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A long-running European antitrust investigation into whether Qualcomm used predatory pricing when selling UMTS baseband chips about a decade ago has landed the chipmaker with a fine of €242 million (~$271M) — aka, 1.27% of its global revenue for 2018.

The EU regulator concluded Qualcomm used abusive pricing to force its main rival at the time, UK-based company Icera, out of the market — by selling certain quantities of three of its UMTS chipsets below cost to two strategically important customers: Chinese tech companies Huawei and ZTE.

Commenting on the decision in a statement, competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, said: “Baseband chipsets are key components so mobile devices can connect to the Internet. Qualcomm sold these products at a price below cost to key customers with the intention of eliminating a competitor. Qualcomm’s strategic behaviour prevented competition and innovation in this market, and limited the choice available to consumers in a sector with a huge demand and potential for innovative technologies. Since this is illegal under EU antitrust rules, we have today fined Qualcomm €242M.“

Qualcomm has come out fighting in response — dismissing what it dubs as the Commission’s “novel theory” and saying it plans to appeal.

It also says it will provide a financial guarantee in lieu of paying the fine while this appeal is pending.

The case — which was triggered by a complaint filed by Icera — dates back to 2015, and relates to Qualcomm business practices between 2009 and 2011. The baseband chipsets in question were used over the period for connecting smartphones and tablets to cellular networks, including 3G networks, and for both for voice and data transmission.

The Commission says Icera had been offering advanced data rate performance vs Qualcomm’s chipsets, thereby posing a threat to the latter’s business.

The EU regulator found Qualcomm held a dominant position in the global market for UMTS baseband chipset between 2009 and 2011 — when it had a marketshare of around 60% (almost 3x that of its biggest competitor), as well as on the high barriers to entry to the market — such as significant initial investments in R&D for designing such chipsets  and IP barriers given the volume of related patents Qualcomm holds.

European competition rules mean those holding a dominant position in a market have a special responsibility not to abuse their powerful position by restricting competition.

The Commission says its conclusion that Qualcomm engaged in predatory pricing during the probe period is based on a price-cost test for the three Qualcomm chipsets concerned; and “a broad range of qualitative evidence demonstrating the anti-competitive rationale behind Qualcomm’s conduct, intended to prevent Icera from expanding and building market presence”.

“The results of the price-cost test are consistent with the contemporaneous evidence gathered by the Commission in this case,” it writes. “The targeted nature of the price concessions made by Qualcomm allowed it to maximise the negative impact on Icera’s business, while minimising the effect on Qualcomm’s own overall revenues from the sale of UMTS chipsets. There was also no evidence that Qualcomm’s conduct created any efficiencies that would justify its practice.

“On this basis, the Commission concluded that Qualcomm’s conduct had a significant detrimental impact on competition. It prevented Icera from competing in the market, stifled innovation and ultimately reduced choice for consumers.”

In May 2011 Icera was acquired for $367M by US tech company Nvidia — which the Commission notes then decided to wind down the baseband chipset business line in 2015.

In its press release responding to the decision, Qualcomm’s Don Rosenberg, executive vice president and general counsel, comes out throwing punches — claiming the Commission’s theory is without precedent and “inconsistent”.

“The Commission spent years investigating sales to two customers, each of whom said that they favored Qualcomm chips not because of price but because rival chipsets were technologically inferior.  This decision is unsupported by the law, economic principles or market facts, and we look forward to a reversal on appeal,” he writes. “The Commission’s decision is based on a novel theory of alleged below-cost pricing over a very short time period and for a very small volume of chips. There is no precedent for this theory, which is inconsistent with well-developed economic analysis of cost recovery, as well as Commission practice.

“Contrary to the Commission’s findings, Qualcomm’s alleged conduct did not cause anticompetitive harm to Icera, the company that filed the complaint. Icera was later acquired by Nvidia for hundreds of millions of dollars and continued to compete in the relevant market for several years after the end of the alleged conduct. We cooperated with Commission officials every step of the way throughout the protracted investigation, confident that the Commission would recognize that there were no facts supporting a finding of anti-competitive conduct.  On appeal we will expose the meritless nature of this decision.”

