Asia’s push into physical AI is being fueled by the same manufacturing prowess that made the region a global industrial powerhouse.
Venmo is rolling out a significant redesign over the coming months that aims to make the app more useful, social, and easier to navigate. This is the peer-to-peer payments app’s biggest refresh since 2021.
The timing is notable. PayPal, which owns Venmo, is restructuring to spin Venmo off as a standalone business unit — a move widely seen as laying the groundwork for a potential sale. Stripe has reportedly expressed interest in buying PayPal outright. In that context, a splashy redesign looks less like a routine update and more like a window-dressing job ahead of a transaction.
The rollout will begin this week, followed by additional features over the next few months. By the time fall arrives, the entire redesign is expected to be available to all users.
One of the first changes users will notice starting this week is the revamped feed. Where it once showed a simple list of who paid whom — with GIFs, a heart button, and comments — the new feed will feature a wider variety of visuals and larger images, along with more ways to respond to payments, such as reactions and quick action buttons like “Pay Again” and “Say Thanks.” It’ll also be more personalized, surfacing tailored cashback offers from brands you shop from and product suggestions based on previous purchases.
Image Credits:Venmo
Another addition is the ability for users to endorse their favorite local businesses directly through the app. A new “Give a Shoutout” button will be available under payments in the feed.
As Alexis Sowa, Venmo’s senior vice president and general manager, explained to TechCrunch, “One of the things that we hear a lot, especially from Gen Z and younger audiences, is a real desire to support and endorse local businesses or merchants that they like. With this feed redesign, we’re giving an opportunity for them to share what we call social proofing. In the future, you will be able to kind of endorse that business — give a thumbs up, almost to say, ‘I go to you.’”
Image Credits:Venmo
Two new tabs, “Send” and “Money,” will also launch in the next few months. In the Send feed, your most frequent contacts now appear as a row of profile icons front and center, instead of requiring you to dig through past contacts or user names. The bill-splitting “Groups” feature” is now easier to access, too, letting users split expenses with up to 30 people. You can also send gifts to friends and schedule payments in the Send section.
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The Money tab, meanwhile, is where you can manage your expenses as well as access Teen Accounts and Crypto.
There will also be a new Rewards tab that pulls all limited time offers in one place. This is also where Venmo’s Stash program will live. Launched last November, this gives users up to 5% cash back when they shop with their favorite brands in the app, money that’s deposited directly to their Venmo Mastercard Debit Card.
Sowa said the redesign came out of a year of user research, and that one of the biggest findings was how many features people didn’t know existed. “One of the biggest insights is how many features and functionalities we have that [customers] just have no idea exist in the app,” she said.
The update reflects a broader trend in what younger users expect from payment apps — less utility tool, more social platform. For instance, apps like Verse and Daylight offer features that let users keep up with their friends’ spending behavior, and the European fintech app Revolut offers features like group bill splitting and in-app chat.
Venmo’s core audience increasingly wants to see and share financial activity the way they would on any other feed, and the app is clearly trying to meet that expectation before a potential new owner comes knocking. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch.
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Asia’s push into physical AI is being fueled by the same manufacturing prowess that made the region a global industrial powerhouse. Across South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan, manufacturing remains a central pillar of economic growth. Unlike economies more heavily weighted toward services or software, these countries have long relied on large-scale production, export-driven industries, and highly optimized supply chains. That structural foundation is now shaping how artificial intelligence is adopted and where investment flows.
Which makes it particularly significant that Config, a Seoul- and San Jose- based startup building the data layer for robotic foundation models (RFMs), has secured backing from the venture arms’ of South Korea’s biggest manufacturers.
Samsung Venture Investment led its oversubscribed $27 million seed round at a valuation of more than $200 million, bringing Config’s total raised to $34 million. Hyundai Motor’s venture arm ZER01NE Ventures, LG Tech Ventures, and SKT America, a South Korean telco giant’s VC unit, also joined as strategic investors, alongside angel investor Pieter Abbeel (co-founder of Covariant AI and a UC Berkeley professor) and financial backers including Mirae Asset Ventures, Korea Development Bank, GS Futures, Kakao Ventures, and Z Ventures.
Config was founded in January 2025 by CEO Minjoon Seo, a former researcher at Meta and chief scientist at Twelve Labs, along with four co-founders with backgrounds at Waymo, Google and Naver. Instead of building robots themselves, the team is focused on a simpler goal, providing data robots need to learn and operate. They believe that better data will be key to making robots more useful.
Training large language models is expensive, because of the computing power required to process them, but the raw material, vast amounts of text from across the internet, is easy to obtain. Teaching robots to move is a completely different challenge, Seo said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. Every piece of training data has to be physically collected, like you need the robot, the facility to run it, and people to operate it. That makes robotics AI more costly to develop than software-only chatbot, according to the Seo. As companies pursue more capable robots, the cost of gathering and labeling data can rise quickly.
Config wants to be the company that makes everyone else’s robot AI possible. The startup compares its role to TSMC, a Taiwanese chipmaker that manufactures
for Apple, Nvidia, and AMD without competing with any of them. Config aims to play a similar role in robotics by supplying the data. The approach is gaining traction as large manufacturers increasingly seek to build their own proprietary robot AI instead of relying entirely on outside vendors. That is the market Config is betting on.
Config is already generating revenue, COO and co-founder of Config Jack Bang said. The startup’s current customers include large manufacturers, system integrators, and companies in the agriculture and defense sectors, Bang told TechCrunch. Peers in the space include Physical Intelligence, Generalist AI and Skild AI.
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Image Credits:Kate Park
Config records humans performing physical tasks in controlled studio environments and in the field. The startup operates out of Seoul and Hanoi, where a workforce of nearly 300 handles data production. To date, it has accumulated over 100,000 hours of human motion data, more than 30 times the size of AgiBot World, the largest comparable open-source dataset at roughly 3,000 hours.
Most robotics teams train AI models on human motion data and then adapt those models for a robot. Config is taking a different approach, Seo said. The company focuses on transforming the data before training begins so it is better suited to the way robots move and interact with the world. Seo compared the process to language translation. Training a model on one type of data and e
Korea’s biggest manufacturers back Config, the TSMC of robot data TechCrunch
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