FinTech
Links from The Ride Home Podcast
All links categorized under this topic, grouped by year and month.
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2026
July
- Sources: Stripe and Advent’s unsolicited $53B PayPal offer, backed by ~$50B in committed bank financing, would create a payments giant processing ~$3.7T annually; PayPal has not responded (Reuters)
- Sources: Apple plans to launch Apple Upgrade, a leasing program for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, in partnership with Klarna in the US next week (Bloomberg)
- Sources: Stripe and PE firm Advent have jointly offered $60.50/share to acquire PayPal, a 28% premium to Tuesday’s close, valuing it at $53B+; PYPL jumps 15%+ (Reuters)
- Kalshi launches a forward curve tool for AI compute, using event contracts to track the future rental costs of GPUs, storage, and memory (Bloomberg)
June
- Sources: Kalshi is in talks to raise funding at a ~$40B valuation in a round that may close as soon as Q3; Kalshi raised $1B at a $22B valuation in May 2026 (FT)
- Meta invests $900M into Indian fintech Cred for a ~20% stake, and plans to appoint Cred founder Kunal Shah as the leader of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart (Bloomberg)
- Businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge business risks; Kalshi says institutional trading volume on its platform has grown 800% since November 2025 (The New York Times)
- Corporate spending management platform Ramp raised $750M at a $44B valuation led by Iconiq, Singapore’s GIC, and the OTPP, taking its total funding to $3B (Bloomberg)
May
- Robinhood launches a feature to let users link AI agents, such as Claude or Cursor, to separate, dedicated investment accounts for trading stocks autonomously (WSJ)
- OpenAI debuts personal finance tools for US ChatGPT Pro users, partnering with Plaid to give access to 12K+ financial institutions to analyze spending and more (TechCrunch)
- Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announces the company is cutting ~700 jobs, or ~14% of its global workforce, to reduce costs, saying “AI is changing how we work” (Reuters)
April
March
February
- Payments Processor Stripe Expresses Interest in PayPal (Bloomberg)
- Airbnb expands its “Reserve Now, Pay Later” globally (TechCrunch)
- The hidden infrastructure crisis in mortgage and real estate finance that only tokenization can solve (Crypto.news)
January
- Capital One Strikes $5.15 Billion Deal for Fintech Brex (WSJ)
- Andreessen Horowitz raises $15 billion for new funds (Axios)
- A16z’s $15 Billion Fund Vacuumed Up A Fifth Of Venture Dollars Raised Last Year (Forbes)
2025
September
March
- Klarna, nearing IPO, plucks lucrative Walmart fintech partnership from rival Affirm (CNBC)
- Banks and fintechs join ‘stablecoin gold rush’ (FT)
- Peter Thiel-backed fintech Ramp nearly doubles valuation to $13bn (FT)
2024
November
July
2023
June
2022
June
May
- SoftBank-Backed Fintech Giant Klarna Looks for New Funds at Lower Valuation (WSJ)
- Stripe flexes its fintech muscle with Financial Connections to pull banking data automatically (TechCrunch)
April
- Fast, the Troubled Fintech Startup, Is Shutting Down (The Information)
March
2021
July
January
- Fintech startup Oxygen raises $17M in Series A round (SiliconAngle)
- Walmart to create fintech start-up with investment firm behind Robinhood (CNBC)
2020
February
- Fintech startups raised $34B in 2019 (TechCrunch)
January
- Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company (Angela Strange)
- Islamic fintechs are on the rise — but how viable is this tailored offering? (Sifted)
- Visa to acquire Plaid, the fintech powering Venmo and other banking apps, in $5.3 billion deal (CNBC)
2019
September
2018
December
- Fintech start-up Plaid raises $250 million at $2.7 billion valuation, adds Mary Meeker to board (CNBC)