Bitcoin miners planning their Spring Breaks 🎉🏖
Weekly press review in Tech & Web3 - 4th April 2022 - Issue #42
I’m Sebastien co-founder and CEO of Early Metrics. TechWatchbySeb is a weekly newsletter to provide Tech Investors, Entrepreneurs & Innovators with my selection of news on the Tech and Web3 ecosystems.
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Summary for this week
Before starting ☕️
Section 1 - Tech main news:
$650M as a foundation to build a modern finance
Intel signs a major AI acquisition
China's homerun in the luxury league
Section 2 - Web3 main news:
1- Miners planning their Spring Breaks
2 - LayerZero gets $135M from top investors to connect blockchains
3 - Visa launches NFT services
Total of articles reviewed this week: 21
Before starting ☕️,
After discussing with some friends and with the great feedback received from you my team, I have set a target: 1000.
1000 readers by the end of 2023.
It doesn’t mean a lot, but now that I have reached 100, I really want to give some ambition to this project and visibility.
So if you think of someone who could benefit from this weekly shot of news in the Tech and Web3 ecosystem, you are more than welcome.
So thank you and enjoy the reading 😁
🥇$650M as a foundation to build a modern finance
Cross River 🇺🇸 Announces $620 Million Capital Raise Led by Eldridge and Andreessen Horowitz to Accelerate Next Stage of Growth.
The company founded in 2008 combines innovative technologies with the expertise of a bank to create new services and solutions for fintech companies that are redefining global financial services. In addition to traditional banking, the company has developed partnerships with financial technology leaders to build compliant and integrated products for the marketplace lending and payment processing arenas.
This new capital will accelerate Cross River’s ongoing technology-focused growth strategy, which includes four core initiatives:
building out the Company’s leading embedded payments, cards, lending and crypto solutions;
further investing in its people and communities;
continuing to execute against plans for international expansion;
bolstering strategic partnerships that underscore Cross River’s commitment to reshaping global finance and promoting financial inclusion
To date, the company has raised a total of $900M.
Source: businesswire
🥈Intel's major AI acquisition
Intel 🇺🇸 buys Israeli workload optimisation startup Granulate 🇮🇱 for $650 m.
Granulate is an AI-powered optimization software creating a streamlined environment for any application. The company was founded in 2008 and raised to date of the merger $48M.
The acquisition will help cloud and data centre customers maximise compute workload performance and reduce infrastructure and cloud costs.
Source: Business-standard
🥉China's homerun in the luxury league
Shein 🇨🇳 to raise funding at $100b valuations in the pre-IPO round.
Shein is an online marketplace that engaged in women's apparel. Shein describes itself as an “international B2C fast fashion e-commerce platform” with businesses in more than 220 countries and regions around the world. It was founded in 2008 and headquartered in Jiangsu, China.
The company has raised a total of $550M and is backed by famous investors such as Sequoia and Tiger Capital.
Source: TechinChina
🥇Miners planning their Spring Breaks
Two important bitcoin minors companies: Prime Block and Riot Blockchain, have announced important capital operations:
Prime Block plans to go public with $1.25B SPAC Merger for an estimated enterprise value of $1.25 billion. PrimeBlock generated $24.4 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2021 and has over 110 megawatts of installed data centre capacity across its 12 facilities in North America.
Riot Blockchain filed a prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the sale of up to $500 million in shares from time to time, otherwise known as an “at-the-market” (ATM) offering.
Sources:
Primeblock: Cointelegraph
Riot Blockchain: Coindesk
🥈 LayerZero gets $135M from top investors to connect blockchains
LayerZero Labs 🇨🇦 Generates $135M in Funding, Pushing Company’s Valuation to $1B
After LayerZero’s beta launch, LayerZero Labs launched a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol Stargate. The protocol solves the Bridging Trilemma holy grail problem. The mission is clear said CEO Bryan Pellegrino:
The round is a massive step forward for LayerZero Lab and the unfolding interoperability landscape. We’ve brought some of the best and most well respected entities in the world together to accomplish the same goal: create the generic messaging layer that underpins all interoperability between blockchains.
The company is backed by the famous investor’s Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Capital.
Source: coinspeaker
🥉Visa launches NFT services
Credit card giant Visa has launched an NFT creator program in an effort to bring small businesses into the digital economy.
“We’ve seen rapid growth in the NFT ecosystem over the past year,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, told TechCrunch. “We think NFTs represent a new form of e-commerce.”
The idea of a small business is evolving from the traditional “brick-and-mortar mom-and-pop shops” to include other independent businesses with creators and entrepreneurs who want to build digital-focused companies and harness new tools like NFTs, Sheffield said.
Aside from collecting NFTs, Visa has built out its crypto team, and in December 2021 launched a crypto advisory practice to help clients and partners consider a deep dive into the space.
Source: Techcrunch
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