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Women's World Banking Brings Making Finance Work for Women Summit to Mumbai

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Women's World Banking Brings Making Finance Work for Women Summit to Mumbai

Leading global nonprofit unlocks women’s financial power and announces the winners of the 2023 Fintech Innovation Challenge

Women’s World Banking, a global leader in advancing financial inclusion for low-income women across the world, is bringing the Making Finance Work for Women Summit to Mumbai, India on 24-25 May 2023. Convening for the first time in person since 2019, the Making Finance Work for Women Summit will provide a space for over 300 leaders in the financial services, investor, philanthropy, policy, and technology communities to come together and discuss innovative ways to economically empower all women through financial inclusion.

“From climate change to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to face an unprecedented number of events negatively impacting the global economy – often with particularly damaging consequences for women,” said Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women’s World Banking. “Nearly one billion women across the world still lack access to the formal financial services that would allow them to be resilient in the face of these challenges. The Making Finance Work for Women Summit is one of the ways Women’s World Banking is trying to close the gender gap in financial services.  We will showcase proven solutions that can be adapted by financial services providers and policymakers around the globe.”

At this year’s Making Finance Work for Women Summit, attendees will have the opportunity to hear from leaders such as Stephanie Copus Campbell, Australia’s Ambassador for Gender Equality; Soraya Hakuziyaremye, Deputy Governor, National Bank of Rwanda; and Rajesh Bansal, CEO, Reserve Bank Innovation Hub. Panel discussions will touch on everything from finance for displaced women, to gender lens investing, to the role of the ‘S’ in ESG, providing attendees with a space to both better understand why financial power is vital to economic resilience and see what they can do to unshackle women’s financial power.

“We are lucky to have so many thought leaders gathered with us in India, which is where Women’s World Banking’s story began more than 40 years ago and where we continue to do some of our most impactful work,” continued Iskenderian. “With India holding the Presidency for the G20 this year, we could think of no better location for creating innovative pathways to women’s financial inclusion.”

Women’s World Banking is excited to bring back the Fintech Innovation Challenge as a part of this year’s Making Finance Work for Women Summit programming. The Fintech Innovation Challenge is a global competition to showcase solutions that tackle the persistent challenges in serving low-income women.   The Challenge will culminate on the final day of the Summit where the four finalists – GajiGesa, IndiaP2P, MeraBills, and Paycode, selected from a field of 98 applications from 34 countries – will deliver their pitches to a judging panel comprised of experts from financial services, technology, innovation, and regulatory bodies. The winner will receive a priority pitch slot at the Inclusive FinTech Forum in Rwanda, powered by Elevandi. The Challenge is sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Ernst & Young LLP (EY US).

“Fintechs have a unique advantage in addressing the digital financial services inclusion gap for women. This year’s applicant pool was full of innovative companies with exciting business models for addressing the biggest obstacles to women’s financial inclusion,” said Iskenderian. “All four of our finalists, three of which are led by female founders, hold enormous potential to promote women’s economic security and prosperity.”

Women’s World Banking is committed to promoting financial inclusion and bolstering economic empowerment for women. To date, the global organization has increased access and/or usage of financial products and services to more than thirteen million women in emerging markets.  In the last year alone, Women’s World Banking invested eighty-eight million dollars in inclusive finance institutions, reaching over six million women.

The Making Finance Work for Women Summit is presented by Women’s World Banking with support from Leading Sponsor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Scaling Sponsor Ernst & Young (EY US). The event is made possible with additional sponsorship from MetLife Foundation, European Investment Bank, The Sasakawa Peace Foundation, International Finance Corporation (IFC), and The United Nations Capital Development Fund. Women’s World Banking is grateful for the ongoing support of its core funders: Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and Visa Foundation.

For more information, follow @womensworldbnkg at #MFWW2023.

About Women’s World Banking

Women’s World Banking designs and invests in financial solutions, institutions, and policy environments in emerging markets to create greater economic stability and prosperity for women, their families, and their communities. With a Global Network reach of 61 financial services providers in 34 countries serving more than 136 million women clients, Women’s World Banking drives impact through its scalable, market-driven solutions; gender lens private equity fund; and leadership and diversity programs.

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All-in-One Web3 Gaming Ecosystem Blockus Raises $4M Pre-Seed After Completing a16z Incubator Program

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The announcement comes during the Game Developers Conference week, where the company will host a special side event

Blockus, an emerging, innovative force at the intersection of blockchain technology and gaming, today announced a significant milestone, securing $4M in pre-seed funding. This successful raise follows Blockus’s participation in the prestigious a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, which not only provided access to mentors and advisors but also allowed the startup to connect with potential investors.

The pre-seed round was led by Maple VC and included Altos Ventures as well as known angel investors such as Zhuoxun Yin from Magic Eden, Michael Ma from CreatorDAO, and Bryan Pelligrino from LayerZero.

Blockus is dedicated to transforming the gaming experience by enabling studios to onboard their players and build on-chain gaming features with ease. The company has already gained traction in the market, with over 30 partners already signed, including Ambrus Studio, the team behind E4C: Final Salvation. The funding will allow Blockus to accelerate its growth, expand its team, strengthen sales operations, and invest heavily in product development.

