🗓 All FinTech news in August 2022
Koop also announced today that it is coming out of stealth with $5 million in funding led by 1confirmation and web3 creator economy-focused Variant Fund, with participation from Palm Tree Crew, Day One Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, DeFi Alliance, Volt Capital, PearVC, DCF God, 0xmons and angel investors including crypto influencer Cooper Turley, ex-Coinbase CTO and a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan and former Sequoia partner Liu Jiang. At its core, Koop is a protocol that helps creators and communities launch NFT-based membership passes to raise funds for projects, Murillo told journalist in an interview. The platform has seen $110 million in total value across the treasuries of its 50 active communities buying and selling NFTs, according to Murillo, who noted that the company has a waitlist of 8,500 groups who want to form Koops. Koops, in contrast, can be more centralized, tend to be smaller in size, and afford groups the option to organize around a short-term goal or cause and dissolve the Koop when it has been achieved, Murillo added.
Los Angeles-based Stacked, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Alex Lin, is making a video streaming platform for gaming content — basically Twitch for web3 users, the founder and CEO told journalist. Lin didn’t set out to develop Stacked for the crypto crowd, but Pantera Capital convinced the founder that blockchain will play a critical role in next-gen mobile games. Having founded two ventures before — YC-backed mobile gaming company LVL6 and social shopping mobile app Hush — Lin has seen enough market ups and downs to not fret too much over the current crypto bear market. The founder remains skeptical of certain P2E games that tend to exploit users, but he’s bullish that high-quality titles will eventually emerge, akin to how free-to-play went from a widely despised monetization strategy to a genre with successful hits.
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CEO Yishai Cohen and CTO Amit Assaraf started Landa in 2020 in an effort to make real estate ownership more inclusive. Users can start investing with just $5, and buy and sell shares as well as see real-time updates on their properties from the Landa app.
Solid, which rebranded from Wise in 2021, raised a $63 million Series B round of funding to continue providing its fintech-as-a-service offering for companies wanting to launch and scale their own fintech products.
As Clearco international workforce is cut, its global clients will now turn to Outfund, an e-commerce investor that operates in the U.K. and Australia. The latest workforce reduction is just one step Clearco has taken over the past few months, including prior rounds of layoffs, to refocus its business operations amid the changing e-commerce scene. When Clearco cut a quarter of staff in July, Romanow said at the time that it was considering strategic options for its international operations. One month after cutting 25% of its total staff, Clearco is conducting another round of layoffs as it retracts its international presence in the U.K., Germany, Ireland and Australia.
Topi essentially brings together the various components that a seller might need to offer hardware subscriptions, including insurance, logistics, and refinancing providers, so that merchants can easily build rentals into their existing online channels using Topi’s APIs. Pallua previously worked as a strategy and business development manager at Apple in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she led a team tasked with exploring the feasibility of hardware subscriptions — Apple has yet to launch such a service, but reports continue to surface that the Cupertino company is still looking to bolster its recurring revenue via such subscriptions. Hardware as a service At its most basic level, Topi is selling a hardware-as-a-service business model, allowing merchants to rent out their equipment such as smartphones, printers, PC monitors, coffee machines, robotic arms, or whatever industry-specific machinery in which they specialize. At the time, Topi was somewhat vague in terms of what its actual product would be, but the company today announced its first product in partnership with German electronics retailer Gravis, and unveiled a fresh $45 million in equity and debt financing.
The gap that Kenya’s embedded finance fintech Pezesha seeks to bridge as it expands into Nigeria, Rwanda and Francophone Africa following a $11 million pre-Series A equity-debt round led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II with participation from Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund, cFund and Cardano blockchain builder Input Output Global (IOG).
Beyond co-founding Initialized, which raised a $700 million fund (its sixth) last year and has more than $1 billion in known assets under management, Tan was also co-founder of YC-backed blog platform Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter in 2012. Initialized Capital founder Garry Tan will become president and CEO of Y Combinator next year, the two organizations announced today. Initialized Capital’s other co-founder, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, left the firm in 2020 to start his own early-stage operation, 776. Months after the departure, Tan said that Ohanian isn’t leaving the firm altogether but is instead stepping into a board partner role at Initialized.
Thus, users in Nigeria and Kenya can receive foreign payments from more than 88 countries using USD, GBP and EUR bank accounts created on the platform, convert them into their local currencies (naira and shilling) and withdraw directly to their mobile money or local bank account. With its Grey Business product, the one-year-old fintech intends to tap into the market and provide a cheaper option to send and receive local currencies within the continent, particularly for micro and small businesses. In the latest development, Grey, a fintech in this category that provides virtual international bank accounts to African freelancers and remote workers, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding. COO Aghedo said the company privately launched a business-focused product, Grey Business, to complement this consumer-facing growth and extend its product beyond remittances and person-to-person payments.
This new fund will continue the firm’s strategy of investing in early-stage companies across four categories that tap into the firm’s family office roots — and now LP network — including insurance, fintech, health tech and e-commerce, an area Davis said the firm is particularly excited about. Micha Breakstone, the founder of heath tech company NeuraLight, said that Davis invested in NeuraLight’s seed round and helped them structure the round after one of the investors had backed out. Kli set out to raise four months ago in what analysts have predicted would be a particularly tough time to go to market, but good timing is part of the firm’s DNA — founder Gniwisch sold and repurchased Ice.com before both the dot-com bubble burst and before the financial crisis in 2008. Kli, launched by dot-com darling Ice.com founder Shmuel Gniwisch, had been cutting checks for two years when Davis arrived, and its casual investing strategy was starting to produce wins.
Anchor claims to be transacting several millions of dollars while growing 200% month-on-month. After testing these features with a select few, Anchor is coming out of stealth with a $1 million+ pre-seed and making its platform public.
This year, Argyle announced a $55 million Series B funding round and the launch of a self-service tool so that consumers can access their employment records with ease. Argyle, which wants to help companies and institutions get access to employment records, has laid off a number of employees across all departments, journalist has learned from sources. CEO and co-founder Shmulik Fishman said he wanted to disrupt the process in which institutions buy records from third parties and instead bring user consent into the mix. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the workforce reduction to journalist, saying that it let go of 6.5% of the team, or 20 people.
CoinDCX on Friday launched Okto, a mobile platform that will host other decentralized apps and won’t require users to remember the long string of words as their passwords. Okto is aimed at helping the masses get exposure to web3, said Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of CoinDCX, in an interview. The startup has started to engage with developers around the world to onboard their apps onto Okto, he said. The new platform will support over 20 chains and more than 100 protocols and absolve all transaction fee across chains, he said.
