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Amazon and Apple have been hit with almost $230 million (€203M) in total fines by Italy’s antitrust authority — following an investigation into reselling of Apple and ( Apple-owned ) Beats kit on Amazon’s Italian ecommerce marketplace. The authority says the alleged collusion decreased the level of discounts available to consumers buying Apple and Beats products on the Amazon Italy marketplace. It has also ordered the tech giants to end the restrictions on resellers. The AGCM announced the sanction today, saying its probe identified a restrictive agreement between the pair to block some “legitimate” resellers of Beats products on Amazon.it. The fine breaks down into €134.5M (~$151M) for Amazon — and €68.7M (~$77.3M) for Apple. The agreement in question was signed between the pair back in October 2018. Per the AGCM’s press release, it found the agreement contained a number of contractual clauses which prohibited official and unofficial resellers of Apple and Beats products from ...

Mobiz , a South African startup integrating hyper-personalization into mobile marketing, has raised a pre-Series A round of $ 4 million from HAVAÍC, Futuregrowth, Launch Africa, Allan Gray E-Squared Ventures, CapaciTech and Endeavor’s  Harvest Fund. The investment comes as the startup is ramping up efforts to expand into the U.S. and double down on marketing, sales and account management . Part of the investment will be used to hire more staff in South Africa and support the commercial expansion to the U.S . Mobiz works as a code-free tool that helps marketers, enterprises and SMBs create and send SMS campaigns to their customers without any marketing experience. CEO Greg Chen founded the company in 2014 came from his 15-year span in the mobile industry, noticing how enterprises in South Africa struggled to target and engage their customers via SMS efficiently . “In South Africa and Africa general, there are a lot of companies using SMS marketing, but it’s not giving any va...

An Indian startup that is improving the way how millions of people in the nation lease or buy an apartment is the latest firm to become a unicorn in the South Asian market. Bangalore-based NoBroker has raised $210 million in its Series E financing round, its founders told TechCrunch in an interview. Tiger Global and General Atlantic, two existing investors, and Moore Strategic Ventures co-led the eight-year-old startup’s Series E financing round. The round values NoBroker, which has raised $361 million to date and counts Elevation Capital and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma among its investors, at $1 billion, up from about $350 million in April 2020 . There was no secondary transaction — that is, sales of shares by any existing investors including the founders — in the new funding round, the founders said. NoBroker helps people looking to buy or lease an apartment avoid brokers, thus avoiding brokerage fee. The startup operates in several major Indian cities including Bangalore...

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao launched Binance in 2017 and, according to some sources, the company grew into the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world in 180 days . The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Binance’s daily transactions stood at $76 billion, a volume worth more than its four nearest rivals combined. In the first half of 2021, Binance attracted 151 million clicks from Africa and the Middle East and 11 million from Nigeria, according to the WSJ. These numbers highlight the general activity of crypto trading in Africa, where $105.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency was transacted from July 2020 to June 2021, according to Chainalysis . Despite growing over 1,200% by value, Africa still accounts for only 2% of the global value of crypto transacted in this period. With cryptocurrency, blockchain and decentralized finance gaining ground on the continent, Binance wants to be the leader in driving these activities . However , for that to happen, the company wi...

One of China’s biggest AI solution providers SenseTime is a step closer to its initial public offering. SenseTime has received regulatory approval to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to media reports. Founded in 2014, SenseTime was christened as one of China’s four “AI Dragons” alongside Megvii, CloudWalk, and Yitu. In the second half of the 2010s, their algorithms found much demand from businesses and governments hoping to turn real-life data into actionable insights. Cameras embedded with their AI models watch city streets 24 hours. Malls use their sensing solutions to track and predict crowds on the premises. SenseTime’s three rivals have all mulled plans to sell shares either in mainland China or Hong Kong. Megvii is preparing to list on China’s Nasdaq-style STAR board after its HKEX application lapsed. The window for China’s data-rich tech firms to list overseas has narrowed. Beijing is making it harder for companies with sensitive data to go public outside Ch...