“This pre-seed raise marks a pivotal moment in our journey,” said Jess Zhang, Co-founder & CEO at Blockus. “The trust our investors, like Maple VC, have placed in us is both humbling and inspiring. We’re ready to unlock the next level of innovation in the gaming industry, and we’re excited to bring our blockchain solutions to even more studios and developers.”

With a rapidly expanding market – approximately 62% of all dApp activity comes from gaming projects, and Web3 gaming is expected to reach $600B by 2030 – Blockus is in a prime position to capitalize on this growth.

“We’re thrilled to witness Blockus’s latest achievement,” said Johnson Yeh, Founder & CEO at Ambrus Studio. “As innovators in the gaming space, we’re proud to partner with a company that’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. The potential for Web3 in gaming is immense, and we’re confident that Blockus will play a major role in shaping its future.”

The announcement is made in the lead-up week to Game Developers Conference (GDC) taking place in San Francisco. There, the company will host a dedicated event on March 21 at 7 p.m. at the iconic SPIN bar to engage with the Web3 gaming community, and current and potential partners.

“Blockus has the potential to be the catalyst for a new era of gaming, built on the principles of decentralization and player ownership,” said Andre Charoo, General Partner at Maple VC. “The founders’ deep understanding of both gaming and Web3 technologies, combined with their track record, makes them an exceptionally compelling team to back. We believe Blockus is poised to lead the way in the Web3 gaming revolution.”

To celebrate its funding milestone, Blockus is extending a special offer of $20,000 in credits to potential clients for the two weeks following the announcement period. This offer presents a unique opportunity for game developers interested in exploring how Blockus can elevate their game experiences.

About Blockus

Blockus is a complete Web3 gaming economy ecosystem. Beautifully built, fully compliant, and seamlessly integrated into games, the company’s mission is to create a future where players have true ownership of their in-game assets and where gaming experiences are more immersive, engaging, and rewarding.

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Cosmology Raises $5M to Simplify Web3 Application Development

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Cosmology

The “Adobe for Web3” makes building dApps accessible to a wide range of developers, not just those who have expertise with the entire blockchain stack

Cosmology, the tech suite that enables developers to build Web3 apps in the Cosmos ecosystem, has closed its $5M seed round, co-led by Galileo and Lemniscap with participation from Dispersion, Hashkey, Tuesday Capital, the Osmosis Foundation, Chorus One, Informal Systems, and angels including Kevin Lin, Zaki Manian, Leland Lee, and Ethan Beard. As an official part of the Interchain Stack, Cosmology empowers over 2,000 developers to build applications like dYdX, Osmosis, and Celestia. This funding allows Cosmology to support the growth of the interchain, and provide tools that make app development accessible without requiring deep technical blockchain knowledge.

“Having spent nearly three decades at the intersection of design and technology, I see the potential of Web3 and the need to lower the barriers to development,” said Dan Lynch, Founder of Cosmology. “Our mission is to empower a broad range of developers, driving innovation and the shift from Web2 to Web3. We achieve this by enabling builders to swiftly turn their ideas into launched applications, focusing on big-picture concepts rather than the low-level technical details of blockchain.”

Cosmology’s tools make the development of Web3 applications dramatically simpler for developers throughout the interchain and have been downloaded over 5 million times. They’ve created tools like Telescope, which generates easy-to-use TypeScript libraries for developers to access the functionality of Cosmos blockchains, and Cosmos Kit, a universal wallet adapter for quickly making apps that easily interact with Cosmos blockchains and wallets.

“Dan’s work building developer tooling has led to huge growth in the number of applications being built in Cosmos,” said Sunny Aggarwal, Founder of Osmosis. “Cosmology is making app development on the 100+ blockchains in the ecosystem a streamlined, elegant process.”

Initially focused on front-end tools, Cosmology is now broadening its scope of services to offer a comprehensive full-stack environment for developers. The team now includes experts in key blockchain technologies like Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, and IBC Protocol, enhancing its suite’s capabilities across the board. This expansion gives Cosmology extra bandwidth to support developers from design to deployment, covering everything from user interface design all the way to backend blockchain and smart contract tooling.

“Cosmology is the bedrock underlying everything being built right now in the Cosmos and Celestia ecosystems,” said David Feiock, Managing Partner at Galileo. “As an integral part of building application-specific blockchains, Cosmology tools like Telescope materially reduce the complexities for developers allowing for much quicker innovation and iteration cycles, which will be an essential component of this next phase of growth in crypto.”

Commenting on the announcement, Roderik van der Graaf, Founder of Lemniscap, said: “To date, the perceived complexity of Web3 has kept many Web2 developers from exploring novel use cases that would enhance their product offerings. Cosmology is playing a pivotal role in enabling developers to incorporate Web3 elements in their applications, while circumventing the steep Web3 learning curve. We’re delighted to have co-led this funding round and look forward to supporting Dan and the team in executing a strong growth strategy in 2024 and beyond.”