The investment, which was shelled out equally by the parent firm Animoca Brands and MUFG Bank, the largest bank in Japan with 360 years of history, comes at a time when the country is tightening regulations around the crypto industry. Asia crypto games and web3 investment powerhouse Animoca Brands is making inroads into Japan as its local unit picks up $45 million in financing at a $500 million pre-money valuation. Line’s 90 million users in Japan can now store their NFTs in their Line-powered digital asset wallet and trade NFTs with friends. MUFG, which was formed from a merger between Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and UFJ Bank, isn’t the only financial group in Japan to have embraced NFTs.
Now, Landing, a startup that is making it possible for its customers to rent a fully furnished apartment on its platform for as short a period as one month, says it, too, has secured fresh funding: $75 million in equity funding and another $50 million in debt. Blueground, a pre-furnished apartment rental startup focused on short-term and long-term rental, meanwhile raised $180 million in equity and debt funding last September. Earlier today, journalist reported that an online rental marketplace, Zumper, just raised $30 million in a Series D1 round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins to help it better serve people looking for short-term rental options. Another flexible-living company is Sentral, whose 3,000-plus properties are owned by Iconiq Capital, the San Francisco-based investment firm whose investors include Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman; Iconiq is also a major investor in Sentral, the WSJ reported last year.
India financial crime-fighting agency conducted searches at multiple premises of the Bengaluru-headquartered CoinSwitch Kuber on Thursday, alleging the crypto exchange startup violated forex laws, four people familiar with the matter told journalist. The government agency has performed over half a dozen probes into tech firms this year, including Chinese smartphone vendors Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi and seized more than $1 billion of capital that it said firms had evaded in fraudulent tax computations. The Enforcement Directorate searched the office facilities and residences of some executives and also questioned many, including chief executive Ashish Singhal, two people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private and sensitive. The agency believes that the Indian startup acquired shares of over $200 million in violation of local forex laws, a person familiar with the matter said.
Chidambaram, a member of Parliament for Sivaganga in the Lok Sabha, wrote an open letter to the country’s fraud regulator, requesting they open an investigation into the finances of Byju’s, which as he pointed out has yet to secure $250 million capital from its most recent funding round unveiled in March and has fired hundreds of employees and is in parallel looking to acquire an American firm at a valuation of over $2 billion. The startup — backed by scores of high-profile investors including Blackrock, Tiger Global, UBS, Prosus Ventures, Sequoia India and Lightspeed Venture Partners — said in early July that it will file the results within 10 days. India Ministry of Corporate Affairs has asked Byju’s to explain why it hasn’t filed its audited financials for the year ending March 2021, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. Edtech giant Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup with a valuation of $22 billion, has missed the deadline to file its audited results by 17 months.
The new product has been created in partnership with National Philanthropic Trust (NPT) and Vanguard Charitable and allows Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) sponsors, community foundations and other grantmakers to move their donations electronically through PayPal’s platform. The company additionally notes it has entered into a commercial arrangement with grantmakers, like National Philanthropic Trust and Vanguard Charitable, to enable them to provide this new solution to their charitable communities. Back in 2016, for instance, PayPal added a new button inside its mobile app to connect users to its thousands of PayPal Giving Fund certified charities, which previously were only available online. In addition to moving money quickly, the system includes an online Grant Payments dashboard available to grantmakers and charities alike where they can view all the grant details, including the donor information, which can be exported to help simplify record keeping.
A major motivation behind launching Symbolic for Nailwal was the opportunity to more formally support companies that are already in his orbit, he said, adding that he doesn’t feel he will have to spend much extra time managing the fund because it will help him realize synergies from relationships he’s already building, in part through Polygon’s own venture fund. Symbolic plans to primarily back companies building consumer-facing decentralized apps (dApps), Nailwal said, a move that seems aligned with Polygon’s own goal to speed up web3 app development. Now, the protocol co-founder Sandeep Nailwal is launching another project, he told journalist exclusively — this time, in the form of Symbolic Capital, a venture capital fund built by and for web3 founders. One key differentiator for Symbolic will be its internal data platform the firm has built to support its portfolio companies as well as to bolster its own diligence process, Nailwal said.
The company purchased education startup ChainShot, which runs coding bootcamps for aspiring web3 developers, Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan told journalist exclusively. Once rolled up into Alchemy, ChainShot will join the crypto infrastructure company’s two other education-related properties, self-paced coding programs Web3 U and Road to Web3. McCabe, who was inspired to found ChainShot after going through a coding bootcamp himself, said the company was bootstrapped before Alchemy bought it. In addition to the founders’ personal capital, which McCabe said included funds formerly in his 401(k), ChainShot covered its costs largely through grants available through its connection to the Ethereum ecosystem as well as through web3 crowdfunding platform Gitcoin.
To that end, the company has raised $30 million in a Series D1 round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins to help it in its efforts to enhance its product to better serve people looking for short-term rental options. The San Francisco company historically has connected renters to landlords for long-term leases, with short-term rentals only being a very small portion of its business. Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, notes that the venture firm has invested in each of Zumper’s funding rounds since its 2012 inception, starting with a $1 million seed round that year announced two weeks after launching into a public beta at SF Disrupt. With a push into short-term rental offerings, is Zumper encroaching on Airbnb’s territory?
Digital mortgage lender Better.com has conducted its fourth round of layoffs since December 1, 2021.
Max Novendstern, co-founder and former chief executive of Worldcoin, is working on a new venture, according to sources and regulatory filings and an investor deck obtained by journalist. The goal is a venture model that scales like software—no marginal cost: anyone in the world can raise; anyone can invest; and because Al gets better with scale, the system improves in a flywheel. Rather, the new market entails underwriting all asset classes—debt, equity, and tokens—in all cities and industries simultaneously, as the globalization of software hits the ‘second half of the chessboard.’ The startup is engaging with Tribe Capital, Multicoin Capital, Dragonfly and Variant to raise funds, according to sources familiar with the matter.
In a series of moves last year, the Reserve Bank of India indefinitely barred Mastercard, American Express and Diners Club from issuing new debit, credit or prepaid cards to customers over noncompliance with local data storage rules (PDF). should provide a boost to the local banks and fintechs that for over a year have been able to largely offer customers debit and credit cards powered by Visa and Rupay, a homegrown card network that is promoted by the National Payments Corporation of India, a special body of RBI. The resumption of American Express’ business in India Unveiled in 2018, the local data-storage rules require payments firms to store all Indian transaction data within servers in the country.
