Category: Tech news

Longtime venture capitalist Shirish Sathaye has quietly joined early-stage investor Cervin Ventures as a general partner.

Most recently, Sathaye was a general partner at Formation 8, the embattled venture firm co-founded by Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, Brian Koo (a scion of the Koo family, owners of the electronics giant LG) and former Khosla GP Jim Kim. Formation 8 announced in 2015 that it would not raise a third fund and would begin winding down operations.

Sathaye, who’s been in the VC business since 2001 as a GP at Matrix Partners, then at Khosla Ventures, remains a partner in Formation 8’s sophomore fund. His previous investments include Nutanix, Samsung-acquired Grandis, McAfee-acquired Solidcore Systems, cybersecurity startup Vectra Networks and data storage provider Panzura.

He’d only been at Formation 8 for one year when the firm began to crumble. As we now know, conflict between the firm’s founding partners led to its demise. Lonsdale quickly raised $425 million for a spin-off fund called 8VC; Koo, in a similar fashion, brought in $357 million for Formation Group and Kim followed up with a $200 million fund called Builders.

Sathaye, for his part, had grown tired of the “bigger is better” mentality and opted to leave the business of big VC for good.

He began making angel investments and advising startups at Cervin Ventures, a pre-Series A VC fund focused on the enterprise. It closed a $56 million fund in 2017, its largest vehicle to date.

“Smaller funds, in general, make better decisions,” Sathaye told TechCrunch. “At a larger fund, there are more people around the table to make decisions. I think returns are better when there are fewer people making those decisions.”

Watching funds swell past the billion-dollar mark and investors deploy the “spray and pray” strategy was a turn-off, Sathaye said. Startups have more access to capital than ever before, yet most companies can get off the ground with very little funding, thanks to recent innovations like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

“With AWS, companies can bring products to market quickly and they can reach their customers with much less money,” Sathaye said. “If you look at it just from a returns profile, the smaller funds will get better cash-on-cash returns simply because companies don’t need that much money to be successful.”

Palo Alto-based Cervin is led by two other GPs, Preetish Nijhawan and Neeraj Gupta. It invests $1 million to $2 million in early-stage startups. Sathaye says he’ll be focused specifically on the security, mobile, cloud and data verticals.

For the 37.5 million adults who have trouble hearing without a hearing aid, Bose has a new product for you. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved audio technology company Bose to market a new hearing aid device.

Dubbed the Bose Hearing Aid, it’s designed to let people with audio impairments fit, program and control the hearing aid without the help or assistance of a healthcare provider. The hearing aid uses air conduction to capture sound vibrations through the microphone. From there, the device processes the signal, amplifies it and then plays it back through an earphone inside the ear canal. Through a mobile app, people can adjust the hearing aid.

“Hearing loss is a significant public health issue, especially as individuals age,” Malvina Eydelman, M.D., director of the Division of Ophthalmic, and Ear, Nose and Throat Devices at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a press release. “Today’s marketing authorization provides certain patients with access to a new hearing aid that provides them with direct control over the fit and functionality of the device. The FDA is committed to ensuring that individuals with hearing loss have options for taking an active role in their health care.”

Before approving the device for marketing, the FDA says it reviewed data from clinical trials of 125 patients. Those studies showed comparable results to those with professionally fitted devices.

“In addition, when participants self-fit the Bose Hearing Aid, they generally preferred those hearing aid settings over the professionally-selected setting,” the FDA wrote in a blog post.

Bose is not the first company to try this. The now-defunct startup Doppler Labs developed earbuds with active listening, enabling people to augment the way they heard the world. There’s also Nuheara, which unveiled earbuds earlier this year that are designed to boost hearing. What makes Bose’s different, however, is the FDA approval.

Bose went through the FDA’s De Novo premarket review process, which is a regulatory pathway for low to moderate-risk devices that are especially novel, and not already available. As the FDA mentioned, this is the first hearing aid authorized for marketing that enables people to fit and program their own hearing aids. Still, depending on state laws, people may be required to purchase the device through a licensed hearing aid dispenser.