The size of the fine being issued to Qualcomm — which is dwarfed by the $1.23BN fine also handed out to the company by EU regulators a year ago (for iPhone LTE chipset related market abuse) — has been calculated on the basis of the value of its direct and indirect sales of UMTS chipsets in the European Economic Area, with the Commission also factoring in the duration of the infringement it found to have taken place.

In addition to being fined, the Commission decision orders Qualcomm not to engage in the same or equivalent practices in the future.

It’s the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, so it’s no surprise that Google’s daily doodle celebrates this milestone today. To mark the event, Google teamed up with NASA and Michael Collins, the astronaut who piloted the remained on the command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the moon.

Besides the usual doodle and animation, Google’s team created a video with Collins in which he narrates the sequence of events from his perspective. Not a lot of people can say that they orbited the moon while sipping on a hot cup of coffee, after all.

It’s a fun video to watch, maybe precisely because it features Collins, who most people probably don’t know all that much about.

Earlier this month, Google also launched a couple of other Apollo 11-themed experiences, including an AR recreation of the command module that you can see after you search for ‘Apollo 11’ on your Android or iOS phone.

Plaid has always been about helping developers build financial applications. Up until now that has involved standard checking and savings, and more recently investments. Today, they are introducing a new product called Liabilities endpoint to help developers build applications around debt. For starters, they are taking aim at a big problem in the US, student loan debt.

The product will expand to cover other kinds of debt over time, but the company wanted to start with student loans because of the depth of the problem. “We’re launching with student loan data given the crisis levels it has reached in the U.S., where it is the second largest debt category behind mortgage. Today, over 44 million people, hold $1.6 trillion in outstanding loans,” Plaid’s Kate Adamson wrote in a blog post introducing the new product.

She added that this level of debt is having an impact on people’s ability to save for larger life milestones like getting married, buying a home and saving for retirement. Plaid says that it is launching this new product to help developers build applications that will in turn help borrowers better manage their debt.

To do this, the new API gives developers access to data from a number of large student loan debt managers including Navient, Nelnet, FedLoan, Great Lakes and others. Eventually, they hope to layer on other types of debt services, so that developers can build applications with a total view of a person’s debt, and perhaps suggest ways to reduce it more quickly, or understand how the accruing interest is adding to their overall debt load.

The Liabilities product along with the investments tool introduced earlier this year shows that Plaid is trying to expand into a full service financial technology platform. Among the companies using Plaid to power their apps are Transferwise, Venmo, Acorns, Robinhood and Expensify.

The company has raised over $350 million since it launched in 2012. The most recent round at the end of last year was for $250 million at a $2.65 billion valuation.

Smartphones have become a creative playground thanks to cameras and innovative apps, such as PicsArt. With PicsArt, anybody can add filters, stickers and tweak photos and videos in many different ways. It has been a massive hit with 130 million monthly active users. And that’s why I’m excited to announce that PicsArt founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

PicsArt started with a simple app that lets you edit photos before sharing them. There are many companies in this space, including VSCO, Snapseed and Prisma. But PicsArt has managed to become a cultural phenomenon in many countries including China.

If you’re thinking about editing a photo or video in one way or another, chances are you can do it in PicsArt. In addition to traditional editing tools (cropping, rotating, curves, etc.), you can add filters, auto-beautify your face, change your hair color, add stickers and text, cut out your face and use masks just like in Photoshop… I’m not going to list everything you can do because it’s a long list.

The result is an app packed with features that lets you express yourself, create visual storytelling and improve your social media skills. If you’re an Instagram user, chances you’ve seen more than one photo that has been edited using PicsArt.

While the app is free with ads, users can also subscribe to a premium subscription to unlock additional features. And PicsArt is not just about editing as you can also use the app as its own social network.

PicsArt is based in the U.S. and has raised $45 million over the years. But the company is also betting big on Armenia with a big engineering team over there.

