Fintech

Bench customers are now being forced to hand over their data or risk losing it, they say

Fintech /

After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on December 27 and was bought in a fire-sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning they can’t easily just take their financial data and leave.  And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. To recap: When Bench, a startup based in Canada that raised […]

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Inside the wild fall and last-minute revival of Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that imploded over the holidays

Startups /

Friday, December 27, was supposed to be the start of a relaxing holiday weekend. But it was chaos for thousands of small business owners who use Bench, an accounting and tax startup based in Canada that raised $113 million from investors like Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify. That morning, they found themselves unable to log

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Robinhood, already a ‘comeback’ stock, has even more aggressive plans for 2025

Fintech /

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has a lot to celebrate this holiday season. After a bumpy few years following Robinhood’s 2021 IPO — a period during which shares of the commission-free trading app plummeted by more than 90% after it abruptly restricted trading in some meme stocks —  the 12-year-old company was just declared Yahoo Finance’s

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Bench shuts down, leaving thousands of businesses without access to accounting and tax docs

Venture /

Bench, a Canada-based accounting startup that offered software-as-a-service for small and medium businesses, has abruptly shut down, according to a notice posted on its website.   “We regret to inform you that as of December 27, 2024, the Bench platform will no longer be accessible,” the notice reads. “We know this news is abrupt and may

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Revenue-based financing startups continue to raise capital in MENA, where the model just works

Startups /

In an era where it’s become tougher to raise venture capital, many companies have turned to non-dilutive, Revenue-Based Financing (RBF) as an alternative. As a result, plenty of startups have risen to meet that challenge, none more so than in the MENA region, which has taken to the model like a duck to water. The

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While some account-to-account payments players falter, Volume raises fresh cash

Fundraising /

Online merchants can usually pay up to 8% of every sale on an item to companies like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Stripe — and those costs are usually passed to consumers. So-called ‘account-to-account’ or ‘A2A’ payments can cut transaction fees to below 1%, saving merchants and consumers quite a bit of cash. The difficulty has been

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KPay, a financial management platform for SMEs, raises $55M Series A

Fundraising /

Sometimes, the easiest way to find a great idea for a startup is to look beyond the current problem you’re solving for your customers. That’s exactly what worked for the founders of KPay. Davis Chan and his co-founders previously helped small and medium-sized merchants optimize their revenue and traffic in Asia, but they eventually noticed

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Latin America fintech will be a market to watch in 2025

Fundraising /

Heading into 2024, Mike Packer, a partner at fintech-focused QED Investors, predicted we’d hit the bottom for funding to Latin American fintech startups during the year. While momentum wasn’t a straight shot up and to the right, Packer’s prediction may still have come true. The volume of venture capital dollars invested into fintech companies based

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Trump’s tariff threats don’t scare this Mexican fintech

Fintech /

Mexico’s economic development — turbocharged by the amount of nearshoring in recent years — has made it fertile ground for startups. But the trend is under threat if President-elect Donald Trump follows through with his idea of taking a harder line on trade with Mexico.  Jaime Tabachnik, co-founder and CEO of Mexican trucking finance startup

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