All posts tagged: 6.5M

Hunter Biden benefactor Kevin Morris details .5M in loans to president’s son

Hunter Biden benefactor Kevin Morris details $6.5M in loans to president’s son

Published by skeptic

Hunter Biden received more than $6.5 million in five separate loans over a two-year period from entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, according to a letter sent this week to one of the congressional committees involved in the GOP impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. A copy of Morris’ letter, obtained by NBC News, details the dates, sum, and terms of the loans issued he issued to the president’s son beginning in 2021. Among the loans listed in the letter to the House Oversight Committee was one issued as recently as last month for for $1.2 million to be paid in full by 2028, and any previously accrued and unpaid interest due the following year. The interest rate for all five loans was set at 5%, and was negotiated by separate attorneys, the letter says. A spokesperson for the Oversight panel did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday night, nor did an attorney for Hunter Biden. The letter comes a week after Morris, a Hollywood-based attorney who met Hunter Biden in 2019, sat for …

Sample Seed pitch deck: Pepper Bio’s .5M deck

Sample Seed pitch deck: Pepper Bio’s $6.5M deck

Published by skeptic

Happy New Year, and welcome to the 78th installment of Pitch Deck Teardown! This week, we are taking a closer look at Pepper Bio‘s seed pitch deck that landed the company $6.5 million. With the slogan “The end of untreatable,” the company is taking on a hell of a challenge: Finding solutions for all those illnesses doctors can’t target well at the moment. Unlike CancerVax (which I ripped apart in a previous teardown for being completely unbelievable), Pepper Bio has a strong team and a lot of promise. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. Before we dive in, I have to admit that I don’t deeply understand this particular slice of biotech, and I had to do a fair amount of Googling to fully understand the deck. As such, there’s a chance I may get some things wrong here. That also speaks to an important point, though: Your deck needs to be well-targeted to its audience, and …

Fintech startup Finerio secures .5M to create open finance ecosystem in Latin America

Fintech startup Finerio secures $6.5M to create open finance ecosystem in Latin America

Published by skeptic

Finerio Connect, a Mexico City-based fintech startup, raised $6.5 million in new funding to continue development on its open finance platform providing access to personalized financial products and services. Nick Grassi and José Luis López, both co-CEOs, started the company in 2018 with the vision of enabling the compliant sharing and consumption of financial data and data analytics across Latin America. Prior to that, Grassi, an American, moved to Mexico on a Fulbright Scholarship. As part of that, he began working at Deloitte Consulting Mexico, where he met Lopez. “This was around 2016, and we were tasked with starting the early fintech practice, and the industry itself was just getting started,” Grassi told TechCrunch. “We were helping a lot of different companies — banks, payment processors and insurance companies — figure out what the fintech wave might mean for them.” Grassi and Lopez got to thinking about platforms, like Mint, where you could control your personal finances. The pair eventually created their own automated personal finance manager with Finerio Connect and launched it at TechCrunch …

Netflix’s 6.5M India subscribers dwarfed by Prime Video and Disney, Bernstein says

Netflix’s 6.5M India subscribers dwarfed by Prime Video and Disney, Bernstein says

Published by skeptic

Netflix has “not succeeded” in scaling up its business in India despite the global streaming giant consistently lowering the subscription costs in the country, analysts at AllianceBernstein wrote in a report to clients Thursday. The U.S. streamer has about 6.5 million subscribers in India, compared to Prime Video’s 20 million in the South Asian market, the analysts wrote. Disney+ Hotstar continues to dominate the market with over 40 million subscribers. AllianceBernstein attributed Netflix slower growth in India to lack of local content, saying only 12% of the titles the global streamer offers in the country were local content. About 60% of Prime Video’s catalog in India, in comparison, was in domestic languages. The poor reception in India comes despite Netflix consistently lowering the prices in the country even as it has virtually raised the prices in all other key markets. Netflix inked a “first-of-its-kind” deal with Jio Platforms, India’s largest telecom operator, to bundle the streaming service with the carrier’s pay-as-you-go plans in August. Data and image: AllianceBernstein “Perhaps the lesson from India points to …

Climate startup CUR8 raises .5M from GV for its market-making platform for carbon removals

Climate startup CUR8 raises $6.5M from GV for its market-making platform for carbon removals

Published by skeptic

The IPCC, has said the world needs to remove 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by 2050 in order to avoid a climate cataclysm. And, yes, there are now multiple methods for carbon removal today such as planting more trees (afforestation), sucking CO2 out of the sky (direct air capture), and spreading CO2-absorbing rock on agricultural soil (‘enhanced weathering’). But it’s widely accepted that none of these methods alone will solve the carbon problem, and that the carbon removals industry is a nascent one, and often full of scams and chaotic messaging, to put it mildly. Indeed, it was recently revealed that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets offered by the biggest certifier were worthless and could in fact worsen the problem. Research into Verra, the world’s ‘leading’ carbon standard for the $2bn voluntary offsets market, found more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits were likely to be “phantom credits”. It’s examples like this that deter companies from investing in carbon removals solutions as part of their net zero …

WireMock lands .5M to help developers build and test on mock APIs

WireMock lands $6.5M to help developers build and test on mock APIs

Published by skeptic

As developers work with an increasing number of third-party APIs, they need a tool that mocks those APIs for testing purposes without actually firing the API gateway. Mock APIs mirror the behavior of APIs, letting developers test them in a sandbox environment. WireMock has emerged in recent years as a popular open source tool for API mocking, and last year the project founder Tom Akehurst teamed up with Uri Maoz to launch a company with the same name, based on the open source project. They created a managed cloud service called WireMock Cloud, and today announced a $6.5 million seed investment. Maoz, who serves as the startup’s CEO, says that by creating a mock, you can safely work out different scenarios without actually using the API. “Now you have an environment where you can actually access all of the APIs that you depend on, but with no dependency on the actual third party API, because everything is working against mock,” he told TechCrunch. What’s more, the mocks are dynamic, so you can test against different …