It’s not clear what this device looks like, or if the Bose Hearphones — currently marketed as a “conversation-enhancing” headphone — will simply be remarketed as a hearing aid.

“Bose has been delivering industry-leading audio experiences for over 50 years, and more recently we’ve applied that expertise to help people hear better in noise,” Bose spokesperson Joanne Berhiaume told TechCrunch in a statement. “Now, the De Novo grant by the FDA validates that Bose technologies can be applied to help people with mild to moderate hearing impairment take control of their hearing. We look forward to bringing affordable, accessible and great sounding solutions to the millions of people who could benefit from hearing aids but don’t use them.”

It’s 2018, and pop culture is one giant ouroboros. Exhibit A: Wolverine: The Long Night, the new comic miniseries inspired by the podcast that was inspired by the comics. Is this a first? Maybe? Who can say? Who really cares anymore? Comics are pop culture now, and the nerds have definitively won the war, and here, enjoy this book.

Announced today at New York Comic-Con, the Benjamin Percy-written, Marcio Takara-drawn, Rafael Albuquerque-covered five-issue miniseries is based on what has, by all accounts, been a successful first-scripted podcast for Marvel.

Here’s a synopsis of the new comic, which is also basically a synopsis of the podcast: “Following a string of mysterious deaths in Burns, Alaska, Special Agents Sally Pierce and Tad Marshall arrive to investigate. They soon find there’s more going on than meets the eye…”

Spoilers: A diminutive, angry Canadian gentlemen with retractable metal claws crosses their paths. The book is due out in January.

When consumers think of search, they mainly think of Google, but under the hood of enterprises and other organizations, there are hundreds of other kinds of challenges that require search technology. Today, one of the bigger companies providing search functionality, Elastic, saw just how valuable that business can be, by way of a very strong debut as a public company. Elastic today opened up at $70, a pop of 94 percent on its initial public offering at $36 on Thursday night, and after an active day of trades, $70 is where it closed, too.

Founded in Amsterdam, Netherlands, but with an office also in Mountain View, Elastic raised $252 million at a market capitalization of around $2.5 billion in that IPO, before commencing trading as ESTC on the New York Stock Exchange.

Its stock went as high as $74.20 today, more than 100 percent over its IPO price. The lowest it went is $66.17/share, evidence of strong demand for shares in the company.

Although Google has long dominated the market for consumer search queries, Elastic has taken the approach of providing a set of strong search tools to organizations to help them both with tackling their own internal data troves, but also to help them build products for their customers to use.

This is no small thing: the tech world is built on big data, and there are absolutely troves of it being created and that goes into making services work, but it’s only valuable if it can be harnessed, controlled and shaped to whatever purpose you need, and that’s where Elastic comes in, covering both customer-facing and internal requirements.

“When you hail a ride home from work with Uber, Elastic helps power the systems that locate nearby riders and drivers. When you shop online at Walgreens, Elastic helps power finding the right products to add to your cart. When you look for a partner on Tinder, Elastic helps power the algorithms that guide you to a match. When you search across Adobe’s millions of assets, Elastic helps power finding the right photo, font, or color palette to complete your project,” the company noted in its IPO prospectus.

“As Sprint operates its nationwide network of mobile subscribers, Elastic helps power the logging of billions of events per day to track and manage website performance issues and network outages. As SoftBank monitors the usage of thousands of servers across its entire IT environment, Elastic helps power the processing of terabytes of daily data in real time. When Indiana University welcomes a new student class, Elastic helps power the cybersecurity operations protecting thousands of devices and critical data across collaborating universities in the BigTen Security Operations Center. All of this is search.”

The company says its portfolio of search products — based on open source and existing under the brand Elastic Stack (which includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash) — have been downloaded over 350 million times since the company launched in 2013 — a mixture of paid and free products.

