Tappity, a digital educational startup now backed by $1.3 million in seed funding, aims to offer an alternative. Its video library offers entertaining and interactive live-action videos kids enjoy, while also ensuring the content itself is...

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