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Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week we dive into PayPal’s new holiday-friendly shopping feature, Klarna’s 2025 IPO ambitions, and sales tax automation startup Kintsugi doubling its valuation in less than a year.
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The big story
PayPal makes bulk purchases much easier
PayPal is launching new features that allow users to pool money with friends or family to pay collectively for trips, travel, gifts, and more. Importantly, pool contributors do not need to have a PayPal account to pay their fair share.
PayPal already had a bundling feature in place in 2017, but the service shut down globally in November 2021. A PayPal spokesperson told TechCrunch that the feature will return “due to high customer demand” and will launch in the US, Germany, UK, and UK. Italy and Spain before the holidays.
Analysis of the week
Klarna is on track to become a public company after confidentially filing a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
After launching in the US in 2015, the buy now, pay later company achieved a massive valuation of over $45 billion by 2021, a number that quickly dropped to $6.5 billion due to market “corrections” amid a tough environment for tech IPOs. . . But Klarna’s valuation reportedly rose to $14.6 billion after an investor increased its stake.
We still don’t know how many shares will be offered, or the price range for the IPO, but the announcement makes it likely that Klarna will go public sometime in the first half of 2025.
Dollars and cents
Indian travel and hospitality group MakeMyTrip has agreed to acquire expense management platform Happay from fintech company CRED. Financial terms were not disclosed, but CRED acquired Happay in 2021 for $180 million.
Sales tax automation startup Kintsugi raised a $6 million funding round at a $40 million valuation in April. The company reopened the round, raised an additional $4 million in capital and doubled its valuation to $80 million.
Senegalese startup Socium told TechCrunch that it has raised $5 million in seed funding to support growth plans for its HR solutions business in French-speaking Africa.
Minu has closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by QED to help the employee benefits startup scale its sales and customer success across Mexico and implement new HR tools.
Prosus aims to list fintech company PayU in 2025 as the Dutch investor looks to shift more focus to India. The market has been described as a pillar of its investment business after Swiggy’s blue-chip listing posted gains of $2 billion.
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