🗓 All FinTech news in April 2022
Sienna is among several other blockchain startups trying to prevent “front-running”, where transactions on Ethereum can be preempted by someone else simply by them paying a higher transaction fee — just like trumping a trade on the stock market by paying a higher fee to a broker.
When I met with Lydia’s co-founders Cyril Chiche and Antoine Porte, they both had read my recent article on Zenly, another popular social app designed in Paris.
Bharat Founders Fund and a number of entrepreneurs, including Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal, DeFi Pulse founder Scott Lewis, AngelList India head Utsav Somani, The Graph’s Pranav Maheshwari, and Treebo founder Rahul Chaudhary also participated in the round. It offers developers the ability to make their own NFTs interact with data feeds of their choice, which could be a web3 platform such as Chainlink or a Web 2.0 outlet like Weather.com.
Transportation startup DeltaX is accelerating its plans to digitize the trucking industry in its native Bolivia and beyond thanks to a recent $1 million seed round. With participation from high-level roles in Latin America’s transportation sector, including two startup founders: Nowports CEO Alfonso de los Rios and Nuvocargo CEO Deepak Chhugani.
Kard manages the relationships with each business looking to offer rewards to promote their brand, making it easy for a new issuer to mix-and-match from Kard’s offerings and integrate those rewards into the issuer’s own user interface, CEO and founder Ben Mackinnon told journalist in an interview. Kard‘s rewards-as-a-service API streamlines the process for card issuers, allowing them to create a customized rewards program tailored to their particular customer base by choosing from Kard set of merchant partnerships.
The crypto market is showing no signs of slowing down as funds and investors alike continue to deploy massive amounts of capital into the ecosystem. Today’s evidence of the trend: Dragonfly Capital, a crypto-centered investment firm, closed its third venture fund for $650 million, the firm’s managing partner, Haseeb Qureshi, told TechCrunch. The fund was \[…\]
Taxfix as you might suspect prefers to talk about the good news stories around tax filing — it’s easy! and it’s often free money owed to you! — so Ott wasn’t keen to talk about how much money it calculated people owed to the state, but there is an opportunity there too to provide financing and longer-term managing of that financing as a different kind of product.
Sumutasu, a Tokyo-based proptech startup that offers a direct online real estate purchase service, has secured $8.2 million in equity and $1.6 million in debt.
Rozic teamed up with Paola Sanchez and Tomislav Biscan to build a new payments network for cash-based economies in order to enable money to flow as easily as information does. Bogota-based payments infrastructure startup Minka has secured $24 million in a funding round co-led by Tiger Global Management and Kaszek.
A lot of B2B payments tech is built on top of B2C tech, such as Stripe, that was engineered to handle consumer card transactions, according to de Souza. As such, according to de Souza, a company accounting department can waste time manually searching for payments, and then even more time trying to reconcile individual invoices.
Ondo is primarily focused on building many of the functions typically associated with the middle and back office of an investment bank on-chain, Allman explained, noting that it does not currently have plans to directly offer advisory services to DAOs or crypto companies as a traditional investment bank might.
The Boston-based asset manager, which administers plans covering more than 20 million participants representing $2.7 trillion in assets, said the launch is expected to take place by midyear, debuting at bitcoin supporter Michael Saylor firm MicroStrategy, which holds billions of dollars of the asset on its balance sheet.
Now, Cogni has raised a $23 million funding round led by Hanwha Asset Management and CaplinFO with a new mandate — bringing web2 and web3 services together on one platform, Ravishankar said.
Seattle-based Copper offers features such as personalized debit cards, access to 50,000 ATMs and support for digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Fiat Ventures General Partner Alex Harris, who was head of growth at digital bank Chime in its early days, is joining Copper’s board as part of the financing.
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, acquired NFT aggregator Gem.xyz (Gem) to “better serve” its more experienced users, the company said in a blog post. The deal, which comes a few months after OpenSea bought DeFi wallet startup Dharma Labs, will allow OpenSea to “learn from Gem’s expertise and intuition about the advanced NFT community,” the \[…\]
Zenda, a UAE-based startup looking to change how parents pay school bills, and the way educational institutions manage fee collection, is eyeing Africa as its next frontier for growth.