Thirdweb — with operations in London but headquartered in San Francisco — plans to use the funding to continue enhancing its developer toolkit — which currently covers some 10 features spanning areas like smart contracts, decentralised logins, publishing tools and more — to expand support for a wider array of blockchains, to bring on more users and to grow its team, both via hiring and potentially acquisitions, all in aid of getting web3 to become more mainstream. In the latest development, a startup called thirdweb — which has created a development toolkit to make it easier to build and launch web3 products such as blockchain games, NFTs, DAOs, marketplaces and more — has raised $24 million, a Series A that values the startup at $160 million. The gap in the market that thirdweb is addressing is one that Bartlett said he discovered with his co-founder Furqan Rydhan when they were working on building a blockchain application themselves. Thirdweb has been live for just nine months, but it’s been on a roll: co-founder Steven Bartlett told journalist that to date some 55,000 developers — which range from independent creators through to organizations like Afterpay and New York Fashion Week — have built a range of NFT items, DAOs, games and other applications using its framework.
Google Wallet is now available in South Africa, the first market for this product in Africa, to make it easy for users to save and easily and securely access their payment cards, loyalty cards and boarding passes. Google said that cardholders of partner banks in South Africa that include FirstRand Bank, Discovery Bank, Investec, Standard Bank, ABSA and Nedbank can now add their details on the wallet, and make contactless payments using their Android phones and Wear OS devices. Google announced the South Africa launch alongside Moldova, Qatar, Serbia, Azerbaijan and Iceland, making the product available in 45 countries. The Google Wallet launch in South Africa comes more than a year after Apple Pay entered the market too.
Spectral, a credit risk assessment infrastructure web3 startup, has raised $23 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Social Capital, the company co-founder and CEO Sishir Varghese exclusively told journalist. The startup built an on-chain equivalent to a traditional FICO score, called the Multi-Asset Credit Risk Oracle (MACRO) Score, which allows users to check their on-chain scores through its platform. DeFi doesn’t have credit risk infrastructure, though, Varghese noted. The long-term vision for Spectral is to make credit scoring a publicly accessible network, Varghese said.
His good timing only cemented the legend of Robertson, who just passed away at age 90 of cardiac complications, according to his spokesman, but who, until he was 67, led Tiger Management, one of the best-known funds in the 70-year-old hedge fund industry. (In addition to Robertson’s own family foundation and Tiger Foundation, a nonprofit that says it has provided more than $250 million in grants to organizations working to break the cycle of poverty in New York City, Robertson in 2017 signed the Giving Pledge, which asks participants to give at least half of their wealth away.) One of those appreciative protégés is Coatue founder Philippe Laffont, who spent three years working for Robertson before striking out on his own in 1999 with a reported $45 million and who, unlike Robertson, had a penchant for tech companies. Another of Robertson’s famous mentees is Chase Coleman, who worked as an investment analyst at Tiger Management for nearly four years before the hedge fund wound down.
While an investment DAO typically can only have up to 100 members in order to stay compliant with SEC rules, Orange DAO has found a way to bring over over 1,000 Y Combinator alumni together to back web3 startups through an associated venture fund. The DAO itself is structured as a Cayman Islands foundation company, Huh said, while the fund is run as a separate legal entity by Huh and a few other general partners. That way, the fund doesn’t have anywhere near the SEC’s cap of 100 investors for a venture group, though Huh and the other GPs leverage the DAO’s hundreds of members to source investment ideas and conduct diligence. Huh said members can capture upside by becoming members of the DAO and voting on what it does with its treasury without needing to be accredited investors in a venture capital firm themselves.
The startup eponymous blockchain, which is currently in testnet, aims to be EVM-compatible and use proof-of-stake and proof-of-quorum consensus mechanisms to reduce the cost of running the network and rely on three types of nodes — validator, archival and standby — in its network, it said in the investor deck. Shetty is raising $20 million to $30 million in a seed financing round for his blockchain startup Shardeum, sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private. Indian crypto exchange WazirX‘s co-founder Nischal Shetty is in advanced stages of talks to raise a maiden funding round for his new venture, sources familiar with the matter told journalist. Shardeum is employing a technique called sharding that partitions the network into shards, resulting in more transactions being processed, verified and validated in parallel, the startup explained in an investor deck, reviewed by journalist.
Dubai-based Zywa, a neobank for Gen Z, plans to fuel its growth in the United Arabs Emirates (U.A.E), and to kick-start its expansion to Saudi Arabia and Egypt after raising $3 million seed funding at over $30 million (110 million AED) valuation. The fintech is also adding community-based value-add services like a platform it is building within the app to enable users to apply for internships at Zywa and partner startups, as a strategy for encouraging users to start earning early. They created Zywa as a social banking app and prepaid card to make it possible for the Gen Z (between the age of 11-25 years) to receive money, manage it, and make payments. Zywa also plans to introduce a social element to its app by enabling its users to share photos or videos of their purchases, and to react to their friends’ purchases on different feeds.
Mural, a crypto firm focused on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) infrastructure, has raised $5.6 million in seed funding, the company co-founders Sinclair Toffa and Kevin Alvarez-Fung exclusively told journalist. The company is rolling out a beta for its fintech-focused platform to help brands deploy DAO treasury funds ranging from $50 to $100 million in size, Alvarez-Fung shared. The funds will be used to bring on new talent and work with brands globally that want to create and use DAOs, Alvarez-Fung said. Toffa and Alvarez-Fung said one of the biggest disconnects they saw in the DAO space was between treasuries and communities.
With Dutchie POS and Dutchie Pay, the cannabis tech company is now offering cannabis operators one of the most comprehensive platforms to manage dispensaries. Called Dutchie POS, this comes just weeks after the company announced a new payment platform, Dutchie Pay. Dutchie today is announcing a new cannabis point of sale platform, including a dual-screen terminal for dispensaries. Zach Lipson spoke to journalist ahead of the Dutchie POS launch, saying this solution is built to accommodate dispensaries of all sizes.
The corporate spend startup launched its bill pay feature in October of 2021, building upon its corporate card business and accounting software product. If the business pays back the money within 30 days and did not use their card, Ramp won’t actually make any money off it using the bill pay feature.
Enter Deposits, a Dallas-based finance startup offering a cloud-based, plug-and-play feature to simplify the implementation of digital banking tools for companies like credit unions, community banks, insurers, retailers and brands.
Complete provides an interactive offer letter product for candidates applying to roles at its client companies and recently began offering a similar product to help employees understand what comprises their total compensation, Mavram said. Complete aims to help companies, particularly early-stage startups, conceptualize and implement a firm-wide compensation strategy, reflective of cash, equity, bonuses and benefits. In today’s job market, where layoffs and hiring freezes abound, getting compensation strategy right is even more important, CEO Rani Mavram of HR tech startup Complete told journalist in an interview. Mavram hopes to expand Complete’s five-person team by bringing on more engineering and design hires to help the company keep up with new customer demand, she said.
