In today’s increasingly connected world, the need for reliable, high-speed internet connectivity is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for both organizations and consumers alike. As more individuals and businesses continue to rely more heavily on digital platforms and technologies, the demand for seamless, secure and robust connectivity has never been so important. For many businesses, connectivity is not just about operational efficiency, it is at heart of business operations, innovation, and security in an age where even minor outages can cause significant disruptions.

This landscape highlights the important role vendors play in ensuring businesses have access to the necessary IT infrastructure and tools needed to succeed. Through focusing on inclusive policies, implementing advanced technologies, and offering tailored solutions, vendors can empower businesses to meet the challenges today’s digital world brings.

Bridging the digital divide for a more inclusive society

Hindustan Unilever has agreed to acquire beauty startup Minimalist for about $342 million, marking its latest push to expand in India’s fast-growing premium skincare market.

The consumer goods giant will initially acquire a 90.5% stake in the four-year-old direct-to-consumer brand through secondary buyouts and primary investment, with the remaining 9.5% to be purchased from founders in two years, according to a stock exchange filing.

The announcement confirms TechCrunch’s report from earlier this month.

The deal gives Unilever’s Indian unit a stronger foothold in the premium beauty segment, adding to its portfolio that includes brands like Dove, Pond’s and Lakmé. Minimalist, known for its actives-led skincare products, reported an annual revenue run rate of over 5 billion rupees and has been profitable since inception.

“This acquisition is another key step to grow our Beauty & Wellbeing portfolio in the high growth masstige beauty segment,” Rohit Jawa, CEO of Hindustan Unilever, said in the statement.

Founded in 2020 by Mohit Yadav and Rahul Yadav, Jaipur-based Minimalist sells a range of products from sunscreen to hair-repair serum. The startup had previously attracted investment from Unilever Ventures in its Series A round in 2021. Peak XV was its first institutional investor, leading the seed funding in the startup through its Surge platform in late 2019. Minimalist is one of the earliest Surge portfolio startups.

The acquisition follows Hindustan Unilever’s expansion into health and well-being through the purchases of Oziva and Wellbeing Nutrition last year. The latest transaction is expected to close in the June quarter, subject to regulatory approvals.

The founders will continue to run the business for two years after the deal closes. Minimalist has built a strong presence in e-commerce, which Hindustan Unilever plans to complement by expanding the brand’s offline distribution using its extensive retail network.

The deal values Minimalist higher than the roughly $300 million valuation it reportedly sought when attempting to raise venture capital in the second half of last year, according to previous media reports.

Indonesia’s antitrust agency KPPU fined Google 202.5 billion Rupiahs, equivalent to $12.6 million, on Wednesday for antitrust violation related to its payment system services for the Google Play Store.

The KPPU ordered the search giant to cease the mandatory use of Google Play Billing in the Google Play Store. It also asked Google to let all developers participate in the User Choice Billing (UCB) program and give them a minimum 5% service fee discount for a year after the decision is finalized, according to its statement.

The antitrust watchdog launched an investigation into Google in 2022 for its market dominance — in particular, the company required Indonesian app developers to use Google Play Billing (GPB). The agency found that the Google Pay Billing System had charged fees up to 30%, higher than other payment systems.

The Google Play Store handles payments between developers and users through the GPB System for in-app purchases. Google requires all purchases of digital products and services in the Google Play Store to go through the Google Play Billing system. At the same time, it prohibits other payment alternatives to Google Play Billing. The agency said that limiting the payment options led to fewer app users, reduced transactions and lower revenue.

The agency noted that the Google Play Store is the only app store pre-installed on all Android devices, with a market share over 50%. As for the search engine market, Google held a market share of 95.16% in the Indonesian search market, and other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex held the rest as of January 2024, according to Statista.

Google plans to appeal the ruling.

“We strongly disagree with the KPPU’s decision and will appeal. Our current practices foster a healthy, competitive Indonesian app ecosystem, offering a secure platform, global reach, and choice, including user choice billing — which enables alternatives to Google Play’s billing system,” a Google spokesperson, Danielle Cohen, said in an email statement.

