DJI |
28,710 (+0.76%) |
NASDAQ |
11,785 (+0.61%) |
S&P 500 |
3,502 (+0.54%) |
*As of 10:00 a.m. ET
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Robinhood says a "limited number" of customer accounts have been hacked, though the service itself was not affected. According to Bloomberg, nearly 2,000 of Robinhood's ~13 million accounts were compromised.
More:
- Robinhood says hackers gained access to customers' personal email accounts, which they used to access Robinhood accounts. The company says it's working with customers individually to secure their accounts.
- In August, Robinhood raised a $200m round of funding that valued the company at $11.2b.
- The app is facing increasing scrutiny as a lack of safeguards continues to risk the financial future of inexperienced traders. The U.S. government has been pressuring the company to take action after a 20-year-old appears to have committed suicide after a leveraged position caused him to lose $730,000 on the application.
- The app has also experienced numerous outages and glitches at times when market activity increases, including the market crash in March and the stock splits of Apple and Tesla in August.
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Peloton has recalled the pedals on 27,000 bikes sold between July 2013 and May 2016. The company said that it received 120 reports of the pedals breaking and 16 reports of injuries. The affected items are first-generation PR70P pedals.
More:
- Despite the news, Peloton shares were up 4% on Thursday to an intraday high of $137.24.
- The company's stock is up 380% so far this year as it benefits from closing gyms due to COVID-19.
- Peloton ended June with 1.1 million Connected Fitness Subscribers ($39/month) and 316,000 digital subscriptions ($12.99/month).
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Uber announced a $150m joint venture with South Korean company SK Telecom. As part of the agreement, SK Telecom will decouple its mobility services, which include its ride-hailing and satellite navigation infrastructure into a new company called T Map Mobility.
More:
- Uber would invest $50m directly into T Map Mobility and allocate the remaining $100m into the joint venture. Uber will own 51% of the joint venture, while SK Telecom owns 49%
- T Map Mobility will offer a "subscription-based mobility-as-a-service offering" which includes ride-hailing and rental cars. T Map Mobility will also use SK Telecom's existing technology infrastructure such as 5G and artificial intelligence to innovate and offer new services.
- SK Telecom disclosed that T Map Mobility is currently valued at $873.3m and expects its valuation will grow to $3.9b by 2025.
- The agreement is part of Uber's latest attempt to penetrate a market it has struggled in. In 2015, the company had to stop using private cars and currently offers registered taxi-hailing.
- SK Telecom shareholders will vote to ratify the agreement on Nov. 26, and the joint venture is expected to launch in the first half of 2021.
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Series A funding tracker: This week, 50 companies raised a total of $582m in Series A funding.
Top three categories:
- Healthcare – 29%
- Enterprise applications – 25%
- Hospitality – 8%
Top three companies:
- RayzeBio develops treatment for cancer using targeted isotopes. The company raised $45m in a funding round led by venBio Partners, Versant Ventures.
- Priothera develops oral medicine for hematological malignancies. It raised $35.4m in a funding round led by investors including Earlybird Venture Capital, and Fountain Healthcare.
- apiiro provides a Code Risk Platform that helps in reducing application development and infrastructure risk. It raised $35m in the recent funding round.


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Payments platform Stripe acquired Paystack – the Stripe of Africa – in a $200m+ deal. This deal is the biggest startup acquisition in Nigeria, and also the biggest acquisition from Stripe.
More:
- Paystack is the first Nigerian startup to get into Y Combinator when it went through the incubator in 2016. Currently, Paystack has around 60,000 customers in Africa.
- The company has received a total of ~$12m in funding – its latest funding round was August 2018. Investors include Comcast Ventures, Tencent, Visa, and Stripe.
- Stripe is currently valued at around $36b (similar to SpaceX) and has made nine acquisitions. Paystack is its first acquisition that would help in geographical expansion – other startups were acquired to improve its technology and product stack.
- Stripe’s co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison said that, despite currently being small in absolute numbers, online commerce in Africa will grow about 30% every year.
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QUICK HITS
- Twitter experienced an outage on Thursday evening that left users unable to tweet for more than an hour. The company said it was an internal system issue and not a security breach or hack.
- The IMF said greater cooperation on a COVID-19 vaccine would accelerate global economic recovery and could add $9t in global income by 2025.
- British Airways was levied a $26m fine by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office because of a 2018 data breach that exposed the personal and financial details of more than 400,000 customers.
- As Apple device adoption grows in the enterprise, organizations are looking for ways to seamlessly manage and secure devices while extending the world-class Apple experience users expect.*
*This is sponsored content.
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Liam Gill is an experienced entrepreneur passionate about business strategy and law. In business, Liam is best known for founding Fumarii Technologies, a top 20 ranked cloud computing service (Yahoo Finance!). Academically, he is working towards a Canadian Masters of Law having completed a UK Law Degree and Masters of Management. He aims to support other entrepreneurs with free legal templates through Law4Startups.com and is happy to chat on Twitter or Linkedin. Reach out!
Nataraajan Arulolie is a Business Researcher at Inside and is keen on telling stories through data.
Jigney Pathak is a Business Researcher at Inside who loves technology, finance & sports. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration with a finance specialization & has previously worked at Salesforce.
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Editor
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Jonathan Harris is a writer for Inside.com. Previously, he wrote for The Huffington Post, TakePart.com, and the YouTube channel What’s Trending.
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