French startup Leocare has raised a big Series B funding round led by Eight Roads . Overall, the company has raised $116 million. It’s an equity and debt round, which means that part of this amount is a cash-for-equity transaction, while the rest is a credit line. The company is raising today’s Series B less than a year after raising its Series A . And some of Leocare’s existing investors are putting more money on the table with the Series B, such as Felix Capital, Ventech and Daphni. Leocare wants to handle all your insurance needs under a single roof. The startup can insure your home, your car, your motorbike and your smartphone. And it believes consumers want to subscribe to new insurance product using a mobile app because it’s more convenient and it opens up new features. For instance, the company is working on a new feature called TakeCare. “It’s like Waze, it tells you when you’re entering a high-risk area,” co-founder and CEO Christophe Dandois told me. But TakeCare doesn’t...

Berlin-based Yababa only started its same-day grocery delivery business this summer, selling products geared towards the tastes of the capital’s sizeable Turkish and Arabic communities shortly afterwards, but in a few short months it’s closed a $15.5 million seed round of funding to fuel planned rapid expansion — both within Germany and across Europe. “Paris, Amsterdan, Brussels, London,” says co-founder Ralph Hage, reeling off the list of likely first-candidate cities for its service outside Germany. Inside Germany, he says Cologne will be next after Berlin — where it currently delivers to Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg, Moabit, Wedding, Neukölln, Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Tiergarten, Tempelhof-Schöneberg and Lichtenberg — either by the end of this year or early next. It also wants the service to be live in seven German cities in 2022. Expanding Yababa’s product mix to address a wider mix of multicultural communities is also on the cards. But, for now, the m...

If you’ve followed corporate card and spend management startups in the U.S., you might be familiar with Brex and Ramp . Payhawk is also offering an all-in-one financial management solution for businesses, but with a focus on European customers. And the company just raised a $112 million Series B round at a $570 million valuation. Greenoaks is leading the round, with all existing investors participating once again, such as QED Investors and Earlybird Digital East. Payhawk wants to replace several services that companies use to simplify their financial stack and make things work better together. Customers get their own account with a dedicated IBAN. They can connect this Payhawk account to their existing bank account to load and withdraw funds. After that, you can use Payhawk for all things related to payment. Customes can issue virtual and physical cards for employees with a set rules, such as a team budget or an approval workflow. This way, employees don’t have to pay with their p...

Facebook’s problems with European privacy law could be about to get a whole lot worse. But ahead of what may soon be a major (and long overdue) regulatory showdown over the legality of its surveillance-based business model, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) is facing a Facebook-shaped problem of its own: It’s now the subject of a criminal complaint alleging corruption and even bribery in the service of covering its own backside (we paraphrase) and shrinking the public understand of the regulatory problems facing Facebook’s business. European privacy campaign group noyb has filed the criminal complaint against the Irish DPC, which is Facebook’s lead regulator in the EU for data protection. noyb is making the complaint under Austrian law — reporting the Irish regulator to the Austrian Office for the Prosecution of Corruption (aka WKStA ) after the DPC sought to use what noyb terms “procedural blackmail” to try to gag it and prevent it from publishing documents related to Gene...

Lost-item tracker company Tile, which competes with Apple’s AirTag is being acquired by family communication service Life360. The deal is valued at $205 million and will see Tile continue to be led as its own brand under its existing CEO CJ Prober. The company says no further changes to the Tile team are currently planned and Prober will also now join the Life360 board of directors. This is the second recent hardware acquisition for Life360, which earlier this year acquired the location device maker Jiobit for $37 million. The company then said its goal was to expand its family tracking capabilities beyond those who have smartphones capable of running its app —  smaller children, children with special needs, and pets, for example. In the case of Tile, however, the company says it sees the potential in expanding its business beyond family tracking to become a broader solution for finding “the people, pets, and things” that families care most about. The company envisions a combine...

Hello and welcome back to Max Q, your very favorite space news digest. A ton happened this week — launches, financing deals, contract awards, etc., etc. — so let’s dive in. Send thoughts, tips, feedback to aria.techcrunch@gmail.com . Don’t forget to sign up to get the free newsletter version of Max Q delivered to your inbox. Source: SpaceX Musk: SpaceX to conduct first orbital flight of Starship in January SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave a talk at the National Academies’ first virtual joint fall meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Board on Physics and Astronomy on Wednesday night, followed by a Q&A session with Academy members on the technical and operational aspects of Starship, SpaceX’s ultra-super-heavy launch system. First, the logistical details: Musk said he anticipates conducting the first orbital flight of Starship in January, followed by dozens or possibly more launches through the rest of the year. He added candidly that while the first orbital launch is not ...