Showing that the regtech industry remains robust to economic headwinds, private equity firms Centerbridge Partners and Bridgeport Partners today announced plans to acquire the publicly-traded Computer Services, Inc. (CSI), a provider of payments processing and regulatory compliance services, for $1.6 billion in an all-cash deal. Centerbridge and Bridgeport note that the deal, if approved by shareholders and regulators as they expect in Q4 2022, will net CSI shareholders a 53% premium over CSI’s closing stock price as of August 19. CSI’s board unanimously approved the plan to take the company private; post-acquisition, its stock will no longer be listed on the public market. Throughout the 1980s, CSI built a network of data centers, began selling its first PC software, and developed what it claims was one of the first online ATM systems.
LatAm FinTechs prevail in the new rounds, while larger FinTech companies go after M&A via SPACs, according to NASDAQ
Nilekani, co-founder of IT services giant Infosys and who has been instrumental in development and evangelising of several of India digital initiatives, including biometric IDs Aadhaar, and Aggarwal, who founded now IBM-owned BPO firm Daksh, launched Fundamentum in 2019 to back consumer-focused and software-focused startups. Fundamentum Partnership, a venture firm co-founded by Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal, has raised $227 million for its second fund as the high-profile tech industry veterans double down on backing startups in the South Asian region. Fundamentum’s new fund comes at a time when startups in India — and beyond — are finding it increasingly difficult to raise capital at terms considered favorable from last year’s bull cycle norm. Aggarwal said many reputed early-stage venture firms have closed new rounds in India in recent quarters, so there’s enough dry powder to continue to back young startups.
Then we have GPs of global VC funds like Ribbit Capital’s Micky Malka, Hustle Fund’s Elizabeth Yin, Sebastes Capital’s Jason Fish, a16z’s David Haber, Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel, 776’s Alexis Ohanian, Bonow Ventures’ Tilo Bonow, Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson, Better Tomorrow Ventures’ Sheel Mohnot, Broadhaven Ventures’ Michael Sidgmore, etc.; Web 2.0 and web3 operators; local and international HNIs; sport and entertainment icons; and PAVE Investments (the anchor LP in Microtraction Fund I), which has committed $1.5 million into the community fund. Microtraction, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in African startups at the pre-seed stage, is announcing that it has reached the first close of its second fund, Microtraction Community Limited. The LPs in this community fund include 30+ venture-backed founders of African companies like Helicarrier’s Ire Aderinokun, Paystack’s Shola Akinlade, Cowrywise’s Razaq Ahmed, 54gene’s Francis Osifo, Paga’s Jay Alabraba, Spleet’s Tola Adesanmi, Float’s Jesse Ghansah. Microtraction is also venturing into the web3 space by setting up a community vehicle (akin to a DAO) where social tokens will be used to incentivize and gamify the experience of members who provide value-add and support to the fund and founders.
Other investors in the round include PrimeBlock Ventures, M77 Ventures, ShataCapital, Kryptos, Antalpha Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, 7 O’Clock Capital, Misa Zhu, founder of AR glasses maker Rokid and Fan Zhang, a former co-founder of Sequoia Capital China. Other startups are also using MPC to enable distributed signing of crypto transactions, but Wang pointed to the fact that Safeheron is open-sourced, which gives its clients more transparency into its source codes. Since its product launch in October, Safeheron has powered over 20 clients, which altogether have more than $100 million in cryptocurrencies under custody and have facilitated more than $4 billion worth of transactions using Safeheron’s wallet as a service, according to Wang. Private keys, critical to decentralized crypto apps, let individuals take control over their digital assets through self-custody wallets rather than leaving control to a centralized institution.
Stripe has laid off some of the employees that support TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that it acquired last year. In July, Stripe went through a 409A valuation process that saw its internal valuation cut by 28%. Stripe’s new and lower internal valuation, explained Fintech hasn’t been immune from the downturn – for evidence, you need to look no further than the stock prices of Block (formerly Square) PayPal, Robinhood and Affirm.
We sat down with General Partners Angela Strange and Anish Acharya to learn more about why the pair believes that the fact that more people are working globally spells huge opportunity for fintech companies. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Uni, which is backed by General Catalyst, Elevation Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirmed in a statement to us that it is suspending card services on its products (Uni Pay 1/3rd Card and the Uni Pay 1/2 Card) and expects to roll out the change to entire customer base by Monday.
Tiger Global has led a new funding round in Jar, the Indian fintech that is helping millions of Indians save small amounts to invest in digital gold as the startup gears up to launch a host of new offerings including insurance, mutual funds and lending. On its eponymous app, the startup allows users to choose from different savings options such as roundups — where the nearest round number after a transaction gets saved automatically, as well as setting recurring savings amounts and performing one-time execution, explained Misbah Ashraf, co-founder of Jar. The funding values the one-year-old startup at over $300 million, it said, and saw participation from Folius Ventures, Panthera Capital, Prophetic Ventures, Yes VC, WealthFront founder Adam Nash and Founders Fund principal Zachary Hargreaves as well as early backers Arkam Ventures, Rocketship.vc and WEH. Jar, which is also looking to hire another 50 people, is developing and testing secured and unsecured lending, mutual funds, fixed deposits, peer-to-peer loans and insurance, he said.
Notably, both firms are also investors in Bolt, Breslow said when asked, though he suggests that if there’s a tie-in to Bolt, it’s that running Bolt for eight years is what led him to alternative thinking about wellness. Bolt employees are also reportedly frustrated that Breslow sold $10 million worth of shares to investors during that Series E round back in January, when Bolt’s board had not allowed them to sell their own holdings. While Breslow found some support for his perspective online, he was also criticized for the comments — including by powerful investors — and one week later, he stepped down as the CEO of Bolt and became its executive chairman. But it was hard to believe Breslow’s attention-grabbing tweets — which kept coming — weren’t rattling Bolt’s investors to some degree.
Launchpad Capital led Rocketplace seed round, which also included participation from TTV, Accomplice, Menlo Ventures and Soma Capital. But Beryl maintains that the startup’s biggest differentiator lies in the fund distribution model. Meanwhile, points out CEO Louis Beryl, customers will need appropriate disclosures and compliance, especially as regulation increases in the industry. Beryl was also a partner at both a16z and Y Combinator, and also founded Solid Energy Systems, which went public via a SPAC merger on the NYSE earlier this year.
Rebill, an Argentina-based startup, raised $3.6 million to continue building automated payment collection and subscription management tools for Latin America. Rebill differs from legacy providers in that it is targeting medium to large companies, is cloud-based and sold on a subscription basis so customers just have to pay a license fee, Candia told journalist. The company automates the collection process and integrates payment gateways and invoicing tools so that customers don’t have to create their own. Candia estimates that Rebill’s process cuts down that implementation process from months to hours.
