One of the hottest Y Combinator startups just raised a big seed round to clean up the mess created by Uber, Postmates, and the gig economy. Catch sells health insurance, retirement savings plans, and tax withholding directly to freelancers, contractors, or anyone uncovered. By building and curating simplified benefits services, Catch can offer a safety ...

To prevent its own Cambridge Analytica and make sure it’s getting paid for its data, Twitter will audit developers using its APIs. Starting June 19th, Twitter will require any app that calls a recent tweets from or mentions of a user more than 100,000 times per day to submit their app for review. If a ...

Instagram is opening a whole new revenue stream. Now the 130 million people who tap Instagram’s product tags on shopping posts will be able to buy those items without leaving the app thanks to stored payment info. “Checkout with Instagram” launches today in the US with more than 20 top brands including Adidas, Kylie Cosmetics, ...

When you live with roommates or go out often with friends, it’s common for someone to front the payment — be that for utilities, the cable bill, rent or the restaurant bill — and have everyone else pay them back via cash, Venmo or Apple Pay. But Ysplit, a company launching out of Y Combinator, ...

Alison Johnston didn’t plan to build a startup around death. An early employee at Q&A app Aardvark that was bought by Google, she’d founded tutoring app InstaEDU and sold it to Chegg. She made mass market consumer products. But then, “I had a family member who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I thought about ...

What if, instead of sitting on your phone on the sofa ordering stuff from Amazon, you could buy the same things locally from local stores that ultimately enliven and enrich your local neighborhood? What if by doing that, you wouldn’t be walking through deserted main streets, past boarded-up shops, dark alleys and graffiti? What if ...

Financial technology company Affirm, which offers consumers an alternative to cash and credit when paying for large purchases, has scored a notable new partner: Walmart. The companies announced this morning that Affirm’s financing options would be made available in over 4,000 Walmart Supercenters across the U.S., and will roll out to Walmart.com in the weeks ...

Facebook will drive a hard bargain with influencers and artists judging by the terms of service for the social network’s Patreon-like Fan Subscriptions feature that lets people pay a monthly fee for access to a creator’s exclusive content. The policy document attained by TechCrunch shows Facebook plans to take up to a 30 percent cut ...

Residents of even the tiniest far-flung villages in China may soon be able to pay on their phones to run daily errands as Beijing announced this month that it aims to make mobile payments ubiquitous in rural areas by the end of 2020. The plan arrived in a set of guidelines (document link in Chinese) ...

Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that commerce is a huge part of the 2019 roadmap for Facebook’s family of apps. But before people can easily buy things from Instagram etc, Facebook needs their credit card info on file. That’s a potentially lucrative side effect of Instagram’s plan to launch a Fundraiser sticker in 2019. Facebook’s own Donate ...