asia News of 12/09/19

In Wake Of Shutterstock’S Chinese Censorship, American Companies Need To Relearn American Values

It’s among the most iconic images of the last few decades — a picture of an unknown man standing before a line of tanks during the protests in 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In just one shot, the photographer, Jeff Widener, managed to ...

Style Theory, A Fashion Rental Startup In Southeast Asia, Raises $15 Million Led By SoftBank Ventures Asia

Style Theory, a fashion rental startup in Southeast Asia, raises $15 million led by SoftBank Ventures Asia image Style Theory , a platform for renting designer apparel in Indonesia and Singapore, announced today it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The startup says this is the first closing of the round. It was led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, the ...

Netflix Earmarks $420m To Fight Disney In India

Netflix may still not have a million subscribers in India, but it continues to invest big bucks in the nation, where Disney’s Hotstar currently dominates the video streaming market. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said on Friday ...

Flipkart Leads $60m Investment In Logistics Startup Shadowfax

Walmart’s Flipkart has backed Shadowfax in a new $60 million financing round as the retail giant works to strengthen its logistics network in the nation. Flipkart led the Series D financing round for the three-year-old Bangalore-based ...

In A First, Amazon Launches A Battery-Powered Portable Echo Speaker In India

After launching nearly a dozen Echo speaker models in India in two years , Amazon said on Wednesday it is adding a new variant to the mix that addresses one of the most requested features from customers in the nation: Portability. The e-commerce ...

Rapyd, Which Offers Fintech-As-A-Service Via A Single API, Adds $20m More To Its Coffers At A $1.2b Valuation

One of the biggest trends in the world of financial technology has been an ongoing push towards consolidation , where larger fish are snapping up smaller fish (including a proliferation of interesting startups ) to get improved economies of scale ...

Xiaomi Launches App To Offer Credit To Millennials In India

Xiaomi, the top smartphone vendor in India , today joined a growing wave of fintech startups in the nation that are offering credit to aspirational young professionals and millennials. The Chinese electronics giant said today it is launching Mi ...

Credit Startup Migo Expands To Brazil On $20m Raise And Africa Growth

Credit startup Migo expands to Brazil on $20M raise and Africa growth image After growing its lending business in West Africa, emerging markets credit startup Migo is expanding to Brazil on a $20 million Series B funding round led by Valor Group Capital . The San Mateo based company — previously branded Mines.io — ...

Kredivo’S Parent Firm FinAccel Raises $90m To Expand Its Credit Lending Platform In Southeast Asia

Kredivo’s parent firm FinAccel raises $90M to expand its credit lending platform in Southeast Asia image Singapore-headquartered FinAccel has secured $90 million in what is the largest funding round for a fintech startup in Southeast Asia as it looks to further grow its credit lending app Kredivo and build more financial services. The financing ...

Accel Closes New $550m Fund For India

Accel closes new $550M fund for India image Accel, one of the world’s most influential venture capitalist firms, is becoming more bullish on India. The Silicon Valley-headquartered firm, which largely focuses on early stage investments, said today it has closed $550 million for its sixth ...

Cellphone Plans Get Up To 40% Costlier In India

India has long been a wonderland for cellphone users. At a time when most telecom operators across the globe charge anywhere between $5 to $10 for a gigabyte of mobile data , telcos in India deliver that for just a few cents. Spare another $2 to ...

Facebook Bowed To A Singapore Government Order To Brand A News Post As False

Facebook added a correction notice to a post by a fringe news site that Singapore’s government said contained false information. It’s the first time the government has tried to enforce a new law against ‘fake news’ outside its borders. ...

Xiaomi’S q3 Earnings Report Shows Slowing Growth

Xiaomi, the world’s fourth largest smartphone vendor, on Wednesday shared its earnings figures for the quarter that ended in September. While the results fell largely in line with analysts’ expectations, a drastic drop in the ...

Indian Scooter Rental Startup Bounce Raises $150m

Big bucks are pouring to get you through the chaotic traffic on Indian roads. Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates over 17,000 electric and gasoline scooters in three dozen cities in India, has raised about $150 million as part of an ...

India’S Ola To Begin Operations In London In ‘Coming Weeks’

Indian ride-hailing giant Ola said today it will begin operations in London “in the coming weeks,” a day after the local authorities revoked Uber’s license to operate in one of the world’s most lucrative cities . The Indian firm, ...

India’S Electric Bike Rental Startup Yulu Inks Strategic Partnership With Bajaj Auto, Raises $8m

Yulu, a Bangalore-based electric bike sharing platform that  maintains a partnership with Uber , said today it has won the backing of one of the country’s largest automaker firms. The two-year-old startup said it has entered into a strategic ...

AWS Translate Comes To 22 New Languages And 6 New Regions

AWS seems to be using this week to get some news out ahead of its annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas next week. In addition to new IoT services and updates to its Rekognition AI service, the company also today announced that it is ...

Amazon-Backed Shuttl Raises $18m To Expand Its App-Based Bus Aggregator In India

Shuttl, a startup that runs an app-based bus aggregator service  in India, said on Monday that it has raised $18 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its business in the country. Toyota Tsusho Corporate and SPARX Group, through ...

India’S Financial Services Firm Paytm Raises $1b

Paytm said on Monday it has raised $1 billion in a new financing round as the Noida-headquartered firm, which once dominated the local mobile payments market, attempts to fight back giants Google, Walmart’s PhonePe, and Facebook. The company ...

China Roundup: Y Combinator’S Short-Lived China Dream

China Roundup: Y Combinator’s short-lived China dream image Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. Last week, we looked at how Alibaba and Tencent fared in the last quarter ; ...