It’s now teaming up with fintech unicorn Revolut to allow users to donate directly to homeless people through the Revolut app, making it the first U.K. homelessness organization added to the Revolut Donations feature. Revolut users will now be able to donate to Beam, help homeless people raise funds for training, work tools, travel costs, childcare or rental deposits, directly through the app. Beam says it has since raised £3.2 million from members of the public and supported more than 850 homeless people into stable jobs and homes by matching them with ethically-checked landlords and employers. Funds donated to Beam through Revolut Donations are distributed equally between Beam’s beneficiaries.
To bridge the input-access gap, iProcure, a B2B agtech, has since 2014 been connecting agricultural manufacturers and distributors to local retailers (agro-dealers), through its unique distribution infrastructure that interlinks agricultural supply chains.
Funding Circle co-founder Samir Desai has unveiled a new U.K. fintech startup called Super Payments, a venture he founded back in February but which very little was known about until now. Reports emerged a few months back that Desai had raised around $30 million for this new company, and today this has been confirmed. Super \[…\]
Led by Gavin Wood, co-creator of Ethereum and its founding CTO, Parity’s partnership with Watr is designed to co-develop the Watr protocol and key applications, and execute joint R&D on the functionality required to make the platform perform for the $17 trillion dollar commodities industry. Omar Elassar, global head of Ecosystem Growth & Business Development at Parity Technologies, said in a statement: This collaboration will bring Watr’s deep commodities’ expertise to the Polkadot ecosystem and kick-start a platform for web3-enabled solutions that solve pressing industry issues. We covered how the Watr Foundation, a Swiss-registered foundation created by experience commodities founders, plans to do this via the use of blockchains, incorporating the technology into commodities trading. We are thrilled to have the legendary team at Parity join us and our existing partners in enabling commodities’ transition to Web3 business models and liquidity while safeguarding the security and decentralized ethos of a public blockchain servicing both retail and regulated institutional users.
The new fund will invest in crypto projects and companies that focus on layer-1 blockchains, web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFTs and gaming, payments, asset management, exchanges, marketplaces and decentralized applications, Pakman said. Seven-year-old CoinFund is launching a $300 million early-stage web3 venture fund, CoinFund Ventures I, which is backed by institutional investors, family offices and crypto-native founders. Pakman thinks the recent drawdown in crypto asset prices generally provides more favorable entry prices for venture capital funds like CoinFund, but the transition from Web 2.0 to web3 is in its early stages. Even in this bearish crypto market, there more evidence of consumer and institutional adoption than previous cycles, Pakman commented.
By focusing on e-commerce, Shergill said Highbeam is able to provide a single financial view of the business, where cash is coming in and going out, and help entrepreneurs decide the right credit option and offer insights on common situations. Highbeam, a New York-based neobank built for people building e-commerce brands on marketplaces like Shopify and Amazon, raised $7 million in seed funding to continue developing banking tools that cater to these entrepreneurs’ needs. The one-year-old fintech startup, started by Samir Shergill and Gautam Gupta, provides banking features, access to transparent credit and cash management insights. Sustainable profit growth has become more important for brands, especially when e-commerce growth exploded during the pandemic and has pulled back some as stores reopened, Shergill said.
eToro has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gatsby — a fintech startup which also aimed to go head to head against Robinhood — for $50 million in a cash and common stock deal.
Lin says one of the things they’ve learned along the way is that Explo is a sticky product and that helped secure the latest $12 million Series A when the company went looking for funding at the beginning of this year. That product is a tool for building customized business intelligence dashboards with a look and feel of your own company, which you can embed in your website or email to customers. In spite of launching a company at the height of the pandemic, Explo finished building the product and found its first customers. He says the company is working with a recruiter to keep building a diverse team, and he says the key is finding candidates early in the process.
Digit, founded by Kamesh Goyal, an ex-KPMG executive with more than three-decades of experience in the insurance industry, says it has simplified the process of buying insurance, allowing users the ability to self-inspect, claim submissions and process service requests from their smartphones. The startup, which also counts Fairfax Group, Indian cricketer Virat Kohli and TVS Capital among its backers and has raised over $540 million from them, says its motor insurance coverage generated $413 million in gross written premium in the financial year that ended in March. The five-year-old startup, which sells auto, health and travel insurance, is part of a group of firms that is attempting to expand the number of individuals in India that buy insurance coverage. The Indian startup, whose valuation jumped to $3.5 billion in a Sequoia India-led financing round last year, said in a filing to the local regulator Tuesday that it plans to raise up to $157.5 million through issue of new shares while existing shareholders plan to sell about 109.45 million shares.
Its SaaS-based platform offers two services: an equity management service for startups, which includes cap table management, stock option management, investor reporting, investor consents, shareholder and board meetings, and a fund management platform for investors, which provides fund info, investment and returns management, portfolio management, LP commitment and returns management, LP reporting and fund activity analytics. Choi, the company’s CEO, said in an interview with journalist that in their capacity as investors, the three noticed that in Korea and many other Asian countries, startups were still relying on Excel when managing their cap tables, stock options, stakeholder and other related information. QuotaBook will use the latest funding — which brings its total raised to approximately $20 million — to digitize the equity/fund management process, providing a common standard for security-related data, and making it possible to safely host shareholder and board meetings online. QuotaBook, a Seoul-based equity management platform, has raised $11 million in funding led by Elefund, with participation from Access Ventures, Hana Securities and South Korean fintech company Viva Republica.
Pomelo, Frenkiel’s new startup launching out of stealth today, wants to make it easier to send remittance payments and conduct international money transfer, with a credit twist.
Left Lane led Arc’s Series A financing, which also included participation from NFX, Y Combinator, Bain Capital Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Torch Capital and Atalaya, as well as founders from Wayflyer, Plaid, Column, Chargebee, Vouch and Jeeves.
The Norrsken Foundation runs Norrsken House in Sweden, a hub for impact entrepreneurs, and incubated Norrsken VC, a $130 million impact VC. The companies that will make it to the final 100 (announced this month) will be nominated by several partner organizations, including the Obama Foundation, SoftBank Investment Advisers, World Fund, Katapult, BMW Foundation, Leaps by Bayer, Summa Equity and several others. The Impact 100 will be judged by a panel including Adalberth, as well as Ulrika Modéer, UN Assistant Secretary General; Matt Miller, partner Sequoia; and Carl Manneh, co-founder Mojang. Niklas Adalberth co-founded Klarna in 2005 but left in 2015 and established the Norrsken Foundation in 2016, contributing $20 million to the launch and an additional $62 million in 2017.