In addition to payment methods, Arrow also integrates shipping information and affiliated loyalty programs, so customers see everything on a single checkout page. Arrow can be integrated into shopping platforms like WooCommerce or Magneto or through APIs that let merchants replace their existing storefronts with Arrow.
Instead, Bitso is working with Moss.Earth, a São Paulo, Brazil-based carbon offsets company, to indirectly mitigate the emissions associated with transacting bitcoin and Ethereum-based tokens via its platform.
Skyflow, which sells data privacy tools for corporate customers, this morning announced a partnership with Plaid, a unicorn that helps pass fintech data between parties through an API. So, data privacy matters quite a lot to Plaid, and Skyflow was willing to cook up a special variation of its standard product recipe just for the fintech API company’s customers. Sharma also stressed that due to the technology that underpins Skyflow — polymorphic data encryption — users of his company data storage system can still run workflows and analysis on their information without decrypting it. I’d hazard that Plaid views data privacy in the fintech space as a key plank undergirding its future; if consumers lose faith that using fintech apps and services is secure, their interest in connecting with said products could decline.
In a statement Ashutosh Bhatt, CEO of Pillar, said: Ever since I moved to the U.K. and found I couldn’t access any of the everyday products I had in India this has been a problem I have been passionate about solving. Adding to this roster is fintech startup Pillar, which has now raised a pre-seed round of £13 million ($16.9 million) led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC. The company claims it will be able to provide immigrants with access to credit products when moving to a new country. Founded by Revolut alumni Ashutosh Bhatt and CTO, Adam Lewis, Pillar has an Open Banking-led data and analytics engine that will be launched in Q3 in 2022.
In the world of crypto, where vast amounts of investment are pouring into young and scrappy teams building uncharted technology, it increasingly the VC firms who are investing heavily in research to sweeten their sell to early teams with plenty of offers on the table. On Thursday, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was building out a dedicated crypto research team led by faculty from Columbia and Stanford.
A developer-focused bank Column emerges from stealth today to — if Hockey’s pronouncements are to be believed — turn the fintech industry on its head. By contrast, Column, a nationally chartered bank with a direct connection to the Fed, has an in-house ledger and data model to power various fintech services.
LiquiFi, part of Y Combinator’s winter 2022 batch, helps startups automate their token vesting, manage their token cap table, and issue token grants in compliance with regulations.
Convoy, a digital freight network that connects shippers with carriers, has raised $260 million in fresh funding to scale up initiatives that will push the trucking tech industry into new ground.
To bring more users to its platform, it will also partner with NFT artists globally, who will do collection drops on Coinbase NFT in the near future, Saxena shared. For example, if an NFT contains details that are illegal in the U.S., Coinbase NFT would ban it, Saxena said.
Much of Lyric core team regrouped and decided to focus on building out what is today Wheelhouse, as the remote work environment precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic led to more people seeking longer-term rentals.
In 2021, Gandhi started Creative Juice alongside Ezra Cooperstein, the president of Night, a management company representing top digital creators like makeup maven Safiya Nygaard, underwater treasure hunter DALLMYD and stunt YouTuber MrBeast, who also sits on the Creative Juice cap table.
PayU, as a provider and builder of fintech solutions, will be able to leverage Treinta as a channel for getting its own customer-facing tech deeper into the market in Colombia and the rest of Latin America, but Treinta will also become another retail channel for PayU’s under-the-hood technology.
Wayne Chang, co-founder and CEO of Spruce, told journalist that web2 platforms that offer sign-in capabilities have been able to access this data in the past because they offer trust and verification to users of the network. That’s the question Spruce is trying to answer by building a public utility of sorts for internet users, but doing so requires individual users to build trust with one another by voluntarily sharing data through the network when they can’t rely on a centralized intermediary to make assurances.
Its acquisition of Pry is not only reflective of Brex’s new emphasis on offering strong software products, but also its continued commitment to early-stage startups — the demographic which was the company’s target customer in its own early days. Dubugras said that Brex valued the startup less on its own metrics and more on the value it believed it could generate for Brex by cross-selling into its existing customer base.