The strength of Elastic’s message/mission and customer base has been enough to entice investors despite the fact that the company is not profitable.

It has 5,500 customers across over 80 countries and in a wide range of industries, and it posted sales of $159.9 million in fiscal 2018, versus $88.2 million the year before, growth of 81 percent. It is also loss-making. Elastic posted net losses of $52.7 million in FY 2018, with a net loss of $52.0 million the year before, while operating cash flow was negative $20.8 million in FY 2018.

Dutch startups have had a strong little run in the market in the last couple of months. Adyen, the payments company, popped 67 percent when it made its debut in June. For some further context, Elastic had hoped to raise $100 million when it first filed its IPO in September. Overall for the tech IPO market, this is a big bounce back after the lacklustre performance of Funding Circle last week.

Sales intelligence firm Apollo left a “staggering amount” of exposed online, including 125 million email addresses and nine billion data points.

From an epic account of the online drug market Silk Road, to a poignant tale about a man seeking intimacy with his robot clone, these stories will blow your mind. Again.

An off-road e-bike that’s as beastly on the single-track as it is on paper.

Fitbit data may have helped catch one of its customer’s killers, and not for the first time.

According to numerous media reports, a 90-year-old visited his stepdaughter at her home in San Jose, Ca. earlier this month, where he says he brought her pizza and visited briefly. But according to data provided to authorities by Fitbit, data from the stepdaughter’s Fitbit Alta wristband device — which tracks one’s heart rate and the number of steps taken during the day — showed a “significant spike” in her heart rate during the man’s visit, followed by a “rapid slowing.” Eight minutes after her heart had risen so rapidly, and five minutes after her stepfather left her home, it stopped.

A concerned coworker discovered the woman at her home five days later. She had a “gaping laceration” on her neck and wounds on the top of her head, say police, who arrested the stepfather based in part on a combination of video surveillance and assistance from Fitbit, which seems to have a less contentious relationship with law enforcement than some tech companies.

Indeed, Fitbit’s newest privacy policy states that the company “may preserve or disclose information about you to comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; to assert legal rights or defend against legal claims; or to prevent, detect, or investigate illegal activity, fraud, abuse, violations of our terms, or threats to the security of the services or the physical safety of any person.”

As the New York Times notes, if convicted, the man won’t be the first assailant whose crime may have been revealed in part by a Fitbit. Last year, a Connecticut woman’s dying moments were recorded by her Fitbit in a case that strongly suggests her husband murdered her, despite his claims that the couple was attacked in their home.

According to local media, her wristband showed that her last movements were at 10:05 a.m. the day she died, nearly an hour after her husband told police she had been killed. The man, who was discovered by first responders on the kitchen floor, still half-tied to a metal chair, later told investigators he had a pregnant girlfriend and that the pregnancy was not planned. He’s still awaiting trial.

We’ve known for a few months now that Jon Favreau was working on a live-action Star Wars series for Disney’s upcoming (but as of yet unnamed) streaming service. But that’s about all we knew.

Until now! Favreau just dropped a few huge details out of nowhere.

In a surprise Instagram post, Favreau mentioned:

• It’s at least tentatively called “The Mandalorian”. For the unfamiliar, Mandalorians are a group of warriors in the Star Wars universe. The most famous Mandalorians are Jango and Boba Fett, though Favreau notes that this series will focus on “another warrior.”
• It’ll take place “after the fall of the Empire” but before the First Order shows up; in other words, after Return of the Jedi but before Force Awakens.

Alas, that’s it for now. No word on casting, or new characters, or even any concept art to be seen. Will the new series tap much of the existing universe, or will it intentionally be set far enough away so as to be mostly self contained? This new warrior — are they a bounty hunter, the gig their fellow Mandalorians are best known for? Will it finally answer, once and for all, whether Boba Fett survived the sarlacc pit in Disney’s hacked-and-slashed version of the canon? We’ll have to wait to find out.

