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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.

 
Startups Weekly: How will we build the...
Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT), just subscribe here. Commercial real estate, the traditional heart of most cities, may have lost its reason to exist in the last few months. The world is about to find out what the situation is as more locations start to reopen. First up in our ongoing coverage of the topic, Connie Loizos caught up with a couple proptech...

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Kevin Rose on health apps, crypto and...
Kevin Rose has been in the spotlight since co-founding the early social news aggregation site Digg in late 2004. A genial whiz kid turned serial entrepreneur, he has since become as well-known for launching a whole lot of slickly designed products, some of them out of his startup incubator Milk (later acquired by Google), and North, an incubator that would later lead him to a site for watch enthusiasts called Hodinkee in New York. Along the way, Rose has...

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Opera’s OPay still plans Africa expansion on...
Opera’s Africa fintech startup OPay remains committed to building a multi-service super app in Nigeria as the foundation to expand on the continent. OPay also continues to operate ORide for limited passenger service — though the company is shifting the motorcycle ride-hail operation toward logistics businesses. These were some of the updates offered by Opera’s Derrick Nueman, a VP of Investor Relations and advisor to OPay. He spoke to TechCrunch amid a flurry of recent reporting questioning OPay’s Nigeria...

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DigitalOcean raises $50M more from Access Industries...
Earlier today, DigitalOcean announced that it raised $50 million more from prior investors Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz. The capital comes after the SMB and developer-focused cloud infrastructure company raised nine-figures worth of debt back in February. DigitalOcean is a large private company that generated revenue at a run rate of around $250 million towards the end of 2019. The company announced today that it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR. (We recently added the...

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UK’s ANNA raises $21M for its SMB-focused...
Small and medium businesses and sole-traders account for the vast majority of businesses globally, 99.9% of all enterprises in the U.K. alone. And while the existence of millions of separate companies, with their individual demands, speaks of a fragmented market, together they still represent a lot of opportunity. Today, a U.K. fintech startup looking to capitalise on that is announcing a round of growth funding to enter Europe after onboarding 20,000 customers in its home country. ANNA, a mobile-first...

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Anyfin raises $30M Series B to let...
Anyfin, the Stockholm-based startup that enables consumers to refinance their existing loans, has raised $30 million in funding. Leading the Series B round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel, Northzone and Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital (GFC). Anyfin says it will use the investment to “drive product innovation,” launch additional offerings and scale into new European markets (currently, the fintech operates in Sweden and Finland). Launched in 2018 by Mikael Hussain (CEO), Sven Perkmann (CTO) and...

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SparkLabs Global Ventures promotes Jessica Jackley, co-founder...
Jessica Jackley, co-founder of nonprofit microlending platform Kiva, has become a general partner at SparkLabs Global Ventures. Jackley was previously a venture partner at the firm, which focuses on seed-stage investments in the United States, Asia and Europe. Jackley is also the chief impact officer at Aspiration, an online financial services firm that lets customers open bank accounts that give them a “sustainability score” based on the environmental impact of the companies they spend money at, and invest in...

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With the CRV-backed Liftoff List competition and...
Justine and Olivia Moore, the twin investors behind the CRV-backed Liftoff List have long believed in the power of student entrepreneurship. The twin sisters were among the early architects of Stanford University’s student investment program, Cardinal Ventures, and even back then they’d noticed that it was hard for student entrepreneurs to get press and coverage for their companies without raising significant capital in the Bay Area. The Liftoff List, which launched with its inaugural batch earlier this month, is...

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Telegram abandons its TON blockchain platform
Messaging service Telegram said on Tuesday it is abandoning its blockchain platform Telegram Open Network (TON) after a lengthy battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). “Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram. We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project,” wrote Pavel Durov, the founder and chief executive of Telegram, on his channel. A U.S. court made it impossible for the messaging service, used by more than 400 million users, to continue development...

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VCs pulled back from fintech in Q1
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. If you just read the headlines, you’d be excused for thinking that venture capital investment into financial-technology companies is at an all-time high. Big deals this year like Plaid’s $5.3 billion dollar exit to Visa, Galileo’s $1.2 billion sale to SoFi, along with CreditKarma’s $7.1 billion deal with Intuit made for a tidy start to 2020. But despite the...

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Southeast Asian lending platform Validus raises $20...
Small- to medium-sized businesses are one of the most important parts of Southeast Asia’s economy, but many have trouble securing growth capital from traditional financial institutions. Validus wants to fix the financing gap with its peer-to-peer lending platform, which connects accredited lenders with SMEs. The Singapore-based startup announced today that it has raised $20 million for its ongoing Series B+ round. The funding was co-led by Vertex Growth fund and Kuok Group’s Orion Fund, which is managed by K3...

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Daily Crunch: Tesla sues Alameda County
Tesla turns to litigation in an attempt to reopen its California factory, we review Microsoft’s Surface Go 2 and Mount Sinai hospital starts using Nest cameras to monitor patients. Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 11, 2020. 1. Tesla sues Alameda County to force California factory reopening Tesla filed a lawsuit Saturday in an effort to invalidate orders that have prevented the automaker from reopening its factory in Fremont, California. It seems that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk...

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Fintech startups amass war chests for the...
Consumer fintech startups were massively successful in 2019, attracting millions of new users and disrupting traditional retail banks and financial services with mobile-first, consumer-oriented products. Despite the economic downturn in public markets and the massive wave of cuts at public and private companies in recent weeks, fintech startups have been raising a ton of money. It feels like they’re all building a war chest to survive the economic winter as traditional banks continue to iterate so they can catch...

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Hunter Walk: Damn the TAM and other...
Hunter Walk thinks your TAM slide is stupid. That’s one viewpoint that the seed-stage investor shared with TechCrunch that made us laugh during our recent conversation. Walk joined us for an Extra Crunch Live chat late last week that was a mix of advice and insight about what the seed-stage Homebrew partner looks for in founders and companies to invest in. In the case of founders, “attitude matters as much as aptitude sometimes,” Walk said, adding that “grit” and...

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Balderton Capital backs Primer, a fintech helping...
Primer, a U.K. fintech that wants to help merchants consolidate their payments stack and easily support new payment methods in the future, has quietly raised £3.8 million in funding. Leading its £3.2 million seed round is Balderton Capital — which mostly does Series A — with participation from Taavet Hinrikus, who co-founded and previously led TransferWise. And despite being founded as recently as January and not yet launched, Primer had already raised £600,000 in pre-seed investment from Seedcamp, Speedinvest...

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