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The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation.  Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox . Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. As always, you can email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec Before we jump in, I wanted to bring your attention to a plea by TechCrunch editor Devin Coldewey to “ Please make a dumb car .” That might sound silly coming from a media outlet focused on technology — and the people investing and building it. But technology for technology’s sake can lead us down some tricky paths. Just look at some of tech-laden vehicles on roads today. This doesn’t just lead to a poor user experience, a point that Coldewey makes. This feature bloat has also helped fuel the chi

As is commonly the case, datasets used inside companies almost always come from diverse sources and in different, unstructured formats. Connecting them up can lead to a be a very large headache. But if it can be done, there are all sorts of benefits, especially in finance, such as fraud detection, KYC/AML checks etc. This is a problem particularly faced by financial firms, but it could also be useful in the areas of Covid contact tracing or general business intelligence. The main platforms used at this point include Neo4j, Senzing, or Neptune from AWS. Alternatively, companies try to build their own solutions using Elasticsearch. But it remains a big problem to solve. Now a new Berlin startup, which has tested its theories after being spun out from a larger corporate, is poised to tackle this thorny problem. Tilo’s data infrastructure tool TiloRes says it helps companies match data points from different sources and formats, by being both serverless and doing it in near real-time a

To buy a share in Amazon, you’d have to fork out almost $3,000. It’s a luxury very few can afford and despite the prospects of the trillion-dollar company or returns from its share price, it’ll take some contemplating to pay that full price for those who can afford to. But with fractional investing, pioneered by Robinhood, access to these securities are democratized and people can own smaller shares in big companies. There are many Robinhood-esque platforms globally because of a growing need to invest in U.S. stocks in different parts of the world. Bamboo , launched in January 2020, is one of such in Nigeria. Following two years of significant growth and raising $2.4 million to facilitate it, the investment firm is announcing that it has raised $15 million in a new financing round. U.S.-based Greycroft and Tiger Global co-led the Series A round (it’s the second Tiger Global-led investment announced this month after Ghanaian fintech Float). Motley Fool Ventures, Saison Capital, Ch

The Egyptian social e-commerce market will be worth over $14.8 billion by 2024. The opportunity in the market can be attributed to the growth in online social sellers in the country, over 1.25 million them, helping little-known brands sell and distribute their goods via different networks. Brimore –a market leader in the country and, to an extent, Africa–off the back of witnessing impressive growth in the last three years, has raised $25 million in a Series A round. The company was founded by Mohamed Abdulaziz and Ahmed Sheikha in 2017. While working in the FMCG business, both founders witnessed how difficult it was for emerging brands to get their products to the mass market due to the dominance of established brands, who, for the most part, had built distribution infrastructure for themselves over the years. On the other end, thousands of individuals, particularly women and stay-at-home moms, wanted to start their e-commerce shops but had no clue how to go about it, nor did

French startup Pennylane has raised a $57 million Series B round (€50 million) from existing investors, such as Sequoia Capital, Global Founders Capital and Partech. The startup wants to replace legacy accounting solutions in France — and in Europe. If you’re an accountant, you might be familiar with tools like Cegid and Sage. Essentially, Pennylane wants to overhaul these tools and modernize the tech stack of accounting firms. Pennylane connects directly with third-party services that hold valuable information. For instance, you can get banking statements in the Pennylane interface, import receipts from Dropbox and get billing information from Stripe. And because it’s an online platform, accounting firms can use Pennylane collaboratively. Clients can also access the platform to centralize receipts, create invoices and automate some tasks. Instead of sending information back and forth with spreadsheets and photo attachments, both clients and accounting firms can interact directly

Niklas Adalberth’s Norrsken Foundation is in the news again barely two months after opening its Norrsken House in Kigali , Rwanda, which plans to accommodate thousands of entrepreneurs by next year. This time, the foundation has teamed up with thirty unicorn founders and a couple of seasoned venture capital and private equity investors to launch a $200 million fund targeted at African startups. The fund, dubbed the Norrsken22 African Tech Growth Fund , has reached its first close of $110 million, per a statement seen by TechCrunch. It’s the latest fund launched by Norrsken after closing €125 million impact fund for European startups last March. Hans Otterling , a partner at Northzone, a U.K.-based early VC firm that led the investment in Adalberth’s previous company Klarna, is Norrsken’s founding partner alongside the Klarna co-founder. Making up the firm’s investment are the general partners Natalie Kolbe , the ex-global head of private equity at Actis, a private equity fund in

Welcome to my new weekly fintech-focused column. It’s an incredible time to be a financial technology journalist. Besides the fact that over 20% of all venture dollars last year went into fintech startups , I am particularly excited about the many ways that this technology is helping boost inclusion all over the world. While this pandemic has sucked on 100 different levels, one good thing to have come out of it is that consumers and businesses have forced more fintech to exist, and that’s a good thing.  I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm , Natasha Mascarenhas and I riff on all things startups! There has been plenty of drama at online mortgage lender Better.com over the last couple of months and it appears that just because its infamous CEO Vishal Garg is back at the helm , there is still no shortage of controversy surrounding the company. Earlier this week, Axios’ Dan Primack revealed that inv

Spotify’s Joe Rogan headache is about to get a lot worse. Earlier this week, musician Neil Young announced that he would pull his music from the streaming service to protest Spotify’s relationship with Joe Rogan , who the company brought under its wing in an exclusive $100 million deal two years ago . In a post to her website on Friday, Joni Mitchell announced that she would “stand with Neil Young” and remove her catalogue from the streaming platform. “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.” As one of the world’s most famous and most well-respected living musicians, Mitchell’s decision to abandon Spotify over Rogan is bound to turn some heads. And unlike Young, she didn’t have an existing beef with the service over its stream quality. Rogan’s podcast, the Joe Rogan Experie

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. The market is down. The party is over. And Peloton of X startups aren’t too happy right now. As tech stocks take a hit, the big question on my mind is how a dip in market performance impacts early-stage startups. There’s the obvious argument here that startups have been preparing for a re-correction, and that market highs were knowingly unsustainable, but just because expectations exist doesn’t mean that ripple effects float away. Despite investor’s outward rationalization, the red, or millennial pink , flags are not going unnoticed, with some firms lowering revenue expectations even at the earliest stages . On Equity this week, Alex and I interviewed Bessemer growth partner Mary D’Onofrio , who admitted that her expectations for exit multiples have changed, and that the IPO window is mostly closed. The stocks may be sane, but that’s still kind