“Beyond our platform, we actively support Indonesian developers through a comprehensive suite of initiatives, including Indie Games Accelerator, Play Academy, and Play x Unity, reflecting our deep investment in their success. We remain committed to complying with Indonesian law and will continue collaborating with the KPPU and stakeholders throughout the appeals process,” she added.

The tech industry has been closely watching a series of legal disputes involving Google being fined for breaching anti-competitive practices due to its misuse of dominant market power in various countries, including Indonesia, India, South Korea, France, the EU and the U.S. Japan’s antitrust regulator is likely to determine that Google has breached Japan’s antitrust laws and will order the tech behemoth to cease its monopolistic behaviors, according to Nikkei Asia.

• A new Xbox Wireless Controller has been official revealed
• The new Pulse Cipher colorway is a dazzling red
• It comes after the Ghost Cipher and Sky Cipher controllers

Microsoft has officially revealed its latest special edition Xbox Wireless Controller – the Pulse Cipher – which was only recently leaked by French outlet Dealabs.

An Xbox Wire post has all the details on this new gamepad, with keeps the general look of the Cipher line-up we’ve seen so far. A translucent frame, solid underside with textured grips and triggers that stand out brightly with an almost metallic sheen – it’s all there, just in a pretty dazzling red this time.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! 

This week, we’re looking at just how much fintech startups raised in 2024, a slew of fundraising deals, Plaid’s reported revenue growth last year, and more!

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here.

The big story

Global funding to fintech startups continues to decline. According to CB Insights’ State of Fintech 2024 Report, fintech startups globally raised a combined $33.7 billion in funding last year — down 20% from the year before. Deal volume also dropped — by 17% to 3,580. But there are at least a couple of bright spots: The annual decline in funding was fintech’s smallest in three years. Plus, funding rebounded to close the year strong, reaching $8.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 — up 11% compared to the 2024 third quarter. CB Insights also reported a 33% annual increase in median fintech deal size  — to $4 million.

Dollars and cents

LemFi, a London-based financial services platform designed for immigrants, raised $53 million in new funding, which it will use to fuel efforts to acquire more customers and further expand into more countries.

Recharge, a key European player in online prepaid payments, has secured a €45 million debt facility with ABN AMRO to look at rolling up the market with a round of M&A, as well as moving into fintech-style services.

French startup Hyperline wants to build the next-generation Chargebee. It raised an initial €4 million funding round from Index Ventures back in 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). And Index Ventures is doubling down on this investment as it is investing another $10 million in the startup.

Bench, the accounting startup that imploded over the holidays, filed for bankruptcy in Canada on January 7 revealing massive debts, documents seen by TechCrunch show. The filings — one for Bench and another for 10Sheet, Bench’s original name — show that Bench had $2.8 million in cash on hand by the end of its life but $65.4 million in liabilities. Charles Rollet does a deep dive here.

More fintech IPOs?! Trading platform eToro has reportedly filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO that could value the company at over $5 billion. Israel-based eToro, which competes with the likes of Robinhood, told TechCrunch it is “not commenting on IPO rumors.”

Amazon has agreed to acquire Indian buy now, pay later startup Axio, deepening its push into financial services in one of its fastest-growing markets.

Ex-SoftBank veteran Akshay Naheta’s Switzerland-based startup, Distributed Technologies Research (DTR), is attempting to bridge the gap between traditional banking and blockchain technology, joining an army of companies trying to modernize the global payments infrastructure.

Barclays’ Rise is shutting down in 2025.

People moves

Synctera has hired its first CFO, Matias Pino. 

Mark Fiorentino announced he’s left Index Ventures to join Bain Capital as “the newest partner charged with helping to guide the next generation of growth-stage AI-native, vertical SaaS and fintech startups.”

High-interest headlines

Last year was a good year for Plaid. Bloomberg reports that revenue at Plaid Inc., which provides infrastructure to connect fintechs and banks, spiked by over 25% last year.

Cryptocurrency-wallet provider Phantom Technologies raised $150 million in a funding round at a $3 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital and Paradigm co-led the round. 

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you again next week!

• Netflix now costs a bit more.
• The streaming service has announced price increases for all three of its plans.
• Its cheapest plan now starts at $7.99 a month and tops out at $24.99 in the US.