Tokio Marine, a Tokyo-headquartered insurance corporation, said Tuesday it has launched its $42 million corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, dubbed Tokio Marine Future Fund, to invest in early-stage startups around the world.
BlockApps has raised $41 million in a new funding round to continue its expansion into the enterprise blockchain space, the company president and CEO Kieren James-Lubin.
Founded in 2007 by Perez and Oscar Garcia Mendoza, who now serves as chairman of Novopayment’s board, NovoPayment had been bootstrapped since inception until it raised its Series A round earlier this year, the company announced today. Novopayment has been focused since its founding on building out a tech stack that ties all the critical processes together for financial institutions to build out their digital banking services.
While Alipay focuses on China’s domestic consumers and merchants, its sister Alipay+ appears to be Ant’s ambition to go after users outside China who have similar cross-border payments needs.
The exchange, one of the largest in India and which also helps power the orderbook of rival Andreessen Horowitz-backed CoinSwitch Kuber (valued at $1.9 billion), is also exploring building a ventures arm, as is popular among other global exchanges such as Coinbase, FTX and Binance2, Gupta said, but it’s not something CoinDCX is planning to launch anytime soon, he suggested.
Union54 can reach an agreement with participating central banks and issue its own domestic and continental debit card, it can shorten settlement time and integrate more local payments native to the region. Mlambo also added that through his and a few colleagues’ work via the African Renaissance Conference, Union54 has gotten in touch with three central banks keen to explore how settlement agreements would work with a new card scheme.
Its API technology can approve businesses for the BNPL in seconds so they can begin offering the installments.
U.K.-based Leatherback offers multi-currency accounts with the option to exchange currency across multiple countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Nigeria, Egypt, Uganda, Tanzania, Angola, South Africa, the UAE, Denmark, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. Now, fintech startup Leatherback, a U.K.-based cross-border payments platform, has raised what it describes as a $10 million pre-seed round led by ZedCrest Capital, a pan-African investment firm. Leatherback offers a multiple currency solution for cross-border transactions. Immigrants, international students, and the migrant population in general all require international payments, or foreign exchange.
Immigrants to the United States face myriad challenges besides having to learn a new language. In many cases, they are dealing with a foreign and complex financial system, may struggle with finding adequate housing and health care and just generally feeling lost. Welcome Tech, a startup aiming to build “an operating system” for immigrant families.
What if you could buy a Peloton with pre-tax dollars? How about vitamins and supplements? Skincare products? Or even mattresses and massages? All of those may likely qualify as purchases you could make through a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) or Health Savings Account (HSA).
The idea with Wagestream is not just to give those workers faster liquidity when they need it, but to give them the ability to use that money in different ways — for example with features to invest small amounts into stocks, and to bring in controls to save money incrementally in a way that makes the most practical sense for those users.
Digital mortgage company Better.com is gearing up for another round of layoffs, multiple sources with knowledge of internal happenings at the company have told journalist.
The verdict that China web3 community has been waiting for months is here: NFTs, or the tokens used to prove the ownership and authenticity of an item, must not be used for securitization or transacted in cryptocurrencies, said China’s banking, securities and internet financial associations in an announcement on Wednesday.
With 12 million users and nearly $200 million in annual recurring revenue, expense software provider Emburse has built much of its business in the enterprise. Historically, it has competed with legacy players like Concur and Expensify and ERP players. But now Emburse is making a big push into the SMB space and going head-to-head with \[…\]
Today, decacorn Brex revealed that it is making a big push into financial software with the release of a new spend management product called Brex Empower. Brex is one of a number of companies in the corporate spend management space that has grown increasingly crowded — and competitive — in recent years.
Umba said it brings a wide range of transparent and accessible financial products to those underserved by legacy banks across Africa — only 43% of the region’s population are account holders at financial institutions. However, the new funding will allow the company to test this out as it prepares to launch in new markets, including Egypt, Ghana and Kenya, where mobile money is prominent.
In addition to the capital raise, BlackRock has entered a strategic partnership with Circle to be its primary asset manager of USDC cash reserves and explore capital market applications for its stablecoin, among other objectives.