And it’s a natural fit as Hovhannes Avoyan is originally from Armenia. In addition to PicsArt, he has founded many successful startups in the past — Lycos, Bertelsmann, GFI, Teamviewer and Helpsystems. Many entrepreneurs would have a hard time founding just one of these companies, so I can’t wait to hear how Avoyan manages to work on so many different products and turn those products into successes.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Hovhannes Avoyan is a serial entrepreneur, investor and scholar. He is the founder and CEO of PicsArt, the #1 photo and video editing app and community with more than 130 million monthly active users. PicsArt is backed by Sequoia Capital, Insight Venture Partners, DCM and Siguler Guff. The company employs more than 350 people and is headquartered in San Francisco with offices across the globe in Yerevan, Armenia; Los Angeles; Beijing; and an AI Lab in Moscow.

Avoyan brings more than 25 years of experience in computer programming and global business management. Prior to PicsArt, Avoyan founded five other startups, all of which had successful acquisitions by global companies including Lycos, Bertelsmann, GFI, Teamviewer, and Helpsystems.

He is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Bertelsmann Senior Executive's program. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the State Engineering University of Armenia and his M.A. in Political Science and International Affairs from the American University of Armenia. He’s also a frequent speaker at business conferences on topics ranging from business strategy to international team building and Al.

Business travel SaaS startup, TravelPerk, has announced it’s more than doubled the $44M Series C round we wrote about just nine months ago — taking in a further $60M from its existing investors, which brings the round to $104M, and the business’ total raised to date to $134M.

Investors increasing the size of their Series C commitment are Kinnevik, partners of DST Global, Target Global, Felix Capital, Sunstone, and LocalGlobe.

A mere three years ago the 2015-founded, Barcelona-based startup had bagged a $7M Series A — with a pitch to take the pain out of business travel booking.

Since then it’s been on a major growth tear. Co-founder and CEO Avi Meir says this momentum is behind the Series C expansion.

“We grew faster than expected,” he tells TechCrunch. “Unit economics are fantastic. Investors have been pushing us to inject more funding, accelerate our growth, and expand faster. We weren’t looking for more runway.

“We always knew that expanding this round was an option depending on performance, and as we exceeded even our most optimistic targets, we had the choice to stay on our same path or become even more aggressive.”

“The team has grown 250% since January and bookings on the platform have increased by 300%,” he adds. “The number of active users has grown by 150% this year compared to last. When you look at those two numbers side-by-side, it demonstrates that not only are we adding customers, but our existing ones are booking more often.”

TravelPerk now has more than 2,000 customers for its business travel booking platform — including some very familiar names n the European startup scene, such as Adyen, Farfetch, Transferwise, Sumup, GetYourGuide and Glovo.

It’s not disclosing the latest valuation of the business but Meir says it’s more than doubled in the last eight months — due to “rapid growth”.

He’s also not sharing the GMV target for the year — but says it’s 300% higher than last year.

The extra Series C funds will be ploughed into further fuelling its European expansion.

It is also trailing “major product additions in the coming weeks and months” — which TravelPerk claims will bring “a new level of disruption to the pricing structure of an industry that is still dominated by outdated solutions that make business travel expensive and painful”.

It’s certainly true that won’t have to ask too many office workers before you’ll find someone more than willing to hate long and loud on legacy platforms their employer forces them to use when they need to book a work trip.

“In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be releasing products that give the business traveler more freedom and flexibility than ever before,” says Meir. “Meaning business travelers are not restricted by the rigid, outdated systems of the travel industry. With these releases, we’ll not be playing catchup with the leisure travel industry, but bringing to market features designed specifically for the business traveler.”

Given the sustained growth tear that’s encouraged its investors to increase their commitments, what about an IPO? Is that now fast looming on the horizon for TravelPerk?

“It’s a very natural path for us,” says Meir. “We don’t have a hard and fast plan, we’re focused on building a really big company that will be a market leader for years to come, and we’re certainly not at all focused on selling.”

“We want to be THE choice for the modern business traveler,” he adds. “A no-brainer choice for anyone booking, managing, reporting, or analyzing their business travel.”

Discussing the startup’s plans for the next year, he says they’ll aim to bolster their position with SMEs in Europe — and “expand outwards”

“We’re planning to have 430 people hired by the end of this year, and more than 580 by end of 2020 – that’s nearly doubling in a year,” he continues. “This is the plan as it stands today, I wouldn’t be surprised if next year is an even higher trajectory. Certainly that’s the pattern when I look back at our journey so far.”