We must be experiencing deja vu as Netflix just raised its prices again, though it might just be that we recently streamed Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour documentary on the streaming service, too. As announced in Netflix’s latest letter to shareholders, price increases are coming for the streaming services’ three main plans.

The streaming service writes: “As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix.” It’s become a trend with Netflix, and other streaming services included, to raise prices, and the latest hikes aren’t shocking but can be substantial over time.

In the United States, the ‘standard plan with advertisements’ is up $1 from $6.99 to $7.99 a month, ‘standard without advertisements’ jumps to $17.99 from $15.49, and ‘premium’ is now $24.99 a month from $22.99. These price hikes go into effect immediately, with similar increases in Canada, Portugal, and Argentina as well.

Netflix writes that the price hikes are so that it can continue to invest further in programming and deliver more value for its subscribers. The latter is a number that continues to grow, with Netflix adding 18.9 million new subscribers in quarter four of 2024, for a total of 302 million paid subscribers globally.

Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the crowded world of expenditure management by focusing on applying AI to optimize an area where businesses are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars annually: software and cloud spend.

The London-based startup’s business has grown 13x in the three years since its inception (similar how fast software spend has increased), and it has now raised $50 million in new funding to expand its vision.

“[Vertice] is designed to standardize companies’ processes around how they buy anything, not just software and cloud,” its CEO and co-founder Roy Tuvey (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. “A lot of companies today have disparate solutions, different silos that they look at, and procurement teams are generally under a lot of pressure to deliver savings and efficiencies. They don’t have amazing technology today. So we’ve brought it all together in a unified and simplified platform.”

Lakestar, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series C round. Perpetual Growth and CF Private Equity, as well as previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and 83North (which co-led Vertice’s Series B almost exactly a year ago) are also participating. 

The startup has now raised around $100 million in total, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, Tuvey confirmed that this Series C was an up-round, valuing the company higher than the “several hundred millions” it was pegged at 12 months ago.

The size of Vertice’s customers has grown, too: Its clientele now number in the hundreds across Europe, the U.S. and Asia Pacific, including the likes of chip giant ASML, Euronext, Grant Thornton, and banking behemoth Santander.

For some more context, Vertice’s founders have a strong history of entrepreneurship: Roy and his brother Eldar previously founded two security startups, ScanSafe, which they sold to Cisco in 2009 for $200 million; and Wandera, which was acquired by Jamf for $400 million in 2021.

Gartner predicts that spending on data centers in 2025 (thanks to cloud and AI), software, related IT and communication services will increase by more than 9% to just under $5 trillion, so it isn’t surprising to see Vertice working in a crowded part of the enterprise market. 

Its competitors include a plethora of platforms that offer varying levels of services like product recommendations, pricing, side-by-side feature comparisons, and more. These include Spendbase, Spendesk, Gartner and G2. 

Vertice’s point of differentiation, Tuvey said, is how it integrates with a business’s data to better understand what to suggest. Tapping into the same approaches that a cybersecurity firm might use to better understand activity in a network, Tuvey said Vertice uses AI and other tools to build a picture of what a company does, how much it spends typically, and what it might need or want to buy next.

In effect, the startup has built, along the lines of a large language model, a “large software procurement model,” where the parameters are not facts and insights, but software usage. The company claims it has ingested data on some $3.4 billion worth of SaaS and cloud expenditure, as well as benchmarking data on more than 16,000 software vendors (none of these have any financial relationship with Vertice, Tuvey confirmed).

Customers essentially use Vertice to speed up the process of buying and also to save money. The startup says that purchasing cycles can typically be cut in half, yielding savings between 20% and 30%. 

“We ingest all the contract information through AI,” Tuvey said, adding that it uses the tech to build co-pilots to help with purchasing, automating work that finance teams might have to do manually before. “We surface benchmark pricing insights and analytics that they need at the point of purchase. AI is really interesting when it comes to procurement orchestration, because you can learn where the company has bottlenecks in their processes.” 

That, in turn, helps Vertice understand how the wider business is working, he added. 

“For example, if a company is always spending a long time with certain steps, for example to check pricing but also security compliance, we can see how to run them in parallel and save time,” he said. “And you can just imagine — the more and more apps you have, the AI can learn and make recommendations.”

