Gojek has paid $30 million to take a minority stake in Blue Bird, one of the largest taxi operators in Indonesia, according to Bloomberg, which first reported that the deal was in progress last month.
Gojek's stake in Blue Bird is worth $30 million. The taxi operator's holding company disclosed in a regulatory filing earlier this month that it had sold 108 million shares of Blue Bird at 3,800 rupiahs (about 28 cents) to an undisclosed buyer. The company already offered reservations for Blue Bird taxis on its super-app, and the investment [...]
SumUp, the London-based fintech company that enables small businesses to take card payments via its device and online, is launching its own pre-paid card in partnership with Mastercard.
Dubbed “SumUp Card,” the new offering will enable merchants to gain quicker to access funds collected via SumUp as it will no longer require money to be transferred out to a third-party bank account first.
The idea — and especially useful for cash-flow constrained micro-businesses — is that the new card can be used for all business payments, in addition to letting SumUp merchants access other benefits, [...]
from Steve O'Hear
Atomico, the European venture capital firm founded by Skype's Niklas Zennström, has announced that it has closed its fifth fund — “Atomico V” — giving it another $820 million to invest in European startups.
The London-headquartered VC firm's previous fund closed at $765 million, so this is an increase over three years ago. However, the remit remains largely the same, as Atomico says it plans to double down on its strategy of backing “mission-driven” European founders at Series A, but with the ability to also invest at Series B and C into what it [...]
Voodoo Games is one of the most interesting startups alive today. In mid-2018, it had 150 million MAUs and raised $200 million from Goldman Sachs, yet I've never heard anyone mention the company. That might be normal for an obscure enterprise SaaS play, but Voodoo is consumer-facing through and through.
Quantitative success aside, Voodoo upends much of the conventional thinking about product design and gaming. If it can do it, how can similar strategies apply to other products?
But [...]
It's suspiciously convenient that Facebook already fulfills most of the regulatory requirements it's asking governments to lay on the rest of the tech industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union's regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation and more. But if they follow Facebook's suggestions, they might reinforce the social network's power rather than keep it in check by hamstringing companies with fewer resources.
We already saw this happen with GDPR. The idea was to strengthen privacy and weaken exploitative data collection that tech giants [...]
from David Dickson, Universe Today
