FinTech news in 500 startups category

Two years later, after the platform did not make enough revenue from developers, the team chose to go vertical to what it is today, Stax, a universal money app on USSD rails for African users. The company, founded by Ben Lyon, Jess Shorland and David Kutalek, fetches all these codes from multiple accounts together into an app users can access offline, letting them perform transactions without dialling any USSD code.

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has seized over 94,000 bitcoins that were allegedly stolen in the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex and arrested a married couple suspected to have laundered the money, the department announced today. While Morgan and Lichtenstein were not formally accused of perpetrating the hack.

Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia started the company in 2016 with an initial focus on startups and small businesses, trying to find product-market fit (as one does), but finding that legal usage among companies of that size was often project-based, infrequent and short-term if the company folds. In 2019, the company pivoted to working with mid-market and enterprise-level companies by selling into legal departments, and that when growth took off, Ahmed told journalist. Similar to other industries embracing contract work, Lawtrades is giving legal professionals a way to become independent and run their own virtual law practices. Ahmed plans to use the new funding to rebrand the company, launch an iOS app, expand into other professional categories, like finance and management consulting, and gain an international footprint.