Blizzard — the company behind massive game titles like World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Hearthstone — is getting new leadership.

After 27 years, Blizzard President Mike Morhaime is stepping down from the company he co-founded back in 1991 (back when it was known as Silicon and Synapse.)

J. Allen Brack, previously Senior Vice President and Executive Producer on WoW, will now lead the company. Brack has been with Blizzard since 2006.

In a letter about the transition, Brack also mentions that Blizzard co-founder (and the original lead designer of WoW) Allen Adham will be joining the company’s executive team to “oversee development of several new games.” Adham left Blizzard in 2004 shortly before WoW went live, which he later called his “biggest mistake.”

Morhaime doesn’t say much about his reason for departure, besides that he’s “decided it’s time for someone else to lead Blizzard Entertainment.” He’ll stay on with the company as a strategic advisor.

Kia is finally sharing more details about its upcoming all-electric crossover — the 2019 Kia e-Niro — that made its debut in Korea earlier this year. The upshot: it’s got some range.

The production version of the all-electric crossover, which Kia is showing off at the Paris Motor Show this week, has a range of about 301 miles (for those who opt for the bigger battery pack) on the European WLTP combined testing cycle. The estimated EPA-range has yet to be released, but expect it to be lower, at somewhere around 250-ish miles in the U.S.

That 301 miles of range is one of the longer ranges in the world of EVs and it’s possible thanks to a 64 kilowatt-hour battery pack, regenerative braking and a feature that gives the driver suggestions on when to coast or brake to further optimize the system. The e-Niro with the 64 kWh battery pack is combined with a 150kW electric motor that produces 201 horsepower and 291 pound-feet of torque.

The vehicle comes standard with a smaller 39.2 kWh battery, which has a 100 kW electric motor and offers a driving range of up to 193 miles on a single charge under the WLTP cycle.

The all-electric crossover is based on the Niro hybrid and plug-in models. Kia has sold more than 200,000 of these hybrid and plug-in Niro vehicles worldwide since it was introduced in 2016.

The e-Niro is headed to Europe first. The company says the e-Niro will go on sale in select European markets at the end of the year. Kia’s U.S. website indicates the vehicle will also come to the states by the end of the year. However, we have yet to hear specifics on U.S. sales or whether the European rollout might push that date into 2019.

The e-Niro looks a lot like its gas-based counterpart and offers some of the same features, including the option to add a driver assistance system with adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, forward collision warning and lane-keep assist.

However, there are a few differences. The grille on the e-Niro has an integrated charging port and the front bumper has been changed to help improve the aerodynamics, and, by extension, the range of the vehicle. The vehicle also has redesigned air intakes.

The inside is a bit different too, as there’s no need for a traditional gear stick and gear linkage in a vehicle with an all-electric powertrain. Nor is there a need for a transmission tunnel, allowing engineers to create a larger storage area at the base of the central console. Kia replaced the transmission with a new “shift-by-wire” rotator dial drive selector.

The dial sits on a panel that extends out from the base of the central armrest. Drivers will also find on the panel buttons for the electronic parking brake, heated and ventilated seats, heated steering wheel, drive mode selector, parking sensors and the Niro’s braking “Auto Hold” function. 

The vehicle is equipped with a 7-inch touchscreen at the center of the dashboard that includes a few electric vehicle-specific features, such as the ability to find nearby charging stations and monitor charge levels. Owners will be able to set a departure time for their next journey, enabling the car to heat itself to a set temperature before the driver departs. There’s also a charge management function designed to extend the life of the battery.

Nintendo is nearing its 130th birthday, and the company is once again in the midst of major changes as it embraces mobile platforms and online services. But Nintendo of America’s president Reggie Fils-Aime says that should come as no surprise: “We reinvent ourselves every five or 10 years. We have to. It’s in our DNA.”

