Venmo finally kills its most criticized feature

PLUS: Uber-backed Lime eyes $2B valuation

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Venmo is finally overhauling its payments app. After years of criticism that its public-by-default social feed exposed users’ routines, relationships, and spending habits to anyone paying attention, the PayPal-owned platform is making privacy a core part of the experience.

It’s the app’s biggest redesign since its inception, and a long-overdue reset for a company that turned oversharing into a growth strategy.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Venmo rolls out privacy-focused redesign

  • Lime, the Uber-backed scooter giant, files for IPO

  • California sues Meta over scam ad profits

  • Whoop adds on-demand doctors to its data

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

VENMO

Image source: PayPal

The Rundown: PayPal-owned Venmo is rolling out its biggest app redesign since its inception in 2009, and it’s finally defaulting new users to friends-only payments instead of broadcasting their transactions to the world.

The details:

  • New users’ posts will now be visible to friends only by default, rather than the public; the option to restrict further to “just me” is also available.

  • An updated send screen will display each transaction’s privacy status before it goes out, so users know what they’re sharing before they hit send.

  • The redesigned feed adds emoji reactions and quick actions like “Pay Again” and “Say Thanks,” plus a “Give a Shoutout” button for local businesses.

  • The rollout begins this week on iOS and Android, with the full redesign expected to reach all users by fall.

Why it matters: Venmo is finally walking back its public-by-default social feed, which critics have long warned could expose users’ daily routines and relationships. Re-centering the app on friends-only and private payments shows that basic data protection is starting to outweigh growth hacks built on sharing all the details.

TOGETHER WITH ASTROCADE

The Rundown: Astrocade is revolutionizing user-generated gaming. Backed by $56M from Sequoia, it’s the ultimate platform to seamlessly scroll, play, and instantly build your own games for a massive global community.

With Astrocade, you get:

  • Free AI editor to generate or import assets.

  • Create viral games and earn real money.

  • Build high-quality, complex games using powerful AI.

LIME

Image source: Lime

The Rundown: Lime, the neon-green scooter and e-bike operator that has been flirting with public markets since 2020, has finally pulled the trigger — filing its S-1 with the SEC and targeting a $2B valuation.

The details:

  • Lime grew revenue from $521M in 2023 to $686.6M in 2024 and $886.7M in 2025, though the company posted net losses of $59.3M last year.

  • On the brighter side: Lime has generated free cash flow three years running, hitting $104M in 2025, nearly double the prior year.

  • Lime is still carrying around $1B in current liabilities, with roughly $846M due within 12 months and $675.8M owed by year’s end.

  • Uber remains deeply embedded — exclusive in-app integration accounts for roughly 14–16% of Lime’s total revenue.

Why it matters: Lime is one of the last major micromobility players still standing after Bird went bankrupt in 2023, and its filing marks a pivotal moment for a sector riddled with financial wreckage. If Lime can’t persuade public investors that shared scooters are a real business, the category may not get another shot.

META

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Santa Clara County in California sued Meta, accusing the company of knowingly profiting from a flood of scam ads on Facebook and Instagram while publicly overstating its enforcement efforts.

The details:

  • California’s Santa Clara County filed suit against Meta, alleging violations of state false advertising and unfair competition laws.

  • The complaint, drawing on leaked internal documents reported by Reuters, alleges Meta generated as much as $7B annually from “high-risk” advertisers.

  • Prosecutors say the company’s ad‑targeting tools and AI systems helped scammers micro‑target victims and rapidly scale their schemes.

  • The county claims Meta publicly overstated the strength of its ad review and anti‑fraud safeguards while failing to curb obvious scam activity.

Why it matters: The suit is among the most aggressive legal actions yet to allege a major platform’s ad business structurally helped fraud rather than simply failing to police it. If Santa Clara County can prove that Meta capped enforcement to protect revenue, the legal and regulatory exposure for the industry could be significant.

WHOOP

Image source: Whoop

The Rundown: Whoop is turning its screenless fitness band into a quasi-virtual clinic, adding on-demand video consultations with licensed clinicians just as Google readies a Whoop-style Fitbit Air to chase the same always-on-health crowd.

The details:

  • Live video consultations with U.S.-based licensed clinicians roll out in-app this summer as a paid add-on to a standard Whoop membership.

  • Each session is built on months of continuous biometric data and, when available, bloodwork and medical history.

  • A new partnership with health records keeper HealthEx enables EHR syncing, letting clinicians pull up info and procedures directly within the app.

  • Whoop, which has over 2.5M members globally, closed a $575M funding round in March that pushed its valuation to $10.1B.

Why it matters: Whoop is betting that months of continuous biometric data — not a 15-minute visit — becomes the foundation of primary care. With Google’s Fitbit Air entering the screenless band market at $99, the fight looks to be less about hardware and more about what you can do with all of that longitudinal health data.

QUICK HITS

Amazon is expanding its “Amazon Now” service — which delivers groceries, household essentials, and other items in 30 minutes or less — to dozens of U.S. cities.

Trump invited Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, and a group of other top U.S. CEOs to join his trip to China this week for a summit with President Xi Jinping.

The FCC will now let already‑approved foreign-made routers and drones keep receiving updates until 2029, slightly easing its earlier ban on such devices.

China plans to expand its Tiangong space station from a T-shaped outpost into a larger six‑module complex with international astronaut access, as the ISS retires.

A QTS data center in Georgia reportedly consumed nearly 30M gallons of unmetered water during a drought due to two unsupervised connections.

TikTok is rolling out a £3.99-per-month ad-free subscription in the U.K., removing ads and ad-targeting data use, likely in response to local GDPR privacy rules.

Texas is suing Netflix, accusing it of secretly harvesting and monetizing users’ and children’s data in violation of Texas consumer protection laws.

Astronomers used James Webb Space Telescope data from the COSMOS-Web survey to create the most detailed map yet of the universe’s cosmic web.

Prosus aims to generate about $3.6B in annual revenue from Just Eat within a year as it pushes to streamline and grow its European food-delivery operations.

COMMUNITY

That's it for today's tech rundown!

We'd love to hear your feedback on today's newsletter so we can continue to improve The Rundown experience for you.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

Reply

or to participate.