The startup is looking to capitalize momentum behind NFT profile pic collections and ENS (.eth) handles to build out a network of NFT-based avatar identity products. Genies, an LA-based digital avatar startup, announced Tuesday that it had raised $150 million in funding from Silver Lake, with participation from others.
Today, said Sathyanesan, Winden offers digital entrepreneurs features such as free ACH, wire and check payments and the ability to manage transactions, payments and expenses in one place. In August 2021, Winden was born as a neobank that offers deposit banking, spend management and other financial products for digital entrepreneurs.
Since HacWare’s Battlefield appearance in 2020, held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricks said the company paused its seed-round fundraise, reinvested its revenues back into the company and re-focused on its product.
Using EvolutionIQ, Vykruta claims that a claims adjuster, who may have hundreds of cases active at a time, can better understand short-term disability, long-term disability, workers comp and property and casualty claims.
The NFT market was worth $41 billion at the end of last year — nearly as large as the conventional art market by some estimates — and it’s expected to nearly double in size by the end of 2022, according to a report released this week by blockchain analytics firm Nansen.
Uniswap joins a growing segment of crypto-native companies now formally dedicating resources to investing in other companies in the space, including crypto exchange FTX and DeFi protocol Cake, which both recently launched venture funds. Before launching this dedicated venture arm, Uniswap invested in 11 companies and protocols across the web3 ecosystem, including Tenderly, LayerZero, MakerDAO, Aave, Compound Protocol and PartyDAO, the company says. Uniswap Labs, the company behind the popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has launched a venture capital arm to invest in web3 projects
Stenn — which applies big data analytics, taking a few datapoints about a business (the main two being what money it has coming in and going out based on invoices) and matching them up against an algorithm that takes some 1,000 other factors into account to determine its eligibility for a loan of up to $10 million; and on the other side taps a network of institutions and other big lenders to provide the capital for that financing — has raised $50 million in equity funding to expand its business after seeing accelerated growth.
Diane Yu, CTO of Better.com, is transitioning from her position as chief technology officer to an advisory role a day after the digital mortgage lender announced a voluntary separation program to certain employees, according to an internal memo obtained by journalist.
Notably, dozens of angel investors also put money in Truora’s latest financing round. Truora, a Colombian user authentication startup, has raised $15 million in Series A funding co-led by two Silicon Valley-based venture firms.
After a decade at Alibaba and its fintech affiliate giant Ant Group, Max Ma founded SwooshTransfer in 2021 to facilitate cross-border payments for small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as individuals such as overseas students, for whom tuition payments are often a hassle.
CertiK, a web3 and blockchain security company, has raised $88 million in its latest round, bringing its valuation to $2 billion. To date, CertiK has protected over $300 billion worth of crypto assets for 2,500 enterprise clients through its auditing and fraud investigation services, among other offerings, the company stated.
The startup, founded by a former Palantir engineer and a Freddie Mac exec, is taking a data-integration focused approach inspired by the data giant and applying it to the real estate capital markets, its co-founder and CEO Charles McKinney
ImaliPay’s pilot was based on Furusa’s encounter: a buy now, pay later (BNPL) fuel product, but for two-wheeler gig platforms as the company partnered with a few fuel stations in Ibadan, Nigeria to offer this service to SafeBoda riders.
Binance.US raised over $200 million in its first external funding round, putting its pre-money valuation at $4.5 billion as it builds out a roadmap for an initial public offering (IPO), its CEO Brian Shroder. Binance.US is one of the largest digital asset exchanges by trading volume in the U.S. with a 24-hour trading volume of $306 million, according to data on CoinMarketCap. The exchange provides licensed services to 45 states with plans to operate in all 50 states and all U.S. territories, Shroder said.
Grover has been on a steady pace of growth in the last several years — CEO and founder Michael Cassau said that across its footprint of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and most recently the U.S., Grover doubled subscriptions and business in the last year, and it currently has half a million items in its catalog available for subscription, 2 million registered users and 250,000 active customers.
Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis announced that it has raised $150 million in funding led by crypto exchange Binance to help reimburse users who lost funds during a ~$625 million hack of its play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which was the largest crypto heist to date.