Commenting in a statement, Antoine Nussenbaum, partner at Felix Capital added: “We are excited to see Avi and his team hitting and surpassing their objectives, as a result we are doubling up our investment as part of this large Series C.

“We’re delighted to be strengthening our relationship with TravelPerk and look forward to seeing the business continue to grow. We are particularly thrilled about the new features soon to be released which will materially transform the traveller experience — building on TravelPerk’s leadership position as the new standard for business travel.”

EBay said today it is buying a 5.5% stake in e-commerce marketplace Paytm Mall as the global firm makes another push to gain footprint in India’s fast-growing e-commerce market.

The two firms did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that EBay has invested between $150 million to $200 million in Paytm Mall at a valuation of $3 billion, up from under $2 billion last year. Paytm Mall had raised about $650 million prior to today’s announcement, the source said.

The agreement will see more than a million products of EBay be made available for purchase to users on Paytm Mall, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm said in a statement. “We will jointly select the inventory we want to bring here. It will be done in a month’s time,” he added. EBay will continue to operate its e-commerce site in India, the company said.

The deal could strengthen Paytm Mall’s position in India, where it competes with Walmart -owned Flipkart, and Amazon India. Online retail sales in India are expected to grow to about $72 billion in three years, according to research firm eMarketer.

Paytm Mall, which is backed by SoftBank, Alibaba, Ant Financial, and SAIF Partners, reported GMV sales of $188 million in 2018. In last one year, sales at the e-commerce arm of One97 Communications, which also runs Paytm wallet, has lost momentum after it cut down the lofty offers it was bandying out to customers, according to an Economic Times report.

Like Amazon and Flipkart, Paytm Mall operated on an inventory-led model in India, but has in recent months shifted to an offline-to-online model, wherein orders placed by customers are serviced from local brand stores. Paytm Mall claims to have over 100,000 seller partners on its platform.

This is EBay’s third investment in India. The company made its first investment in the country in Snapdeal in 2013, and then on Flipkart. After the Indian firm was acquired by Walmart for $16 billion, EBay sold its stake for $1.1 billion and relaunched its e-commerce site with cross-border trade as its new focus.

“We are deeply committed to India and believe there is huge growth potential and significant opportunity in this dynamic market,” said Jooman Park, Senior Vice President of EBay’s APAC business. “This new relationship will accelerate our cross-border trade efforts in a rapidly growing market, providing hundreds of millions of Paytm and Paytm Mall customers with access to EBay’s unparalleled selection of goods.”

As Facebook continues to lay the foundation for getting some of the world’s largest payment processing and technology companies a seat at the global monetary policy table, the company faces significant obstacles to enacting its plans from both sides of the Congressional aisle.

In the second of what’s sure to be many (many many many) hearings in front of Congressional committees, David Marcus, the chief executive of Facebook’s new digital payments subsidiary, Calibra, faced hours of questions from Representatives on the House Financial Services Committee about the how and why of Facebook’s digital currency plans.

Facebook’s critics had questions about both sides of the company’s two-pronged approach to transforming the global financial services industry.

Marcus was able to avoid answering some of his toughest questioning by taking advantage of the grey area between Facebook’s role as the chief architect behind Libra (a financial instrument that uses blockchain technology to enable transactions using a digital currency managed by a consortium of private companies) and Calibra (the payments subsidiary that Facebook owns).

Marcus stated in his testimony, Facebook’s plans for Libra are entirely about getting the digital currency that the company is creating recognized by international financial bodies — skirting the oversight of U.S. banking and financial services regulators in favor of Switzerland’s “neutral” approach.

Representatives, rightly, have concerns about each step of the process, so it’s probably best to examine the currency that Facebook is hoping to create with its partners in the Libra Association and the Calibra subsidiary separately.

First, there are significant questions around the Libra Association that Facebook assembled itself, and the regulatory responsibility that Congress and various Federal agencies have to oversee the digital currency that it’s hoping to create.

The structural problems of the Libra Association and its currency

Concerns begin with the independence of the association Facebook selected to be its partners in the cryptocurrency. There are any number of ties between the corporations and investors that are on Libra’s existing governing body and Facebook. The fact that Facebook selected the initial charter members that paid $10 million for the privilege of being co-founders of the currency was not lost on Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the first term representative from New York.

