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? News Highlight: Ryan Breslow, founder of Bolt, said he’s stepping down as chief executive officer, two weeks after securing an $11 billion valuation for the business. Breslow will become executive chairman, and Maju Kuruvilla, a 44-year-old Bolt executive and a former vice president at Amazon.com Inc., will be promoted to CEO. Breslow said in an interview that this was planned weeks ago before the latest financing was completed.
⚡ Just in Groupon shares are getting a huge lift from an apparently substantial appreciation of the company’s stake in the U.K.-based payments company SumUp.
⭐ Also, Subaio chose European open banking leader, Aiia, a Mastercard company, to enable a smarter way for assessing creditworthiness through Subaio’s new white-label offering.
?? Furthermore: MEDICI Global has identified PayPal, Square, Razorpay, Adyen, and Stripe as the largest payment gateways based on their Total Payment Volume.
? M&As:
Block has completed its $29bn acquisition of ‘buy now, pay later firm Afterpay. Under the deal, first announced back in August 2021, Block - which is headed by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and owns the Square and Cash apps - has acquired all of the issued shares in Afterpay.
UniCredit will continue to study potential mergers and acquisitions after deciding against a Russian deal due to geopolitical risks but won’t stray from plans to return billions in capital to shareholders.
? Funding rounds & investments:
Pennylane raised $57 million (€50 million) in Series B funding. The round was led by existing investors Sequoia Capital, Global Founders Capital, and Partech.
Bamboo raised $15 million in a new financing round.
Dozens of tech executives, including the founders of Klarna, Skype, Delivery Hero, and Flutterwave, have launched a $ 200 million venture capital fund aimed at finding the next $ 1 billion or more in Africa
? Opportunities: Matt Cheung, a serial entrepreneur in the financial services sector, recommends recent graduates to broaden their job search. His advice is to not just look for graduate jobs in the big banks when a faster-growing and more exciting alternative is on offer.