Tencent has revealed that PayPal users will soon be able to make cashless payments across China by using WeChat Pay's widespread merchant network through QR code scanning. This new payment option will initially be rolled out to PayPal’s US users and will later expand to other regions. This development bridges PayPal’s 400 million-strong customer base with China’s comprehensive payment landscape, which includes nearly every taxi, eatery, and retail outlet across the country.

The British fintech company Revolut has amassed a waitlist of around 450,000 potential users in India as it moves closer to a full-scale launch in the country.

Small businesses typically manage around 500 invoices each month. When this process relies on emails, spreadsheets, and manual payments, the cost per invoice can range from $15 to $40. This issue is less about technology and more about inefficient operations, which acts as a hidden growth tax that many finance departments have been shouldering for years.

WARC reports that if the energy crisis continues, global advertising growth could see a significant setback. In a worst-case scenario, marketers might lose up to 4.2 percentage points of projected growth in 2026, as they face increasing pressure to maintain already slim profit margins.

Aleksandar Savic

Morningstar has grown significantly over two decades, evolving from a mutual fund rating company into a global financial services leader with a tenfold increase in revenue and profits by 2025. CEO Kunal Kapoor attributes this success to a strong corporate culture centered on relentless execution. Through an analysis of employee feedback on Glassdoor, Morningstar stands out for its positive culture and commitment to core values. Kapoor emphasizes three key principles behind this execution:

1. Decentralizing decision-making to foster ownership by pushing accountability to business units, reinforcing this with performance-based compensation and organizational design.

2. Using transparent Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to create open communication about challenges and progress, enabling early course corrections and candid feedback.

3. Instilling urgency and ambitious goal-setting to prevent complacency, encouraging teams to move quickly and stretch toward challenging yet achievable long-term plans without fear of penalization for missed stretch targets.

Kapoor’s leadership style highlights disciplined follow-through and a culture that values ownership, transparency, and rapid execution to sustain Morningstar’s growth and innovation.

Dublin-based startup Grand has successfully raised $5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by venture capital firm 20VC, with additional support from NAP and Firedrop. The funds will be used to advance the development of a new payment network aimed at enhancing real-world transactions.

Xero, the well-known accounting platform from New Zealand with 4.6 million users globally, has announced a strategic multi-year partnership with Anthropic. This collaboration will embed the AI assistant Claude directly into Xero’s software and allow small business financial data to be accessed within the Claude.ai environment. This integration will enable small business owners to get immediate answers about their cash flow and financial status using Claude's conversational AI capabilities.

As concerns over AI-driven job displacement intensify, backlash against data centers is mounting. Senator Mark Warner has proposed taxing these facilities to fund support for workers affected by the transition to AI technologies.

Recent headlines in venture capital highlight a trend toward larger investment rounds amidst rising valuations and mega funds. Smaller and more modest seed rounds are becoming less common, as confirmed by Crunchbase data on U.S. seed funding. From 2024 to 2025, deal counts and total funding for smaller seed rounds from $200,000 to under $5 million declined by roughly 20%, while the largest seed deals of $10 million and above grew significantly.

This bifurcation splits the market between elite AI startups attracting substantial Series A funding from major firms, and other companies facing tougher competition. In response, some seed funds are altering strategies to preserve more capital for promising startups and to invest at earlier stages, sometimes prior to product-market fit.

The share of seed deals under $5 million dropped from 93% in 2018 to 75% in 2025, while those above $10 million rose from 2% to 9%. Total U.S. seed funding reached $19.4 billion in 2025, largely driven by large rounds, including a record $2 billion seed round by Thinking Machines Lab. Outlier rounds over $50 million surged over 300% in 2025, reflecting AI’s influence on early-stage investment dynamics.

Seed funding is not declining but evolving, with larger rounds becoming the norm for top-tier startups, while smaller funds continue to play a vital role in nurturing emerging companies in a tough market environment.

In a surprising turn on Tuesday, OpenAI announced the discontinuation of its video-generation app, Sora, and abandoned plans to integrate video features within ChatGPT. Alongside this, the company halted a $1 billion collaboration with Disney, reassigned a key executive, and secured an impressive $10 billion in fresh investments, pushing the total funding round beyond $120 billion. This string of major decisions underscores OpenAI's urgent pivot towards financial sustainability, as Sora’s extensive computing demands failed to yield proportional revenue.