In an interview at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Fils-Aime talked, in his immaculately Nintendo-promotional manner, about the company’s ups and downs over the last decade and what it took to get the Switch out the door.

“We focus on giving consumers experiences that they haven’t even thought of,” he explained. Anyone who has followed Nintendo for a few years certainly wouldn’t disagree — remember the vitality sensor? “By going down this path you create doubters. And we’ll be the first to admit that there will always be stumbles along the way.”

“The Wii had sold a hundred million units globally; the Wii U did not have that same level of success,” he admitted. That’s something of an understatement; the Wii U is widely considered something of a boondoggle, interesting but confusing and hugely outgunned by the competition when it came to what was valued by the rapidly growing mainstream gaming world.

“But in the words of one of our presidents — this is [Hiroshi] Yamauchi — when you’re doing well, don’t be excited by that high-flying performance, and when you’re doing poorly, don’t be sad. Always have an even keel,” he said. Not exactly catchy, but it is good business advice. The focus should be on the horizon.

And that’s where it was, despite the painfully low sales numbers and lack of third-party support. As he tells it, they just plowed ahead with new lessons under their belt.

“If we had not had the Wii U, we would not have the Switch,” he said seriously. “What we heard from customers was that the proposition of a tablet on which they could experience gameplay, coupled with the ability to play games on the TV, is really compelling. Users were telling us, ‘I want to play with this tablet, but when I get 30 feet away from the TV, it disconnects.’ The one point gamers all hate is the point where they have to put the controller down. So it was an important step for us to be able to deliver on this proposition.”

“When I first saw the embodiment of that system,” he recalled, “the hairs on the back of my neck raised up.” It was the same feeling, he said, that he had with the Wii Remote and the DS — both featuring technologies that people were highly skeptical of at first but proved versatile and compelling.

Touchscreens weren’t common when the DS came out, and motion controls weren’t common when the Wii came out, he noted. Both have since become mainstream — not entirely due to Nintendo’s success with them, of course, but it would be disingenuous to say that had nothing to do with it.

But while the company can rightly be said to be taking risks in some ways, in other ways it is uniquely stuck in the past. Its most successful franchises are well past a quarter of a century old.

As Fils-Aime sees it, however, this is exactly how it should be. Mario and Link are characters the way Mickey Mouse or even someone like Robin Hood are characters. New franchises like Splatoon can be established and cared for, but the traditional ones (though no one mentioned Metroid, predictably and unfortunately) should be recycled and brought to new platforms and generations.

Nowadays that includes mobile games, where Nintendo has been taking tentative steps in recent years.

Nintendo’s latest has been criticized for its unvarnished quest for players’ money.

“We see our mobile initiatives as a way to bring our intellectual properties and our gameplay experiences to a larger population than the tens or hundred million consumers that own a dedicated gaming system,” he said. “With Super Mario Run, we literally have hundreds of millions of consumers experiencing Mario, consumers in places where we don’t even distribute our gaming systems. Then maybe they buy that Super Mario t-shirt, they may eat that Super Mario cereal, they may buy a Nintendo Switch.” (Presumably imported.)

Here Fils-Aime’s comments rang a bit hollow, however. Nintendo’s mobile strategy has leaned hard on the “gacha” style game that massively incentivizes in-app purchases of virtual currencies and grinding levels to unlock new characters randomly in loot box style. This seems so far from Nintendo’s core mission of entertainment and so close to the current industry method of cash extraction that it’s hard to believe it’s what the company really wanted to create.

It does, as Fils-Aime said was the goal, allow them to be “effective” on platforms and marketplaces they don’t themselves own, and it does drive their “overall business agenda.” But it seems as though the company is still trying to figure out how to truly bring its games to mobile. Perhaps the upcoming Mario Kart game will be a better option, but it could very easily go the other way, as well.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the working group that has long offered such euphonious, IEEE-defined names for Wi-Fi protocols such as 802.11ab and 802.11n, has finally decided enough was enough with the numbers and letters and such. Their decision? The next Wi-Fi version will be Wi-Fi 6 — and sucks to your ass-mar if you don’t like it.