It’s the Tuveys’ background, how they are applying it to procurement, and the resulting growth that has had investors knocking on the door, said Georgia Watson, the Lakestar partner leading this round. At the moment, expenditure is top of mind for companies looking to bring down operational costs — especially at startups given the constrictions they are facing around funding at the moment. 

“Some of our portfolio companies are using Vertice,” Watson said, citing the pressure to bring down software expenditure. “That’s been a conversation we’ve been having… and feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” she noted, adding that Lakestar had been trying to invest previously, and finally pulled it off this time around. 

Indian fintech Jar has turned cash flow positive, an executive at the Tiger Global-backed startup confirmed on Wednesday, as it gears up to deepen its offerings.

The three-year-old startup, which offers its users the ability to start their savings and investment journey, achieved the milestone while still growing by more than 10 times last year, according to an investor note TechCrunch has reviewed.

The profitability push comes as many fast-growing Indian startups are improving their financials and paring down expenses to become IPO-ready.

Jar has expanded its offerings in the past year and a half, adding lending and online jewelry sales to its business. Its jewelry business, called Nek, is doing an annualized sales of about $13 million annually, according to the investor note.

The new offerings come at a time when the Bengaluru-headquartered startup is in talks to raise as much as $50 million in a new round of funding, according to Indian newspaper Economic Times. Jar declined to comment on the fundraising talks.

Meta is luring TikTok creators over to its platforms with the promise of cash bonuses, content deals, and support to grow their communities. The company announced on Tuesday that eligible TikTok creators will be able to earn “up to” $5,000 in bonuses over three months for posting Reels on Facebook and Instagram.

These creators will also get access to the Facebook Content Monetization program, which allows creators to earn money for their videos, photos, and text posts on Facebook. Additionally, Meta will offer some TikTok creators content deals to help grow their audiences on Instagram and Facebook.

Some TikTok creators will also get a one-year trial of Meta Verified, which includes a verified badge, account support, and impersonation protection. (The company did not share the criteria for whose will receive access).

While TikTok is back online in the U.S. after going dark for 12 hours over the weekend, the ByteDance-owned social network is still missing from app stores. Although President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to delay the TikTok ban deadline by 75 days and told the Department of Justice not to enforce the ban’s penalties, it’s unknown when (or if) the app will return to Apple and Google’s app stores.

Meta is clearly taking advantage of TikTok’s current troubles by poaching and attracting some of the service’s creators.

The company also said it’s rolling out changes to Reels to make the short-form video format more appealing to TikTok creators. For instance, U.S.-based Instagram creators can now publish Reels up to three minutes long, a notable increase from the previous 90-second limit. On TikTok, however, creators can record videos up to 10 minutes long, and in some cases, upload content up to an hour in length.

In addition, Meta is going to make Reels more prominent, as the company plans to recommend Reels in more places across Instagram in Facebook. For instance, people may start to see recommended Reels higher up in their home feed. Plus, they may see more reels in their search results.

To further court TikTok creators, Meta notes that it has optimized its ranking systems to allow newer creators to break through to new audiences.

Meta will also allow creators to show their Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube handles and follower counts in their Facebook profiles to boost their credibility on its platform.

Meta already made other changes to take advantage of TikTok’s current uncertainty in the U.S.

On Sunday, Meta revealed that it’s going to launch a CapCut-like app called Edits next month. On Friday, it introduced updates to make it easier for Instagram users to find Reels that their friends and followers are liking on the platform. The app will also encourage users to start conversations about Reels through a new “reply bar.”

• A new rumor suggests the RTX 5090 will use 600W of power
• Comments in a Chinese forum point toward the new GPU being much louder
• PSU requirements are 1000W according to Corsair

Nvidia‘s RTX 5090 promises to provide a step up from the previous generation’s RTX 4090, but that could come at a significant cost according to new rumors – and you might want to invest in a beefy power supply.

As reported by Tomasz Gawronski on X, discussions within Chiphell (a Chinese forum page about the latest PC hardware) suggest that Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPU will use 600W of power while being much louder compared to the 4090. This is based on what appears to be an upcoming review with the embargo set for January 24, with a post translated from Chinese that says “The editor cursed while testing… After all, the power consumption increased, the current increased, and the screaming also increased~”.