TikTok is quietly building a super app with shopping, hotel bookings, fintech, and sports

Airwallex raises $320m at an $11bn valuation, betting on agentic finance

Airwallex huy động thành công 320 triệu USD trong vòng Series H, nâng định giá lên 11 tỷ USD, đồng thời công bố doanh thu thường niên 1,3 tỷ USD và khối lượng giao dịch 287 tỷ USD. Công ty tập trung phát triển "agentic finance" với hai sản phẩm mới: nền tảng tài chính tự động T:0 và ví kỹ thuật số Airi, trong khi sự tham gia của các quỹ crossover gợi ý khả năng IPO sắp tới.

Lập trình viên nên đọc bài này để hiểu cách các công nghệ tài chính tiên tiến như agentic finance, tự động hóa giao dịch và nền tảng AI được xây dựng từ cơ sở hạ tầng phần mềm, từ đó tìm hiểu về các xu hướng mới trong việc tích hợp AI vào hệ thống tài chính và ứng dụng trong thực tế.

Airwallex raises $320M at an $11bn valuation

Airwallex has closed a $320M Series H round at an $11bn valuation, up from $8bn just six months prior, led by Addition with participation from Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price, Amex Ventures, and others. The company is pivoting beyond payments infrastructure toward 'autonomous finance,' unveiling two new products: T:0, an AI-native platform that automates a company's entire finance function (bookkeeping, taxes, compliance, forecasting) currently in private beta, and Airi, an agentic consumer wallet designed to serve as payment infrastructure for AI agents transacting on users' behalf. Airwallex reported $1.3bn in annualised revenue (up 74% YoY) and $287bn in annualised transaction volume (up 120%). The company argues its decade-long investment in 85 regulatory licenses and local settlement rails gives it a compliance edge in the emerging agentic payments race, where Stripe, OpenAI/Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal are also competing.

TikTok's road to becoming a super app

TikTok is steadily expanding beyond social media toward a super app model, similar to WeChat in China. Recent moves include TikTok GO for hotel and attraction booking, a fintech license application in Brazil for payments and lending, a FIFA World Cup sports hub, casual in-app games, microdrama content, and continued growth of TikTok Shop (which hit $15.82B in U.S. sales in 2025). The strategy aims to keep users inside TikTok for discovery, commerce, entertainment, and financial services rather than switching to Google, Amazon, Spotify, or other platforms.

All you need is PostgreSQL

A deep-dive into building a complete financial transaction system using only PostgreSQL 18, arguing against the common reflex of adding specialized infrastructure. The post walks through designing schemas for a banking-style API with managed/external accounts, stateful transfers, and immutable transactions. Key techniques covered include: SQL 2011 temporal tables for account activity periods, domain types for data integrity, constraint triggers enforcing a transfer state machine, HOT updates via fillfactor tuning for write throughput, cursor-based pagination over composite primary keys, incremental balance ledger maintenance via triggers, and serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) to prevent write skew. The design also uses updatable views as a decoupling mechanism, replacing the need for microservices. Benchmarking results for a startup-scale scenario are included.

Google Finance gets a dedicated app for Android

Google has launched a dedicated Android app for Google Finance, offering watchlists, real-time market data, live financial news, and an AI-powered 'Key Moments' feature that explains stock movements. An iOS version is planned for later. The move puts Google in direct competition with Yahoo Finance and Robinhood. Alongside the app, Google is rolling out portfolio tracking globally on the web, letting users view holdings in a single dashboard and interact with an AI research tool using natural-language queries. New AI task features allow users to set up automated briefings and performance summaries based on their watchlists or portfolios.

Taktile raises $110M to put AI in charge of bank decisions

Taktile, a Berlin-and-New-York startup, has raised $110M in a Series C led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, bringing total funding to $184M. The company sells an Agentic Decision Platform that blends AI agents, hard rules, data, and human oversight to automate high-stakes financial decisions — including loan underwriting, insurance claims, customer onboarding, and anti-money-laundering checks. Clients include Mercury, Monzo, Faire, and Pleo. Taktile claims customers have achieved 95% automation in B2B underwriting and a 75% reduction in AML false positives. The company argues general-purpose AI is insufficient for regulated financial decisions where errors cost millions, positioning its platform as auditable and steerable by business owners, not just engineers. The funding will go toward expanding in the US, Europe, and Latin America, including a new São Paulo office.

FirstQFM Reports Quantum Forecasting Results Using NVIDIA CUDA-Q FirstQFM Reports Quantum Forecasting Results Using NVIDIA CUDA-Q

FirstQFM announced at ISC 2026 that its Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) system achieved a 56.1% series-level win rate against leading classical foundation-model baselines in zero-shot financial time-series forecasting. Built on proprietary Quantum Foundation Models and powered by NVIDIA CUDA-Q, cuQuantum, and cuTensorNet, the system was scaled on the Leonardo Supercomputer. The company claims to outperform AI forecasting models from Google, Salesforce, and Amazon on NISQ-era hardware, with plans for both cloud and on-premises enterprise deployments using NVIDIA NVQLink.