Merritt Hummer, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said she doesn’t view Fidel API as a competitor to expense management players, but rather an enabler of them. Fidel API says it has tripled its growth metrics and quadrupled its card base year-over-year since launching in 2018, according to CEO and co-founder Dev Subrata.
With the fresh capital, SmartHop aims to focus more on its fintech products, like the company’s fuel card program that offers fuel discounts and other perks, or SmartHop’s insurance offerings.
The credit-oriented fintech platform Liquidity Group, which funds later-stage technology companies, has announced a new raise of $775 million from private equity house Apollo and MUFG Bank. The commitments include $425 million from Apollo Funds for a credit facility to help Liquidity scale its lending activity for late-stage technology companies. Founded in 2018, Liquidity employs machine learning and real-time data to automate the full credit investment lifecycle, committing more than $1 billion in capital. It also includes $300 million from MUFG Bank (NYSE: MUFG), for a debt fund joint venture named Mars Growth Capital.
Affirm is giving job offers to the ‘vast majority’ of Fast engineers Fast posted a paltry six-figure revenue total in 2021, despite raising a $102 million Series B led by Stripe.
This is part of the reason you read about layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) networks so often; VCs are making bets on competing L1 blockchains to take advantage of this deficit and L2 blockchains that sit on top of Ethereum are designed to improve the speed and price of transactions. It’s a technology that has been pretty widely accepted as a near-term solution for the Ethereum network and VCs have already christened a number of other unicorns in the optimistic rollup space including Optimism and Arbitrum.
Siedman said his conversation with a number of entrepreneurs including Amir Haleem, the founder and chief executive of decentralized wireless network Helium, helped him gain more confidence about the business model of giving ownership to the contributors.
Taro will support developers transferring assets on the Bitcoin Lightning Network by executing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, a much greater volume than what the Bitcoin network could otherwise support, Stark said. Taro is the latest of multiple products Lightning Labs has built specifically for the Lightning Network, which is a layer-two solution that makes the Bitcoin blockchain more efficient.
In Nigeria, POS terminals are used to process card payments at retail locations as well as for agency banking purposes, a branchless banking system where agents act like human ATMs. Its mobile application allows small businesses across the retail, agency banking, hospitality and services sectors to perform similar tasks, such as tracking sales and managing business operations, said Olawale.
Starlight’s core customers are companies who need to convert some of their cash into crypto, many of which are digitally native but new to web3, Nguyen said. He added that Starlight has also seen interest in its product from crypto-native entities, including DAOs, which often invest in other companies, creating a need for them to convert cash into crypto and vice versa.
Ghost Financial is developing API integrations with point-of-sale systems, like Toast, and delivery apps, like DoorDash, so it can pull metrics that represent areas including operational health and efficiency, hourly and daily sales, average food preparation ties, ratings and reviews to determine credit limit and provide an instant loan decision. After operating his own ghost kitchen, Keto Kitchen, in Austin for the past year, serial entrepreneur John Meyer saw that fintech resources for the industry were lacking.
On Friday, Justin Kan’s crypto gaming marketplace Fractal, which hosts Solana-based NFTs, raised $35 million in a round co-led by Paradigm and Multicoin, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Animoca, Coinbase and Solana Labs.
Hayes stepped down from his prior role as CEO of BitMEX in October 2020, though sources told The Block that he played a role in the layoffs, in part through his support of BitMEX pivoting away from its core focus on derivatives.
Most people finance a car, so for Tomkins, it is natural that with the average cost of an IVF cycle being $12,400 — similar to the cost of a car — people would want to finance fertility treatments. Less than a year after taking a small Series A extension, Future Family, a startup aiming to make fertility services, like IVF and egg freezing, more accessible, is back with $25 million in Series B funding.
One of Gotrade’s key markets is Indonesia, where Gotrade has launched Gotrade Indonesia. Gotrade Indonesia says it is the first platform in Indonesia to offer this kind of market access for U.S. stocks, meaning that its users don’t have to go through a foreign stockbroker or trade CFDs locally while accumulating substantial fees.
Demonstrating that there a robust market for contract management solutions, LinkSquares, a company developing intelligent software that helps brands maintain and ink new contracts, today announced that it raised $100 million in Series C financing led by G Squared.