“Dan’s experience building and exiting low-code platforms like Brandcast is invaluable in the Web3 space, where building applications can prove daunting,” said Pat Gallagher, Managing Partner at Tuesday Capital. “Cosmology is democratizing the digital landscape for businesses and developers alike with an Adobe-style suite of products that lower the barrier to entry, so decentralized application development doesn’t require the full-stack expertise that very few software engineers possess.”

“In the early days of the internet, the concept of every business having its own website once seemed like a pipe dream. Today, we’re at a similar point in time before the brink of a revolution with the Internet of Blockchains. Much like low and no-code platforms transformed Web2, making digital participation accessible to all businesses, I see a future where Web3 is equally open and user-friendly,” said Dan Lynch.

As Cosmos becomes an increasingly interwoven mesh of blockchains, Cosmology is at the forefront of enabling developers to build interchain-native applications. This raise helps the team further build out the essential tooling that’s making Cosmos one of the most attractive places to build in Web3 today.

About Cosmology

Cosmology is creating the Adobe of Web3 – a suite of products that work interdependently to catalyze creativity for builders.

Cosmology is building a unified developer experience for cross chain dApps, streamlining everything from low-level encoding and signing to user interfaces and wallet adapters. Our tools are becoming the standard in the interchain, where our community has now grown to 100+ chains and countless smart contract projects across the Cosmos ecosystem.

Hundreds of developers leverage Cosmology’s software to build DEXes, wallets, governance tooling, NFT platforms, lending, leverage, and liquid staking protocols. These include Osmosis, dYdX, Celestia, Cosmostation, Stride, Juno, DaoDao, Stargaze, Mars Protocol, Leap Wallet, AstroTech, Persistence, Quicksilver and more.

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Seattle based Enzzo Announces $3M in Seed Funding to Accelerate Hardware Product Development

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Enzzo supercharges the product definition and requirements process for companies creating hardware. The $3 million seed investment was led by Unlock Venture Partners with participation from PSL Ventures and the Mayfield/Pioneer Square Labs AIStudio Fund.

Enzzo, a company reimagining how hardware products are created by leveraging generative AI, announced today that it raised a $3 million seed investment led by Unlock Venture Partners with participation from PSL Ventures and the newly created Mayfield/Pioneer Square Labs AIStudio Fund. With this round of funding, the company will be expanding the team refining and building its platform.

“I know what it takes to define and ship great products,” said Andy Liu, Managing Director of Unlock Venture Partners, and former VP at VIZIO. “Enzzo is reimagining the process to amplify the abilities of product companies and manufacturers to take an idea, understand the requirements and cost, and get it to market faster with higher quality than ever before. It is a real game-changer for all hardware-related companies.”

Defining new products is challenging enough for software, but hardware’s unique variables and regulatory requirements add complexity. Companies and teams creating hardware are interested in moving faster from a vision to an in-market product but must start by defining the product and developing requirements, which typically take weeks to months. The definition phase is critical, as any hardware changes become increasingly expensive as development progresses, underscoring the critical need for comprehensive requirements and risk assessment from the outset.

To address these problems, Enzzo empowers teams to define innovative products and their requirements faster and more efficiently than is possible today – from weeks or months to days – saving time and expense. Enzzo runs in modern web browsers and leverages the power of foundation models along with company-provided data to prompt, synthesize user inputs, and then generate key outputs. The service features product management expertise accessible via a chat interface, a collaborative workspace for team members and partners to work on requirements, and document generation capability to accelerate the definition of new products.

“Enzzo represents what we believe is the new way that product teams will work by leveraging gains from AI in combination with human creativity to define and create hardware products faster,” said Ford Davidson, co-founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to have awesome investors helping us to grow the company and catalyze the next wave of hardware product innovations.”

Enzzo is a spinout of Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. “I have known Enzzo CEO Ford Davidson for over 20 years and we worked closely together building Dashwire into a successful acquisition by HTC in 2011,” said Geoff Entress, Managing Director. “Ford’s incredible background helping create new category devices and services at Microsoft, HTC, Amazon and, most recently, Meta make him the perfect leader to build Enzzo into a massive player in the hardware space.”

About Enzzo
Enzzo, Inc. is a Seattle, Washington-based company founded in 2023 by product innovators who have worked on award-winning products at startups and tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Samsung, HTC, and Roku.

About Unlock

Unlock Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm run by founders and operators that invest in world-changing technology companies based in Seattle and Los Angeles.

About PSL Ventures
PSL Ventures is a venture capital fund located in Seattle, WA. The fund is affiliated with Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. The organization partners with exceptional founders at the earliest stages to help build and invest in market-defining technology companies, primarily based in the Pacific Northwest.

About Pioneer Square Labs (PSL)
Pioneer Square Labs is a Seattle-based startup studio that creates and launches technology startups.

About AIStudio Fund
AIStudio Fund is an investment vehicle backed by Mayfield to invest in AI spinouts of Pioneer Square Labs.

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