“The membership is open, based on certain criteria,” Marcus said in his testimony responding to a question from Representative Ocasio Cortez about the membership of the Libra Association. “The first 27 members that have joined are companies that have shared that desire to build this network and solve problems.”

Representative Ocasio Cortez responded, “So, we are discussing a currently controlled by an undemocratically selection of largely massive corporations.”

The New York representative wasn’t alone in her criticism of the composition of the Libra Association, questioning whether Facebook would have undue influence over the organization.

Setting aside the independence of the Libra Association, Representatives also had some pertinent questions about the ways in which the currency is structured.

Libra’s currency is set up as a stablecoin whose value is set by the Association and is pegged to a basket of global currencies that provide a hedge against the the currency fluctuating in value as a result of speculative investment. Users pay in a certain amount of currency and receive an amount of Libra that they can spend at participating merchants or companies (a vast network considering that Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa are all participating in the Association).

Given the size of Facebook’s user base (which numbers in the billions), if every user put an average of $100 into the network, the Libra Association would vault into the ranks of the top 20 largest banks in America (assuming $100 billion in assets). That alone would warrant regulatory oversight by any number of Federal agencies, some representatives argued.

They also expressed concern about how the Libra Association and its membership could manipulate currencies and potentially displace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.

“Sovereign currencies should remain sovereign and we do not want to challenge sovereign currencies,” said Marcus in response to a particularly sharp line of questioning. “We just want to augment their capabilities in the way they can be used.”

It’s an engineer’s answer to a question about the social function of currencies. Facebook can use the basket of currency structure to argue that Libra isn’t actually a currency, but instead rests atop of several currencies to provide more stability and access for its users — and make the system function more effectively. But should Libra’s adoption begin to accelerate, the organization behind it would be able to pick currency winners and losers and begin to leverage its holdings to potentially manipulate markets, some representatives feared.

“Facebook could destabilize currencies and governments,” said California Rep. Maxine Waters. “Facebook’s entry is troubling because it has already harmed vast numbers of people.”

For some members of the Finance Committee, the structure of the asset-backed currency itself makes it resemble a financial instrument that also demands regulation from government agencies. At varying times they compared the proposed currency to an Exchange Traded Fund (because it relies on a basket of currencies to create value) or an alternative fiat currency itself.

“What exactly is this? Is it fish or fowl? And it seems to me that it’s more of a platypus and it evolves in its different parts,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga, of Michigan.

For Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the foreign currency risk that users could be exposed to presents an opportunity for the government to exercise oversight under investment laws passed in 1940. “They will have some degree of volatility,” said Marcus in his testimony.

“This looks to me exactly like an exchange traded fund. Backed by a series of short term instruments in foreign currency… it even has a creation and remittance mechanism,”  says Himes. If that’s true, then the Libra Association would be subject to regulations under the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Marcus says that the instrument behind Libra isn’t an exchange traded fund, because the users that will transact using the cryptocurrency through services like Facebook’s Calibra, aren’t going to be speculating on the currency’s rise in value. However, that logic seems to be slightly faulty given that all of the members of the Libra Association are expected to generate returns from the assets that are held in Libra and invested in the short term basket of currencies.

What’s the matter with Calibra?

If the Libra Association and its mechanism for establishing a stablecoin creates one knot for regulators to untie, then the actual transaction mechanism that Facebook is proposing in the form of the Calibra subsidiary is yet another.

Here again a host of issues raise their head for members of Congress… Some are associated with Facebook’s perennial privacy problems and the history of predatory behavior that reared its head yet again with the company’s $5 billion fine for continuing violations.

MROthers are related to the company’s policy of what conservative critics called “social engineering” which saw Facebook boot some controversial users from its platforms (potentially denying them access to the benefits of Libra). Still another batch of concerns rests on Facebook’s ability to properly implement the know your customer (KYC) regulations that are required of banks and other financial services institutions.

The concern about Facebook’s propensity for de-platforming was topmost in the mind of Wisconsin’s Republican Representative Duffy

“Can Milo Yiannopoulos or Louis Farrakhan use Libra?” Duffy asked. “I bring that up because both of those two individuals have been banned from Facebook.”

