The California-based holding company will keep Kik Messenger running while trying to make it faster and remove spam from the app. Meanwhile, San Francisco equity-management software firm Carta has hired 51 of Kik’s former employees, who will staff a Waterloo-based research-and-development centre. (The Logic)

Talking point: For Kik, these moves represent two major steps in its restructuring. It is cutting its workforce from about 150 to 19, and it shut down the messaging app while fighting an ongoing lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its cryptocurrency, Kin. MediaLab has said it will continue to allow Kin to be used as payment on the messaging app, keeping open an important revenue stream for Kik. It still has about 75 employees in its Tel Aviv office and is looking to have another tech company hire them en masse. By scooping up a group of former Kik employees, Carta will be able to hit the ground running in Canada. It will be entering an increasingly crowded fintech space in Canada, but has the capital and the connections to be a competitor. Carta was valued at US$1.7 billion earlier this year, and has attracted investments from major U.S. VCs, including Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.