“For nearly two decades, Wi-Fi users have had to sort through technical naming conventions to determine if their devices support the latest Wi-Fi,” said Wi-Fi Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa in a release. “Wi-Fi Alliance is excited to introduce Wi-Fi 6, and present a new naming scheme to help industry and Wi-Fi users easily understand the Wi-Fi generation supported by their device or connection.”

Wi-Fi 6 is actually 802.11ax, an improvement on 802.11ac. The ostensible data rate for Wi-Fi 6 is, according to Wikipedia, “37% higher than IEEE 802.11ac, the new amendment is expected to achieve a 4× increase to user throughput due to more efficient spectrum utilization.” It runs eight 5 GHz streams and four 2.4 GHz streams.

In addition to 6 we will now all call 802.11ac Wi-Fi 5 and 802.11n will be called Wi-Fi 4. Devices will be officially certified by generation and the first Wi-Fi 6 devices will arrive in 2019. We would encourage you to stop using the 802.11 nomenclature well before the deadline, ensuring a swift and effortless transition into Wi-Fi chaos.

Scientists interested in cannabis as a subject for pharmaceutical studies may find an unlikely new home for their research into the plant, its byproducts and biochemistry aboard the International Space Station.

Yes, weed is going to space thanks to the work of a small Lexington, Ky.-based startup called Space Tango.

The company makes a “clean room” laboratory in a microwave-sized box. Because space is tight on the International Space Station, companies that want to conduct experiments in microgravity have to do more with less. And Space Tango gives them a small environment in which to perform tests and monitor the results.

Using Space Tango’s “CubeLab” modules, which slot into the larger TangoLab containers, companies like Anheuser-Busch can send barley up to the space station to observe how the crop could be cultivated in environments approaching zero gravity.

Now, Space Tango is taking its own steps to develop experiments on how the zero gravity environment could affect cannabis cultivation.

Alongside two Kentucky hemp and cannabis cultivation and retail companies, Atalo Holdings, which provides hemp genetics, and Anavii Market, an online retailer of hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD) therapeutics, Space Tango has set up its own subsidiary to research how microgravity can be used to better cultivate particular strands of hemp for medical compounds.

“For all entrepreneurial companies in this new space area everyone is trying to hone in [sic] on what is the actual business,” said co-founder and chairman Kris Kimel of Space Tango, in an interview. “We’re trying to figure out here what’s the business now… For us, the model is looking at low earth orbit to actually develop and design applications for life on earth.”

Kimel said the company now has two micro-laboratories installed on the International Space Station and has payloads launching to the space station for corporate and university customers about six times a year.

In its early stages, the company is mainly operating on existing income. “We’re able to meet our operating expenses off of revenue,” says Kimel. “Which is great for a company that is not just three years old.”

As it looks to create these kinds of joint ventures with other companies, Kimel said that additional revenue could come from a profit-sharing agreement rather than just straight contracts for services. The new subsidiaries enhance what the company sees as its broader mission, Kimel said.

“Each time a new type of physics platform has been successfully harnessed such as electromagnetism, it has led to the exponential growth of new knowledge, benefits to humankind and capital formation,” said  Kimel, in a statement. “Using microgravity, we envision a future where many of the next breakthroughs in healthcare, plant biology and technology may well occur off the planet Earth.”

Industrialized hemp production and research and development into the crop was enabled four years ago with the passage of the 2014 U.S. Farm Bill. It was the first time in 70 years that new rules were enacted to promote research into applications for the hemp plant as fiber, food or medicine.

By taking the plants to space, Space Tango hopes to study whether the growth of certain strains can be better controlled in the absence of gravitational stresses on the plant’s development.