Marcus could only respond “I don’t know yet.”

Rep. Duffy compared the potential for Facebook to engage in the same kind of social engineering to grant access to its new payment network as the experiments that China is conducting with its social credit scoring.

“For this system, I think you’re going to see a lot of pushback from both sides,” said Duffy. “I’m also concerned about the data privacy and how we’re going to use that data… How we spend our money is really powerful information and you have access to that too.”

Calibra may face anticompetitive challenges too. Facebook has said that its payment processing app will be the only one that’s directly integrated with the company’s other social networking and communication tools, but that other potential wallets would be interoperable. The exclusive access to Facebook gives Calibra an automatic advantage over other potential payment tools and opens the company up to receive a whole host of transaction information that it would otherwise not be privy to.

And while Facebook is restricting wallet access on its platform to its own digital payments service, it’s giving free rein to developers to build other apps for Libra’s payment platform without vetting them at all.

It’s a situation that could lead to another Cambridge Analytica-style scandal for Facebook and is yet another hole in the company’s oversight.

The appropriate response 

The Libra project is hugely ambitious and its critics have several valid concerns about its execution. Some of the concerns about the risk that it poses are justified and it could, indeed, become a systemic player in the global financial system more quickly than its proponents are willing to accept. All of that doesn’t mean that it should necessarily be thrown out or dismissed because of the potential dangers it poses, some economists argued.

The hard work of governing demands appropriate oversight (which Facebook has been calling out for — although it’s arguably doing it in the jurisdictions that will have the lightest touch over its activities).

No less an expert than the acting International Monetary Fund chair, David Lipton, has said as much in recent discussions over the role that Libra should play (or could play) in the global monetary system.

“Risks include the potential emergence of new monopolies, with implications for how personal data is monetized; the impact on weaker currencies and the expansion of dollarization; the opportunities for illicit activities; threats to financial stability; and the challenges of corporates issuing and thus earning large sums of money — previously the realm of central banks,” Lipton said of Facebook’s proposed digital currency, according to Bloomberg. “So, regulators — and the IMF — will need to step up”

But stepping up does not mean regulating Facebook’s currency out of existence.

“We look back at the the history of technology and innovation, and a conclusion is you never know at the beginning how valuable a technology will be,” Lipton said. “It requires experimentation and adaptation over years and often decades.”

The above image is a shot of Georgia Tech’s latest robot posed next to a penny. The 3D printed bot is roughly two millimeters in length — or about the size of the world’s smallest ants, per the school. The tiny devices are designed to move using vibration from a variety of sources, ranging from ultrasound to more traditional speakers.

With the proper source, the bristles allow them to move four times their own size in roughly a second by moving the legs up and down. Different sized legs react differently, responding to a variety of different frequencies The actuators that generate the vibration are outside of the robot, however, since batteries small enough to be housed on their bodies simply don’t exist.

The research team believes robots of this size could ultimately prove useful for a variety of different tasks, ranging from environmental sensing to human body repair. For now, however, we’re just dealing with some tiny prototypes.

“We are working to make the technology robust, and we have a lot of potential applications in mind,” assistantships professor Azadeh Ansari said in a release tied to the news. “We are working at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, biology and physics. It’s a very rich area and there’s a lot of room for multidisciplinary concepts.”

Fintech startup N26 is raising $170 million a few months after raising $300 million. While it’s technically structured as a new round, the company considers today’s new funding as an extension of the Series D round.

N26 has only reached out to existing investors. All the investors in the Series D round are investing again, as well as a few investors that have been around for a while. So that’s Insight Venture Partners, GIC (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund), Tencent, Allianz X, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital and Greyhound Capital.

“It’s a raise in valuation of about 30%. It’s only existing investors that participated. We didn’t go external as it is also quite quickly after the round that we did earlier this year,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “But I think it’s a good testament of the development of the company over the last couple of months.”

With this new influx of funding, N26 has now reached a post-money valuation of $3.5 billion. The company has raised $670 million in total. And N26 says that it is now the highest valued German startup and one of the highest valued fintech startups in the world.

N26 has been building a retail bank that works better. The company lets you sign up from your phone, get a card that you can control from your phone and make purchases all around the world without any foreign transaction fee. And the company has managed to attract 3.5 million customers all around Europe.

