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Amazon wants to be your palm reader 🖐
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Amazon announced it's expanding its contactless payment solution, Amazon One, from a few Amazon Go stores to seven more Whole Foods Market stores in the Seattle area.
After signing up once, shoppers wave their palm over the Amazon One reader to pay — no wristbands or device needed. The reader captures biometric data from your palm to identify you for payment.
While Amazon slowly works its way up to battle Square, here are new launches speeding up payments in other spaces.
Healthcare
Just-launched Peachy Pay is frictionless payment for medical bills. While we’re not quite at the “wave your palm as you exit the hospital” place, Peachy Pay could be a leap forward for an industry still bogged down by paper bills, clunky payment portals, and phone negotiations.
Subscriptions
As D2C boomed, the stack for small businesses grew too. Still, as hot as subscriptions have become, it's been tough for local sellers to keep up. Per Diem offers local businesses like coffee shops and farmers market sellers a quick onboarding to set up and manage subscription sales, fulfillment, and delivery. The company just announced a $2.3 million fundraise led by Two Sigma Ventures.
Cryptocurrency
Lastbit Cards recently launched to give Europeans the ability to pay in Bitcoin, followed by Lastbit Lite, a solution to pay and get paid in Bitcoin. Maker Prashanth Balasubramanian explained that he was “frustrated with not being able to use Bitcoin in the real world.” Today, it’s rare to see a shop accept Bitcoin, and we recently wrote about how Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong believes payment acceptance is essential to crypto really going mainstream.
Coindesk reported that Lastbit has also been working with Visa to get to market faster in the U.S.
B2B
B2B payments are often slow and manual because they’re full of TBDs. Balance is a new self-serve B2B checkout system to deal with those complexities. Businesses can set up their own payment process, defining their net terms and how they want to pay through a checkout that looks as simple as modern B2C checkouts.
After signing up once, shoppers wave their palm over the Amazon One reader to pay — no wristbands or device needed. The reader captures biometric data from your palm to identify you for payment.
While Amazon slowly works its way up to battle Square, here are new launches speeding up payments in other spaces.
Healthcare
Just-launched Peachy Pay is frictionless payment for medical bills. While we’re not quite at the “wave your palm as you exit the hospital” place, Peachy Pay could be a leap forward for an industry still bogged down by paper bills, clunky payment portals, and phone negotiations.
Subscriptions
As D2C boomed, the stack for small businesses grew too. Still, as hot as subscriptions have become, it's been tough for local sellers to keep up. Per Diem offers local businesses like coffee shops and farmers market sellers a quick onboarding to set up and manage subscription sales, fulfillment, and delivery. The company just announced a $2.3 million fundraise led by Two Sigma Ventures.
Cryptocurrency
Lastbit Cards recently launched to give Europeans the ability to pay in Bitcoin, followed by Lastbit Lite, a solution to pay and get paid in Bitcoin. Maker Prashanth Balasubramanian explained that he was “frustrated with not being able to use Bitcoin in the real world.” Today, it’s rare to see a shop accept Bitcoin, and we recently wrote about how Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong believes payment acceptance is essential to crypto really going mainstream.
Coindesk reported that Lastbit has also been working with Visa to get to market faster in the U.S.
B2B
B2B payments are often slow and manual because they’re full of TBDs. Balance is a new self-serve B2B checkout system to deal with those complexities. Businesses can set up their own payment process, defining their net terms and how they want to pay through a checkout that looks as simple as modern B2C checkouts.
Highlight
Yesterday we announced the three winners of our latest round of Maker Grants.
That included the makers of Rollups, who have launched three products into Product of the Day status. Here’s what they’ve learned.
That included the makers of Rollups, who have launched three products into Product of the Day status. Here’s what they’ve learned.
Ad
We asked 34 customers what Viktor does for them. Not one said chatbot.

They kept using words like colleague, coworker, team member. One CEO called it the glue holding their e-commerce business together, which is a lot, but also… you see why. It lives in Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, so instead of jumping between tabs, you just ask for the thing. Pull Stripe against HubSpot, check Sentry alerts, spin up a campaign brief, build a landing page, send a report upstairs. It all happens there.
It has already hit top 5 on Product Hunt with 130 comments, is SOC 2 certified, and your data does not train models.One user said it was the first time AI felt like a real coworker, which is either exciting or slightly concerning depending on your week.
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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.