🦄 Fintech's Newest Unicorn
What’s happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍 Artificial Intelligence solves laggy video, Disney makes a bold move, and investors turn to FaithTech.
And..if you haven’t already, sign up below ⬇️
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 142 seconds.
🚫 Facebook Bans Sexy Onions FB uses a host of different technologies to ensure images and ads uploaded to their platform aren’t sexually explicit. However, they don’t always get it right. A Canadian garden supply store had an advert containing a picture of some onions taken down by FB. Why? It had identified the onions as being…something else…check out the photo here.
🤖 Google’s Robot Farmers! Google has revealed a prototype for several groovy looking robots that will patrol and investigate fields to analyse crops. Check them out here.
🎥 Fed Up With Pixilated Video Calls? Nvidia are using AI to re-animate faces, slash bandwidth and even make it look like you’re facing the camera when you’re not. Check out this cool demo here. The improvement is huge.
🏦 How Are US Banks Investing In Fintech? Get the answers by checking out the graphs on this CB Insights report here
💸Another Stripe Acquisition. Stripe has acquired Paystack, a Nigerian fintech that enables merchants to take payments using a simple API, for $200m. Paystack is based out of Lagos, and current has 60k customers. Techcrunch also previously referred to Paystack as ‘The Stripe of Africa’ back in 2018. Read the full story here.
🏰 New Focus For Disney! Disney has announced a company reorg to focus its media and entertainment businesses onto streaming. What does this mean in practice? Watch out Netflix, Disney is coming for you! Read more about the re-org here.
🦄 Wealthsimple Reaches Unicorn Status 🦄 The Canadian based robo-advisory fintech has reached unicorn status with its newest round of investment. Wealthsimple has 1.5m users, manages $8.4bn in investments and has a beautiful website, which can be found here (we love the 3D graphics).
📷 The Next Apple App Store? Zoom has announced ‘Zapps’ - third party applications that allow their 300 million daily participants to access information and collaborate with other services while on video calls. They plan to launch it later this year with 35 partners such as Slack, Dropbox & Salesforce. Could this be the next platform for startups to flourish?
💰 The 20-minute Term Sheet Clearbanc, an innovative alternative to venture capital, has launched in the UK promising to invest more than £500m into startups over the next year. They use AI to connect to startups’ payment, ad and e-commerce platforms to analyze the businesses’ health before approving a loan that takes the form of a revenue-share agreement - all within 24 hours. Game-changer.
🛐 FaithTech Venture investors have traditionally kept away from making investments into religion, but that’s changing. The top Christian meditation apps have had 2.3m downloads between March and August, up 325% year-on-year. The drivers are two fold: more people are looking to seek solace in faith-based communities at the same time that places of worship are forced to close.
🗂️ The Ultimate VC Guide Looking to get into venture capital and not sure where to start? Pietro Invernizzi, an investor at Stride VC, has published the guide of all guides covering the skills you need, how to develop your theses, how to get a job and more. Check it out here.
A Positive Spin
We don’t need to tell you about what’s going on in the world this week; but we do want to highlight companies, startups and technology that’s being used to positive effect people and movements across the globe today.
📚BLCK VC has announced a program with the likes of UC Berkeley, Salesforce & the Black Venture Institute, to help black operators become investors. Its goal is to teach 300 students over the next 3 years.
🏫 London Business School and VC-firm, LocalGlobe, have launched the ‘Newton Venture Program’ to help under-represented groups enter and, rise up within, the venture industry.
🌳💳 This Weeks Grapevine is brought to you by…
🌲 TreeCard, a new fintech backed by Ecosia, has launched a free wooden debit card that plants trees when you spend money, and donates 80% of profits to reforestation. Yesterday we caught up with their founder, Jamie Cox, who said they’ve had over 10,000 people signup for card in the first two hours. Keen to join the waiting list? click here. Keen to understand more about how TreeCard works? Click here.
The team over at TreeCard are also sponsoring this week’s Grapevine – so please give their product and mission the love it deserves.
Sign up to their waiting list here 🌳
Sharing The Grapevine 🔥
Please click the on the big green button below to share the Grapevine with co-workers, friends, family, or enemies.
If you share it on LinkedIn, be sure to tag us so we can say thanks!
Want to have a chat? Shoot us an email at founders@onthegrapevine.co.
Don’t follow us on LinkedIn?
Over & Out,
Nick & Louis