More recently, N26 launched its challenger bank in the U.S. The company plans to expand to Brazil in the coming months and launch more products to make it easier to manage your money. Many features will be based on Spaces, which are sub-accounts that let you separate your money in multiple pools and eventually share Spaces with other people.

I chatted with N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf about the future of N26. Here’s our interview, which was edited for clarity and brevity.

TechCrunch: You announced N26 You already. What’s the idea behind it?

Valentin Stalf: We launched it yesterday or the day before yesterday. There are different card colors and we’re differentiating our premium tier [N26 Metal] a little bit more from the mid tier [N26 You]. I think it was a little bit similar.

But now, N26 You is more individual. And then it’ll come together in a couple of weeks when we launch additional cards for one account. You can have different colors. And then, with Spaces, I think we're trying to build the most flexible bank account to live and think your way.

And then, in the next quarter we’ll do an app update with a transaction-based timeline.

TC: Does it mean that because of the new colors, people will get multiple cards and attach one card to one Space for instance?

Stalf: In the end, you’ll be able to attach the cards freely to different Spaces. It’s not even that important that you attach one card to one Space. Sometimes, people want to have multiple cards. But if you only use one card, then you can swap a transaction to a different Space.

TC: Now that you’re bringing perks from N26 Metal to N26 You, what does it mean for Metal customers? Do you just get a different card?

Stalf: I think with Metal, we’ll go more and more in the premium direction.

We also mentioned that we’ll be relaunching our insurance packages. The new package will be based on traveling but also mobility. You’ll have a lot of things in the mobility space including scooter riding.

TC: Let’s talk about product. You talked about Shared Spaces and multiple cards. There’s a redesign that is coming out in the next few months, what will it look like?

Stalf: With the app update that we’re doing, it’s not just a design update of the front end, it’s really an update of the way we talk to our customers and how we present transactions. We’ll be changing what you see in the app timeline.

We want to give you more context and we cant to make it smarter. We’ll integrate customer support interactions, we’ll integrate transactions that didn’t work… These features will launch over time.

We’re launching the infrastructure and then we’re launching each of the features. For instance, you’ll have the opportunity to start a customer service interaction directly from a transaction, straight to live chat.

And it’s coming together with Shared Spaces. It’s also something that needs to be reflected in the timeline in a smart way. Some of the transactions that might show up in your timeline might not be done by yourself but maybe by someone else.

Depending on which transaction you do, we move more details into the timeline directly based on what we think is important. So let’s say it’s a transaction in a new country, you might want to see the exchange rate in the timeline directly. If it’s rent, sending the same amount every month, you don’t need to see more details. It just needs to say rent — okay fine.

TC: What did you promise when you raised some more money? New countries, user numbers, improved monthly transaction volume?

Stalf: We have an opportunity that we build a bank that has more than 50 million users around the globe. Today, we only have 3.5 million users but we’re accelerating.

From a country perspective, we have agreed already that we go to Brazil. There’s no plan after Brazil yet. Now let’s focus on the U.S., then on Brazil, then next year we’ll find out what’s the feedback from these two markets.

Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in Southeast Asia, announced today that it has been acquired by 8×8 in a deal worth about $125 million. The acquisition will help San Jose, California-based 8×8 expand in Asia, where Wavecell already has offices in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Wavecell’s cloud API platform, which includes SMS, chat, video and voice messaging, is used by companies such as Paidy, Lalamove and Tokopedia. It has relationships with 192 network operators and partners like WhatsApp and claims its infrastructure is used to share more than two billion messages each year.

The terms of the deal includes $69 million in cash and about $56 million in 8×8 common shares. Founded in 2010, Wavecell’s investors included Qualgro VC, Wavemaker Partners and MDI Ventures.

In a prepared statement, 8×8 CEO Vik Verma said “8×8 is now the only cloud provider that owns the full, global-scale, cloud-native, technology stack offering voice, video, messaging, and contact center delivered both as pre-packaged applications and as enterprise-class APIs. We’re excited to welcome the Wavecell employees to the 8×8 family. We now have a significant market presence in Asia and expect to continue to expand in the region and globally in order to meet evolving customer requirements.”