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My First 16: Competing in a Crowd of Incumbents with Mercury’s Immad Akhund

Andreessen Horowitz

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about the idea of a minimum delightful product in fintech, doing the spreadsheet math on unit economics early on, and how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents. Immad Akhund: Sure. Because I was an immigrant to the U.S.

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Booz Allen Hamilton launches $100M corporate venture arm focused on early-stage startups

TechCrunch

Excepting breakouts like Anduril and Palantir , most contracts are awarded to incumbents — more than 95% of Booz Allen’s nearly $8 billion in revenue comes from government contracting — and any startup that gets a foot in the door has to bridge the gap between the R&D phase and the contract award.

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UK challenger bank Starling raises $376M, now valued at $1.9B

TechCrunch

Starling — which competes against incumbent banks, as well as other challengers like Monzo and Revolut — said it will be using the money to continue its growth. Starling, founded in 2017, has now passed 2 million accounts, with 300,000 business accounts among them. billion) post-money. The bank is already profitable.

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FintechOS nabs $60M for a low-code approach to modernizing legacy banking and insurance services

TechCrunch

“Challenger” startups in banking and insurance have upended their industries, and picked up significant business, by building more customer-friendly tools and services — more personalized, easier to access and usually competitively priced — than those typically provided by their bigger, incumbent rivals.

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Bond Pet Foods enters meat proteins phase with $17.5M Series A

TechCrunch

million to bring its total funding since 2017 to $20 million. Last November, Bond kicked this off by announcing a partnership with Hill’s Pet Nutrition to develop a craft meat protein for its product portfolio. Joining in as individual investors are musicians Sia Isabelle Furler and Joan Jett.

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Beyond cost control: Where cloud management is going next

TechCrunch

” Consolidation followed, TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers noted , “as incumbents in adjacent sectors saw the opportunities presented by cloud cost optimization. Microsoft in 2017 acquired Cloudyn [ … ]. Meanwhile, cloud cost-optimization tools (represented by Spot, Granulate) allowed for tactical changes to lower costs.”

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Monzo Makes Money Work For Everyone

Y Combinator

2 Incumbent banks miss the mark in two crucial areas: The banking experience has not evolved to match modern consumer. Outperforming incumbents with modern experience and digital infrastructure. Monzo has also been able to move faster than incumbents because of its forward-looking approach to building banking infrastructure.