Galaxy Digital said Monday it has terminated the $1.2 billion proposed acquisition of crypto custodian BitGo, a high-profile deal they announced in May last year, after the San Francisco-based startup failed to provide its audited financial statements for the year 2021. BitGo’s alleged failure to provide the financial statements by July 31 violated the terms the two firms had agreed upon last year, Galaxy Digital said in a public statement, adding that the termination of the deal won’t incur the company any fee. BitGo, which counts Galaxy Digital, Goldman Sachs, Valor Equity Partners, Craft Ventures, DRW and Redpoint Ventures among its backers, ended last year with over $64 billion in assets in custody, it said. The BitGo purchase was positioned to help Galaxy Digital broaden its offerings for institutional investors by adding services such as investment banking, prime lending and tax services.
Four Tencent veterans want their offering .bit, an identity protocol built on the blockchain, to become the universal identification system in web3, like how emails and phone numbers became ubiquitous in Web 2.0, while giving users control over their own data rather than letting it reside in the platforms they use. The strategy won investor support as the company has closed a Series A funding round of $13 million led by CMB International, which is owned by the Chinese conglomerate China Merchants Group, HashKey Capital, known for its early investment in Ethereum, QingSong Fund, GSR Ventures, GGV Capital and crypto-focused investment firm SNZ. On Jike, a social network favored by China’s tech workers, venture capitalists and web3 enthusiasts, people are attaching the .bit suffix to their names even if they haven’t actually registered an account with the platform. The company’s next ambition is to promote the use of .bit for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), said Yeoh.
The new capital will assist Pastel in increasing its efforts in this area as it looks to expand its product offerings and develop more productivity and finance management features and tools around group savings, loans and payments for small businesses.
a16z wrote its largest individual check ever, at $350 million, to Flow, Neumann new residential real estate company focused on rentals, the New York Times reported today.
Penfold, a digital pensions platform, has closed a £7 million ($8.49 million) Series A funding round led by Bridford Group, an investment group. Also participating in the round was Jeremy Coller, chief investment officer and chairman of Coller Capital. Penfold also raised additional funding via a crowdfund amongst its customer base. The cash will be used to expand Penfold workplace pension division.
Flipvolt Technologies, the India registered entity of Singapore-headquartered Vauld, was used to deposit 3.7 billion Indian rupees by 23 entities, including non-banking financial companies and fintech firms, into the wallets controlled by Yellow Tune Technologies, the Enforcement Directorate said Friday of its ongoing investigation. Vauld’s India entity failed to provide the agency with a complete trail of crypto transactions made by Yellow Tune and also could not supply KYC details of the wallets, ED said. The agency said it has frozen assets from Vauld’s India entity till it provides a complete fund trail. Vauld, which suspended its customers from withdrawing, trading and depositing on its eponymous platform last month, recently filed for bankruptcy and reportedly owes creditors $363 million, according to news outlet The Block, which cited legal documents it obtained.
The second PV angel fund is backed by some of the U.K.’s more active angels, including Chris Adelsbach, Will Neale and Michael Pennington, alongside founders from Credit Kudos, FreeAgent, BrandWatch, Wayve, Passfort, ContentCal, Griffin, Bibliu, Rahko and Fixflo. PV makes much of its community-driven culture, with a network of founders, investors and others alongside the PV founders Will Martin and Will Brooks who put the fund together in 2014. Starting Funding Club (SFC) is the funding services provider, and all investors are committed to the fund and Portfolio Ventures are discretionary fund managers deploying from a pot of capital put in by these investors. A good example of that is Portfolio Ventures (PV), which has now closed its second angel fund (which they claim was oversubscribed), where many of the investing angels do so under EIS.
Tiffanie Stanard launched the company in 2017 with a focus on the supply chain, creating a product that provided establishments with the tools and data to choose, compare, and form relationships with product suppliers and vendors. She spent six years as a payroll and vendor manager before starting her own company.
A group of Voyager Digital customers filed a class-action suit in Florida federal court against Cuban as well as the basketball team he owns, the Dallas Mavericks, alleging their promotion of the crypto platform resulted in over 3.5 million investors losing $5 billion collectively.
Two firms stuck out in recent days, including Urban Innovation Fund, which closed with commitments of $100 million for its Fund III and $20 million Opportunity Fund, and VMG Catalyst‘s $400 million Fund II.
Matthews, CEO, was an investment banker and management consultant before co-founding Essmart, a social enterprise company in India, and then moving over to a leadership position at fintech retirement advisory firm ForUsAll.
Apple launched Apple Pay, which lets customers make payments in stores and online through iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or Mac, in Malaysia on Tuesday. Currently, Apple Pay is supported for Malaysian customers using Visa and Mastercard cards from banks including AmBank, Maybank and Standard Chartered Bank with support for American Express cards coming later this \[…\]
Option may be provided for borrowers to accept or deny consent for use of specific data, including option to revoke previously granted consent, besides option to delete the data collected from borrowers by the DLAs/ LSPs. Regulated entities will also be required to ensure that loan service providers they engage with have appointed a nodal grievance redressal officer to address complaints lodged against fintech startups or other digital lending firms, the guidelines add. The Reserve Bank of India has published guidelines that it intends to enforce for digital lending firms, recommending more transparency and control to customers as the South Asian nation central bank moves to take further steps to crack down on sketchy practices and creditors. The central bank also suggested that consumers should be provided with an option to accept or deny consent for use of any specific data and also the ability to revoke any previously granted consent and delete historic collected data.
The two moves put Finix squarely on Stripe’s turf, though its CEO and co-founder Richie Serna told us that Finix differs from Stripe in its focus on creating an open ecosystem. Read more.
LongHash Ventures, a web3-focused investment firm and accelerator, has launched its second fund for $100 million and its new accelerator LongHashX
In TeamApt, QED finds a company that bootstrapped for four years before raising a venture round in 2019 but has grown 300% annually to build one of the largest fintechs in Africa (in revenue and market cap)–and is profitable.
Layer-1 blockchain Injective has raised $40 million in a round led Jump Crypto, Eric Chen, CEO and co-founder of Injective Labs.
Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based Truework integrates with payroll providers including Gusto, Zenefits and BambooHR, and enables mortgage providers and lenders (e.g. automotive, personal loans, and student financing) to verify and approve borrowers quickly within their own applications using Truework APIs. Truework, a company that builds technology for mortgage and consumer-centric lenders to instantly verify the income and employment of borrowers, has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding led by G Squared. Aside from lead backer G Squared, Truework’s Series C round included investments from Sequoia Capital, Activant Capital, Khosla Ventures, Indeed, Human Capital and Four Rivers Group. On the flip-side, mortgage demand recently hit a 20-year low after the highs of 2020, but Truework co-founder and CEO Ryan Sandler reckons that the need for automated verifications is only going in an upward direction.
