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Public App, a location-based social network that connects individuals to people in their vicinity, has raised $41 million in a new round, just six months after securing $35 million as the hyper-local Indian startup looks to expand its presence in the world’s second largest internet market.

A91 Partners led the new round in Public App, valuing the Indian startup at over $250 million. The Indian startup, which also operates popular news aggregator app InShorts, said some of its existing investors also participated in the round but did not identify them. Public App counts Lee Fixel’s Addition, SIG, and Tanglin Venture Partners among its investors. (The startup didn’t specify the name of the new round.)

Azhar Iqubal, founder and chief executive of Public App, said the new social network has amassed over 50 million users already and he aims to expand it outside the country eventually. The app, launched in April 2019, has already attracted individuals such as politicians and several major firms such as Amazon, HDFC Bank, and GSK that are using Public App to reach their audience.

“Public has continued to maintain best in class retention and engagement metrics while scaling. We look forward to working closely with the founders to help build an outstanding company,” said Gautam Mago, General Partner at A91 Partners, in a statement.

Public App, which is available in several major Indian languages (including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, Gujarati and Marathi), allows shop owners and other local businesses to drive e-commerce and hire local talent, and political leaders, government authorities, and media houses to reach local audiences.

“The app is already being used by over 50,000 elected officials, government authorities and citizen journalists to connect with their locality. Additionally, many local businesses have also started to use the app to reach their customers in the locality,” the startup said.

The app, which also provides entertainment and news services, sees more than 1 million videos being created on the platform each month.

The startup plans to deploy the new capital to expand its tech infrastructure, broaden its content offerings, and hire more talent.

Once thought of a crowded space, several Indian startups have launched their social networks in recent years. Kutumb, an eight-month-old startup, is in talks with Tiger Global to raise funds in a round that values it about $170 million, TechCrunch reported earlier this month.

You may have seen an article over at Axios today about the rebrand of many of the Verizon Media products under a new Yahoo+ banner. I would like to congratulate all of the teams that have worked hard to build a cohesive brand identity and a new plan for a bunch of great properties with fine individuals at the helm.

Unfortunately, some of the wording in the article, and a subsequent Techmeme headline on the old twitter dot com have led some people to believe that TechCrunch would now be YahooCrunch or some such situation. That is not correct. TechCrunch is a brand that, against all odds, has stood the test of time in a radically changing and challenging landscape. That’s thanks to the bold idea of its founder as well as the tireless efforts of every member of the TC staff past and present who are all immensely talented, generous, multi-hyphenates that I have taken intense satisfaction from working with every day.

Since we’ve been around a while we have had the pleasure of being called dead a bunch of times by critics, owners, cynics and fans. But I just checked, and we’re still here.

See you tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. I leave you with our motto of this day:

Airwallex, the fintech company for cross-border businesses, announced today it has added $100 million more to its Series D round, bumping its valuation up to $2.6 billion. The extension was led by Greenoaks, with participation from Grok Ventures and returning investors Skip Capital and ANZi Ventures.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Jack Zhang told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used for Airwallex’s United States launch in the second quarter of this year, expand its payment coverage to new regions like the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and add more products, including physical cards.

This latest extension brings Airwallex’s Series D round to $300 million, and total equity raised so far to $500 million. Airwallex first announced its Series D in April 2020 after raising $160 million, then another tranche that added $40 million in September 2020.

Airwallex reached unicorn valuation after its Series C in March 2019. The company was founded in Melbourne in 2015, and now has more than 600 employees across 12 offices in Australia, China, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States. In its announcement today, Airwallex said it is also hiring for more than 500 positions.

Airwallex’s products for cross-border businesses include foreign currency accounts and multi-currency debit cards with Visa, international money transfers and a suite of APIs that allow companies to do things like accept and manage international payments, and manage their foreign exchange risk.

OnePlus unveils new hardware, Apple updates its educational offerings and Facebook reveals plans for its next developer conference. This is your Daily Crunch for March 23, 2021.

The big story: OnePlus announces its first smartwatch

The Chinese smartphone maker announced the OnePlus Watch today, a $159 smartwatch with a minimalist design and a new operating system. It also comes with a number of different sensors to measure things like heart rate and blood oxygen level.

In addition, the company also announced its OnePlus 9 series of phones, its first phone built in partnership with legendary camera company Hasselblad, with a primary camera that includes a 48-megapixel Sony sensor. Pricing starts at $729, with pricing for the Pro starting at $969.

The tech giants

Apple launches the Apple Teacher Portfolio recognition, updates Schoolwork and Classroom apps — Teachers who complete a total of nine lessons will be able to submit their portfolio of lesson examples to earn the Apple Teacher Portfolio designation.

Facebook will bring back F8 on June 2 as a pared-back, single-day, virtual-only conference for developers — There will be no Mark Zuckerberg keynote this year.

New York’s Department of Financial Services says Apple Card program didn’t violate fair lending laws — This follows an investigation triggered by online complaints back in November 2019.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Robinhood files confidentially to go public — The company may be closer to a public debut than we anticipated.

‘Instant needs’ delivery startup goPuff raises $1.15B at an $8.9B valuation — Last fall, delivery startup goPuff made a big splash by raising $380 million in funding and acquiring West Coast beverage retailer BevMo shortly afterwards.

Roll still doesn’t know how its hot wallet was hacked — Move fast, break things, get hacked.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges — Discord is a well-financed unicorn that has raised significant capital and reportedly sports rapidly expanding revenues.

Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay? — New data from the DocSend Startup Index show that for early-stage fundraising, particularly in the pre-seed round, founders need to approach VCs with much more than a great idea to secure funding.

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features — Most startups would kill for hockey-stick growth, but it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Top tech CEOs will testify about social media’s role in the Capitol attack this week — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all appear virtually before a joint House committee Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

‘Black Widow’ and ‘Cruella’ will get Premier Access releases on Disney+ — That means Disney+ subscribers will have the option to pay an additional, one-time $29.99 fee to watch the live action remake of “Cruella” at home on May 28, or to do the same for “Black Widow” on July 9.

Extra Crunch Live’s April slate features speakers from Forerunner, Accel, Fifth Wall and more — April showers bring May flowers, and by “flowers” I mean actionable insights and advice from some of the top minds in tech.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

When Amazon announced last month that Jeff Bezos was moving into the executive chairman role, and AWS CEO Andy Jassy would be taking over the entire Amazon operation, speculation began about who would replace Jassy.

People considered a number of internal candidates such as Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure at AWS and Matt Garman, who is vice president of sales and marketing. Not many would have chosen Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky, but sure enough he is returning home to run the division he left in 2016.

In an email to employees, Jassy wasted no time getting to the point that Selipsky was his choice, saying that the former employee who helped launch the division when they hired him 2005, spent 11 years helping Jassy build the unit before taking the job at Tableau. Through that lens, the the choice makes perfect sense.

“Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team. And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well,” Jassy wrote in the email.

Jassy has run the AWS since its earliest days taking it from humble beginnings as a kind of internal experiment on running a storage web service to building a mega division currently on a $51 billion run rate. It is that juggernaut that will be Selipsky to run, but he seems well suited for the job.

This is a breaking story. We will be adding to it.