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MoonPay CEO and co-founder Ivan Soto-Wright speaking at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Cryptocurrency start-ups have raised record funding this year.

It’s no surprise, then, that some major players in the space — from the Winklevoss twins’ virtual currency exchange Gemini to Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin’s blockchain start-up ConsenSys — announced massive new funding deals in the last week.

MoonPay, a relative newcomer, is taking the crypto mania in venture capital to new heights. The three-year-old fintech firm said Monday it has raised $555 million in its first-ever financing round. The investment, led by Tiger Global and Coatue, values the company at $3.4 billion.

Founded in 2018, Miami-based MoonPay’s software lets users buy and sell cryptocurrencies using conventional payment methods like credit cards, bank transfers or mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

It also sells its technology to other businesses including crypto website Bitcoin.com and non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea, a model CEO Ivan Soto-Wright calls “crypto-as-a-service.”

Soto-Wright said the firm aims to make crypto accessible to the masses in the same way that video-conferencing tools like Zoom made it easier to make calls over the internet.

“With the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, I think right now we are still in the dial-up days,” he told CNBC in an interview.

“Eventually we will get to this place where it’s frictionless to move any amount of value around anywhere in the world, and costs move as close as possible to zero.”

‘PayPal for crypto’

With prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies hitting all-time highs lately, venture capital investment in the start-ups powering the market is booming. Investors are looking for the next Coinbase after the crypto exchange giant’s blockbuster listing in April.

MoonPay’s pitch to investors is that it offers a “gateway” to digital assets. For now, that includes bitcoin, ether and other digital tokens like NFTs. But Soto-Wright’s vision is to expand the platform to include everything from digital fashion to tokenized stocks.

“People are calling us similar to PayPal, but for crypto,” he said.

The company has strong controls and checks in place to tackle money laundering, Soto-Wright said. Regulators have become increasingly wary about illicit activity in the market.

MoonPay says it has been profitable since launching its platform in 2019. The firm is on track to hit $150 million in annual revenue this year after transaction volumes skyrocketed 35-fold from 2020. Its service is now used by more than 7 million customers.

Still, the company faces stiff competition, not least from fintech pioneers like PayPal, which rolled out its own crypto features last year.

Soto-Wright said he’s not worried about the competition. He described PayPal as a “walled garden” that doesn’t give users control over their assets. “We believe the future of crypto is about customers taking possession of their private keys,” passwords that grant people access to their funds, he said.

IPO ambitions

Looking ahead, MoonPay plans to spend the money raised on new products and expansion. Soto-Wright said the firm already has ambitions to take the business public. “We have aspirations eventually to be a public company,” he said.

Cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile, however, and that has impacted even the most well-known players in the space. Coinbase, for example, missed sales estimates in the third quarter after a drop in monthly users.

Bitcoin hit an all-time high of nearly $69,000 earlier this month, but has since dropped about 17%. Ether, meanwhile, is down 13% from its record high.

Soto-Wright said MoonPay is prepared for a potential downturn in crypto markets, adding the firm is “agnostic” on which assets it supports.

“In the same way that telecoms got disrupted by voice over IP (internet protocol), we think, over time, financial services and all these different applications will be disrupted by the blockchain,” he said.

“There’s obviously going to be volatility as the market is trying to discover what assets, what blockchains are ultimately going to get adopted.”

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Qualcomm unveils driverless tech with BMW, sees ‘domino effect’ of customers

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Qualcomm unveils driverless tech with BMW, sees 'domino effect' of customers

A concept car shows off Qualcomm’s auto technology. The car was on display at the Qualcomm booth at the IAA Mobility show in Munich on September 9, 2025.

Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

Qualcomm’s self-driving technology developed alongside BMW is expected to spark significant interest from other automakers keen to licence the system, the CEO of the U.S. chip giant told CNBC.

The comments underscore how Qualcomm, a major player in smartphone chips, is diversifying its business into new areas, with automotive among its fastest-growing divisions.

Last week, Qualcomm and German auto giant BMW announced an automated driving system that is built on the former’s semiconductors.

It’s called the Snapdragon Ride Pilot Automated Driving System and is a type of driver-assist feature. It allows hands-free driving on certain roads or even lane changing, but not for the car to be fully driverless.

The system will debut on the new BMW iX3 and the companies say it will be available across 100 countries by 2026.

But while the system has been developed with BMW, Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday that the technology has been designed to licence to other automakers.

“Everybody’s been waiting for this moment, including ourselves, because people wanted to see how it performs in the street,” Amon said, adding that the BMW iX3 will launch with the automated driving technology in 60 countries. This will allow the system to be demonstrated, he said.

“I think what I expect to happen, as OEMs [Original Equipment Manufacturers] see how it compares and how competitive it is, that’s going to ignite a domino effect” of other carmakers wanting to use the technology, Amon said.

The Qualcomm CEO said the company had “made a lot of progress” in talks with other carmakers, but is “not yet ready to announce” any partnerships yet.

Qualcomm bets big on autos

Qualcomm’s biggest revenue driver is the chips that power smartphones from players including Samsung and Xiaomi.

But Amon has looked to diversify the company into new areas, including PC chips, data center semiconductors and automotive.

He has big hopes for the auto business, which brought in nearly $1 billion in the June quarter and grew 21% year-on-year. The company has previously said it expects automotive revenue to grow to $8 billion by its 2029 fiscal year.