Coinbase’s Q2 results Coinbase’s quarter included a large gain in costs compared to the year-ago period — around $500 million — and a sharp revenue decline.
Portal’s other venture partner at the firm, Ori Shimony, comes from a builder background in the web3 infrastructure world and runs a sizable crypto developer collective, aiding the young firm on its promise to help young startups with strategy and product roadmapping in addition to financial guidance.
The Austin-based firm recently secured $145 million in its own debt and equity financing to help B2B SaaS founders grow their businesses without diluting ownership.
Outside of Miami, Quinn said, RealOpen’s crypto focus has attracted a strong pipeline of listings from sellers all over the world. By using RealScore, buyers can defer converting their crypto into cash until the very instant the transaction closes without having to explain to a seller what the value of their offer is beforehand, according to Dumontet.
The platform provides infrastructure for both emerging creators and enterprises to store, manage and build more functionality into their NFTs, Mike Duboe, partner at Greylock.
Both Tornado Cash and Blender.io appeared to play a role in obfuscating the digital trail of funds stolen in that $625 million hack, though Tornado was not sanctioned at that time and the Axie-linked theft was not mentioned in today’s OFAC announcement. Back in May, the U.S. Treasury also sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer Blender.io, another service the Lazarus Group used to launder cryptocurrency stolen after hacking the Ronin bridge on the play-to-earn video game Axie Infinity in April. The Treasury also said Tornado was used by hackers to launder at least $7.8 million in stolen crypto funds during last week’s Nomad heist, which saw cybercriminals exploit a trivial bug to steal $100 million in crypto assets, including Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin, Tether, USD Coin and Dai. The U.S. has sanctioned decentralized cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash for its role in enabling billions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency to be laundered through its platform.
Singapore-based cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com has acquired two startups in South Korea — payment service provider PnLink and virtual asset provider OK-BIT — for an undisclosed amount, Crypto.com said. South Korea is an important market for Crypto.com in terms of blockchain technology advancement and high-level crypto interests, said Crypto.com’s South Korea general manager Patrick Yoon. Crypto.com had received several approvals to offer crypto exchange products and services, including in-principle approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and provisional approval of its virtual asset license from the Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority in June, as well as regulatory approval from the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission in July. The company also said Monday it has secured registrations under South Korea electronic financial transaction act and as a virtual asset service provider.
Vista notes that its proposed share purchase price of $93.50 represents a premium of 27% on its closing share price of exactly a month ago — however, it’s worth noting that the price is marginally lower than Avalara’s $95 closing price on Friday.
As to how to restore investor confidence in the crypto sphere, Ge believes regulators are on the right track to bring more oversight over consumer-facing crypto products and protection for retail investors, as is the case in Singapore.
Weekly news about Paystand, Alloy, Payday, QED Investors, Metromile, Lemonade, Wiseasy, Attentive, Robinhood, Opendoor, Savana, Lami, Bluecopa, Geopagos, Mudafy, Parafin, FinanZero, PayIt, NG.CASH, Legalpad, Weltio and others.
Binance announced the acquisition of WazirX in late 2019 in a blog post. The clarification follows India’s Enforcement Directorate freezing WazirX’s assets worth over $8 million, citing suspected violation of foreign exchange rule.
The company rebooted ODF, which helps founders scale their startups through IRL and virtual programming, as well as On Deck Scale, a program for founders behind high-growth businesses to understand how to become better leaders. On Deck, a tech company that connects founders to each other, capital and advice, has conducted another round of layoffs just three months after laying off a quarter of its staff. On Deck, not to be confused with small business lender OnDeck, is a company that provides capital and network support for emerging fund managers and founders. In a message to community members that was obtained by journalist, Booth said the company would issue refunds for current On Deck Climate Tech participants.
A founder of Tag accused the other co-founder of forging documents to the central bank; upon discovery of the fraudulent act the bank suspended the startup, a letter to investors in June said. The central bank did not outline (PDF) which regulatory rules Tag had violated, but set a deadline of August 19 for the refund. The startup has been accused of forging documents to the central bank, according to an investor letter obtained by journalist. The regulatory action follows a months-long probe into Tag, which offers banking and financial services to users in Pakistan.
Instagram and Twitter aren’t the only digital giants looking to embrace NFTs, as YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki suggested that the platform may embrace web3 technologies, including NFTs, as a means of helping YouTube creators make money. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg said Meta is going to work on augmented reality NFTs, or 3D NFTs, that you can bring to Instagram Stories using Spark AR, which is the company’s software AR platform. Instagram to start testing NFTs with select creators this week Facebook begins testing NFTs with select creators in the US Instagram’s NFT functionality allows users to connect a digital wallet, share NFTs and automatically tag both a creator and collector for attribution.
Though Halliday plans to charge an initial fee to customers using the product to cover the startup’s costs, Malhotra hopes to eliminate the fee over time as his goal is to keep the product as low-cost as possible for gamers.
BlackRock’s Aladdin investment management platform will offer connectivity to Coinbase Prime to offer crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage, and reporting capabilities to shared clients.
Many hacks and bugs in the web3 space occur because the production system is poorly put together due to lack of ability to build in an early-stage environment, Marchetti said. Long term, Kurtosis plans to continue building tools that simplify engineers’ ability to build on web3, Marchetti said.
HR workers can use the platform to open employer and tax accounts automatically — Mosey shows the requirements in each location across payroll, registration and taxes.
Kontempo, a startup offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) and interest-free installment plans to business-to-business (B2B) customers, today announced that it raised a $30 million seed round in a mix of equity ($6.5 million) and debt ($25 million).
Prior to helping co-found Geopagos, Núñez Castro spent over 14 years as VP and general manager of Amex´s GNS, LatAm division, where he managed the card business operation in Latin America, including penetration into new markets.
Andreessen Horowitz recent hire of former Jordan Park Group Chief Investment Officer Michel Del Buono suggests the venture capital firm is getting into startup founder wealth management. Alongside ditching a centralized HQ, a16z announced new offices in Miami Beach, New York and Santa Monica in addition to its existing Menlo Park and San Francisco posts. The outfit, more commonly known as a16z, confirmed Del Buono’s hire as CIO to oversee those types of services for founders, as first reported by Bloomberg. That move was notable in that the storied venture firm was founded in 2009 in Menlo Park and has historically been associated with the Bay Area.
Glambook reckons that market is ripe for some tech-forward disruption, not dissimilar from renting a chair in someone car (Uber) a desk in someone’s office (WeWork), or a room with a view in someone’s house (Airbnb). In addition to its own real estate, the company is already hosting 20,000 freelance professionals across 50 European cities, for at-home, at-office, or in-salon appointments. The company is opening beauty co-working spaces across London for starters, and is eyeing international expansion. In the world of beauty, independent professionals often end up renting a chair in a salon.