“When plants are ‘stressed,’ they pull from a genetic reservoir to produce compounds that allow them to adapt and survive,” said Dr. Joe Chappell, a member of the Space Tango Science Advisory Team who specializes in drug development and design. “Understanding how plants react in an environment where the traditional stress of gravity is removed can provide new insights into how adaptations come about and how researchers might take advantage of such changes for the discovery of new characteristics, traits, biomedical applications and efficacy.”

Founded by former NASA engineer Twyman Clements and Kimel, who was serving as the president of the nonprofit Kentucky Science and Technology Corp., Space Tango was spun up to be the for-profit arm that would commercialize experiments in space as a service for large businesses that wanted to take advantage of the unique properties of manufacturing in microgravity.

There have been few commercially viable products that have come from microgravity research or production, in part because it’s expensive to bring products from space to earth.

That’s why Space Tango has focused on drug discovery and pharmaceuticals and why the company is spinning up its independent subsidiary that will focus exclusively on cannabis. Pharmaceutical compounds are lightweight and can be profitable in production without enormous volumes.

“That’s why biomedicine is attractive,” Kimel said. “You’re dealing with products that are incredibly high value and incredibly low weight.”

Nearly a year after German fintech startup N26 announced that it would launch its service in the U.K., the company is launching in the U.K. N26 is already quite popular in the Eurozone, with more than 1.5 million customers. In this new market, it will face tough competition from existing players, such as Revolut, Monzo, Starling and many others.

N26 is going to roll out its product in multiple phases. Some lucky few will be able to open an account right away. The startup will then go through its waiting list — 50,000 people already left their email addresses to express interest. After that, anybody will be able to download the app and sign up.

This might sound like a convoluted process, but N26 expects a full public launch in just a few weeks. So it should be quite quick if everything goes as planned.

So what can you expect exactly? British customers will get all the basic N26 stuff with one killer feature — U.K. account numbers and sort codes. This way, customers will be able to receive payments and share banking information with their utility providers just like they would with a regular Barclays or Lloyds account.

When you open an N26 account, you get a true bank account and a MasterCard. Basic accounts are free, and N26 has a proper banking license — your deposits up to €100,000 are guaranteed by the European deposit guarantee scheme. You can then send and receive money and pay with your card. Sending money to other N26 users is instantaneous (they call it MoneyBeam).

N26 recently launched Spaces, a new feature that lets you create sub accounts and put some money aside. It’s still limited, but the company plans to add more features.

Your MasterCard works like any other challenger bank. Every time you use it, you receive a push notification. You can set payment and withdrawal limits, lock your card if you lose it and reset your PIN code. N26 will also bring Black and Metal plans to the U.K.

How does it compare to Revolut?

Let’s be honest, the elephant in the room is Revolut . The company has hundreds of thousands (if not over a million) customers in the U.K. N26 lets you do many of the things you can already do with your Revolut account.

So let me point out a few differences. As I noted, N26 has a banking license and U.K. banking information. N26 cards work in Apple Pay and Google Pay.

When it comes to international payments, N26 lets you pay with your card anywhere in the world without any additional fee. The company uses MasterCard’s conversion rates. Revolut first converts the money with its forex feature and then lets you spend your money.

There are an infinite number of forum posts about the exchange rates you’ll get. Sometimes Revolut is cheaper, sometimes N26 is cheaper. It mostly depends on the day of the week (Revolut conversion rates are more expensive on the weekend) and the currency. Unless you plan to spend tens of thousands of GBP during your vacation, you won’t see a huge difference on your bank statement.

Revolut also has many more features than N26. You can insure your phone, buy bitcoins, buy travel insurance, create virtual cards and more. It’s clear that N26 and Revolut have two different styles.

Revolut has a bigger user base than N26. But it’s always been a bit hard to compare them, as N26 wasn’t available in the U.K. Of course, they will both say there are tens of millions of people relying on old banks — multiple challenger banks can grow at the same time if they capture market share from those aging players. Still, the battle between N26 and Revolut is on.