In an effort to achieve that, Qualcomm is designing technology for various parts of a car. Its chips can power in-car entertainment systems, for example, and on Monday, the company announced a partnership with Google Cloud that allows automakers to create their own digital assistants.

“[Qualcomm] are building a whole ecosystem led by software,” Murtuza Ali, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC. “The main thing is they are a fully integrated solution provider for autonomy, which is what they were lacking.”

Traditional car firms, particularly in Europe, are thought to be falling behind when it comes to technology such as autonomous driving, compared with their rivals from China.

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‘We’re all kind of in shock.’ Oracle’s revenue projections leave analysts slack-jawed

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'We're all kind of in shock.' Oracle's revenue projections leave analysts slack-jawed

Oracle Chair and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison speaks at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sept. 16, 2019.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

John DiFucci from Guggenheim Securities said he was “blown away.” TD Cowen’s Derrick Wood called it a “momentous quarter.” And Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said, “We’re all kind of in shock, in a very good way.”

That’s how the analysts opened their comments and questions during Oracle’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, as the company’s stock price was in the midst of a 28% after-hours rally. The software vendor had just reported an earnings and revenue miss, but nobody was paying attention to that.

Wall Street was singularly focused on Oracle’s forward-looking numbers and a massive growth trajectory that the company now sees thanks to its booming cloud infrastructure business and a host of new artificial intelligence deals.

“There’s no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up,” Zelnick said on the earnings call.

Analysts are often effusive in their praise of companies on their earnings calls after results beat expectations or a forecast is particularly impressive. Executives are used to being congratulated on an excellent quarter.

But the latest Oracle call was different, and investors knew why.

Based on its post-market move, Oracle’s stock is poised to surge more on Wednesday than it has in any single session since the dot-com boom in 1999. And the shares, trading at $310 in extended trading, are set to zoom past their record close of $256.43, which they hit last month. Oracle’s market cap would jump past $870 billion.

The excitement is mostly around cloud infrastructure, where Oracle competes with Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Oracle said that revenue this fiscal year in that business will jump 77% to $18 billion from $10 billion in the last year.

In fiscal 2027, the figure will almost double to $32 billion, before reaching $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion in the subsequent three years.

Oracle projects $144 billion in cloud revenue by 2030, boosts capex 65% to $35 billion

CEO Safra Catz said in the earnings statement that the company signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the quarter. OpenAI said during the quarter that it agreed to to develop 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity with Oracle.

Oracle’s remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, soared to $455 billion, up 359% from a year earlier.

Wood from TD Cowen said the RPO figure is “just really amazing to see.” He asked Catz for more clarity on how much it was going to cost the company to build out the infrastructure needed to service those customers.

Catz said that one difference between Oracle and some of its rivals is in the way it deals with the property that houses data centers.

“I know some of our competitors, they like to own buildings,” she said. “That’s not really our specialty. Our specialty is the unique technology, the unique networking, the storage — just the whole way we put these systems together.”

In an interview with CNBC’s “Fast Money” after the report, D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria called Oracle’s projected cloud revenue figure “absolutely staggering,” and said it represents a tenfold increase in the next five years.

But he also had a word of caution. The big hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google, he said, have instituted a strategy of “offloading their capacity to other data center providers.” That’s leading businesses to use Oracle.

“These are not organic customers to Oracle,” said Luria, who recommends holding the stock. “This is Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s customers that will use Oracle capacity.”

Heading into Tuesday’s report, Oracle shares were up 46% for the year, while the Nasdaq had gained 13%.

WATCH: Luria on Oracle’s ‘staggering’ numbers

D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria talks Oracle's guidance and how it propelled the stock to record highs

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Klarna prices IPO at $40, above online lender’s expected range

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Klarna prices IPO at , above online lender's expected range

Klarna is synonymous with the “buy now, pay later” trend of making a purchase and deferring payment until the end of the month or paying over interest-free monthly installments.

Nikolas Kokovlis | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Online lender Klarna priced its IPO at $40 per share on Tuesday, above its expected range, in a deal that values the Swedish company at about $15 billion.

Klarna, known for its popular buy now, pay later products, said it raised $1.37 billion for the company and existing shareholders, who are looking to exit a portion of their long-held positions. The company will list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “KLAR.”

The public markets have shown an increased appetite for tech IPOs of late, with companies like crypto firm Circle and software vendor Figma soaring in their highly anticipated debuts. Klarna, which competes with Affirm, was initially aiming to go public earlier this year, but put its plans on hold due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s April announcement of reciprocal tariffs on dozens of countries.

Widely known for its short-term, interest-free financing products, Klarna has attempted in recent months to rebrand itself as more of a digital retail bank. Its IPO will be a test of Wall Street’s excitement about the direction of its business.

Klarna disclosed a net loss of $53 million in the second quarter, widening from $18 million in the same period a year go. Revenue climbed 20% from a year earlier to $823 million over the stretch.

Klarna makes money by charging merchants that use its online payment tools a small fee on every transaction. It also generates income from interest on longer-term financing products and late fees.

Of the total amount being raised, $1.17 billion is going to shareholders with just $200 million going to the company.

WATCH: Everything you need to know about Klarna’s IPO

Klarna IPO: Everything you need to know

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