The ambition over time is to be able to handle all of the data you would need to apply for something like an apartment and remove all of the friction involved in the current paper-based systems most companies are still using, while allowing users to share their Footprint data with any trusted partners.
Unlike most popular multi-sig wallet products on the market today, Taub added, Vault DAO is specifically designed for individual users to secure their own assets rather than for groups that require multiple parties to sign off on a transaction. For example, a user could require three signatories to sign off on any transfer of assets from a specific wallet, and those three signatories could either all be accounts operated by the user or could include accounts delegated by the user to a trusted friend. The Vault DAO, Upstream’s solution, operates as a multi-signature wallet that can be configured to require sign-off from multiple discrete accounts to authorize a transaction on behalf of a user. It’s fundamentally similar to Gnosis Safe, a popular multi-sig wallet tailored toward organizations, but Taub says the Vault DAO is much more user-friendly from a design standpoint.
Elsewhere, it seems that the U.S. also remains a more desirable option for tech companies considering going public, with SoftBank-owned U.K. chip giant ARM reportedly favoring an IPO in the U.S, though the U.K. government is trying to engineer a dual-listing that includes the U.K. It is worth stressing that Atlassian has only ever really been a U.K.-domiciled company on paper, though — its global headquarters has always been in its native Australia, and it has never had an office in the U.K., though employees are allowed to base themselves from the U.K. as part of Atlassian’s remote work policy.
Managing partner, co-founder and president Gary Acosta is co-founder and CEO of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, as well as the founder of several mortgage, real estate and technology companies.
The new division will be built upon the acquisition of blockchain-based loyalty platform for games WonderBlocks, as well as a strategic alliance with blockchain infrastructure gaming developer Forte.
Founded out of London in 2019, Ben is a SaaS platform that offers core employment benefits such as life insurance, health, and pension, as well as more lifestyle-based nice-to-haves such as gym memberships and work-from-home allowances.
Users aren’t under a legal obligation to repay ZayZoon and ZayZoon won’t take action to collect payments, but nonpaying users will be limited from accessing the service in the future. ZayZoon’s platform allows small- and medium-sized businesses to implement what’s known as an earned wage access (EWA) program.
An unknown actor had drained funds from 7,767 wallets on the Solana network as of 5am UTC on Wednesday, Solana’s Status Twitter account said. Solana spokesperson Chris Kraeuter declined to answer our questions, but referred us to Solana’s Status Twitter account.
It’s been a volatile year for retail investment behemoth Robinhood. The fintech company is laying off 23% of its workforce, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The layoff comes just three months after Robinhood cut 9% of full time staff. At the time of its last layoffs in late April, \[…\]
Nomad, a token bridge that allows users to send and receive tokens between Avalanche (AVAX), Ethereum (ETH), Evmos (EVMOS), Moonbeam (GLMR) and Milkomeda C1 blockchains, was attacked on Monday, with hackers draining almost all of the protocol’s funds. This meant that when a user transferred funds from one blockchain to another, Nomad allegedly never checked the amount, enabling the user to withdraw funds that didn’t belong to them. Approximately $190.7 million in crypto was stolen from the bridge, according to decentralized finance tracking platform DeFi Llama, which shows that the current total value locked — the amount of user funds deposited in a DeFi protocol — is less than $12,000 at the time of writing. The attack comes just days after Nomad revealed that a number of high-profile crypto investors, including Coinbase Ventures, OpenSea, Polygon and Crypto.com Capital, had participated in its $22 million April seed round, which landed the company a $225 million valuation.
Oberoi said that people in many markets including the U.S., Australia and Canada still prefer to use SMSs over any third-party offerings, but added that it’s within reach for the startup to quickly adopt WhatsApp or any other instant messaging service onto the platform. Emitrr, founded by Oberoi and his partner Pulkit Gambhir in December 2020, claims that that over 150 local businesses in the U.S. use its platform. Oberoi said that Emitrr has so far built seven to eight different automation models that work over the short messaging service (SMS). Now a young startup, Emitrr, is aiming to bring the benefits of this model to small and local businesses in the U.S.
In the latest development, Youverify, a Lagos and San Francisco–based identity verification company helping African banks and startups automate KYC and other compliance procedures, is announcing that it has secured a $1 million seed round extension. However, in a bid to serve more clients, the company launched its proprietary technology, the Youverify OS (YVOS), which provides a single platform for automating due diligence and combines risk and compliance management with its core identity verification platform to deliver these fintechs an enterprise-grade compliance solution. Nearly two-thirds of Nigeria’s commercial banks, such as Standard Chartered, Standard Bank and Fidelity Bank, use the platform’s identity verification and KYC products, Youverify said. In addition to verifying identities beyond Nigeria’s bank verification number (BVN) and addresses, Odegbami says Youverify layers KYC and compliance products such as transaction monitoring.
Bluecopa, an Indian startup building a finance operations automation platform for high-volume companies, has raised $2.3 million to expand its offering in the global market.
Spur Capital Partners, an investor in venture capital funds, is out to raise $200 million for its seventh core fund. Over the years, the investor claims it has indirectly backed dozens of high-flying tech and life science firms at the early stage, including hostelier Airbnb and weapons maker Anduril.
Rakuten Capital said that it saw a huge market potential for Indian-based rewards business opportunities, and Twid was well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity to build and scale its business model. In parallel with Rakuten, Google’s addition is expected to help Twid expand its model of enabling customers to make purchases using their multiple reward points.
Mudafy, a tech-enabled real estate broker operating in Latin America, has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding led by San Francisco-based Founders Fund.
It’s not only the digital platforms that want to sell insurance products, but also to help existing players be more efficient in their distribution of products, allowing them to play a role in increasing the insurance penetration level.
Sanchez argues that Savana has an advantage in its experience building digital systems for banks and financial institutions. One fintech that competes almost directly with Savana is London-based 10x Future Technologies, which helps larger, established banks build both next-generation services and tools to help their older services work more efficiently.
Besides the founders, Cheri Beth Bowen, Ronald R. Deering, Samuel D. Ellis, Mark F. Hamlin, Carlos L. Martinez, Alisha R. Shepperd and Sarah L. Theissen were all also charged with violating federal securities laws in connection with Forsage, according to the SEC complaint.
Oui Capital, an Africa-focused VC firm based in Lagos and Massachusetts, announced today that it has completed the first closing of its $30 million second fund, Oui Capital Mentors Fund II, as it seeks to strengthen its presence on the continent.