Julien Brault

In 2000, a group that would later be known as the PayPal Mafia betrayed @elonmusk in a desperate attempt to save their company. They fired their new boss while he was on his honeymoon and saved @PayPal. Here is the story of how they built one of the largest fintechs in the world…

US-based AI lending platform @Upstart is drawing investor concern after insiders sold $1.8 million in shares over three months, even as the company posted 67% revenue growth in Q1 2025. Chief Accounting Officer Natalia Mirgorodskaya sold 12,637 shares, reducing holdings by…

US multinational financial service giant @WellsFargo is ending its credit card partnership with payment and rewards platform @BiltRewards early after losing up to $10 million monthly on the rent rewards program, forcing the fintech to find a new issuer. The partnership,…

Math-focused AI startup Harmonic AI, co-founded by @RobinhoodApp CEO @vladtenev, raised $100 million at an $875 million valuation. Tenev also intentionally kept the valuation below the $1 billion unicorn threshold. “You never want to take the highest offer,’’ he said in an…

Newsletter platform @beehiiv has surpassed $20 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) just 3.5 years after launch, according to a post on LinkedIn by CEO @denk_tweets (pictured below). Denk added that Beehiiv’s Ad Network and Boosts products contributed another $10 million,…

Canadian cryptocurrency platform @shakepay has expanded its services with the launch of US dollar (USD) accounts offering 3% annual interest, paid weekly in bitcoin. In a July 9 post on X, CEO @aiouy (pictured below) said the new feature lets users convert Canadian dollars to US…

Spanish fintech Murphy has secured $15 million in funding to scale its AI-powered debt collection platform that automates communications with debtors across SMS, email, WhatsApp, and phone calls. The Barcelona-based startup, led by CEO @borjasolef (5th from the left), received…

X CEO @lindayaX (pictured below) has quit @elonmusk's social media platform just months before its ambitious fintech features were set to launch, offering no explanation for her sudden departure. “I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world”, she concluded her…

Norwegian payment processor Two has raised €13 million ($15.2 million) in strategic funding to expand its Stripe-like platform for B2B transactions, bringing total funding to over €40 million ($46.7 million). Founded in 2021 by Andreas Mjelde (pictured below) and Kiran Thomas,…

Financial social media platform @Stocktwits has launched a news service that turns conversations from its 10 million users into market news articles, according to its project advisor @TedMerz, founder of Principals Media. The platform analyzes what users are saying about stocks…

Irish-American multinational financial services giant @Stripe's usage-based billing (UBB) platform has grown 145% year-to-date as SaaS and fintech companies accelerate their shift from traditional seat-based subscriptions to consumption-based pricing models. Stripe CEO @patrickc…

This is from Jamie Dimon's 2024 shareholder letter. Weirdly, the bank doesn't ask consumers for permission to furnish their data to credit bureaus, which the bureaus use "for their own purposes and profits"

Pakistani e-commerce platform @BazaarTechPK expects to hit profitability in the coming quarters after completing the acquisition of digital payments platform Keenu. Co-founder @hamzajawaid (left), who launched Bazaar in 2020 with high school friend @saadjangda (right), aims to…

The New South Wales Supreme Court granted investors access to Till's financial records in a decision rendered on July 2. This is a major setback for Canadian payments processor @Nuvei, since the decision could be setting the stage for a major lawsuit over its 2024 acquisition of…

London-based @Mastercard’s AI governance lead, Richard Boorman, successfully tricked an AI assistant into following hidden instructions embedded in his LinkedIn profile, exposing critical vulnerabilities in how language models process text. Boorman embedded a "prompt injection”,…

Canadian Prime Minister @MarkJCarney's ethics disclosure reveals extensive fintech holdings. The disclosure shows the former @bankofengland governor transferred over 500 stocks to a blind trust, including positions in payment processors @PayPal, @Stripe, @blocks, and @Adyen,…

The last nail in the coffin of open banking in the US might just have been hammered last week when @jpmorgan sent pricing sheets to data aggregators such as @Plaid and @mX outlining new charges for accessing customer bank account information. The fees, expected to take effect…

Nigerian open banking startup @okra_HQ has quietly shut down, marking the end of a six-year journey. Co-founder and former CEO Fara Ashiru Jituboh (pictured below) said the company “made the decision to wind down operations in May,’’ according to Techpadi. She has since joined…

Nigerian software engineer Sulaiman Adewale (pictured below) has launched @usexara_ai, a WhatsApp-based AI bot that lets users send money, pay bills, and track spending. “I wanted an easier way that carries everybody along in banking, and if you look at it properly, you will see…

Bank of New York Mellon (@BNYglobal) has deployed dozens of AI bots with full company logins that work autonomously alongside human staff. Those bots have direct managers, operate independently on coding and payment validation, and will soon get email accounts and Microsoft Teams…

Dutch payments giant @Adyen has launched Capital in Canada, a financing solution that allows businesses to receive advances within hours based on the sales data captured by Adyen’s point of sale (POS) terminals. The $49 billion market cap company, which is Stripe's biggest…