🗓 All FinTech news in January 2022
French startup Sunday, which didn’t even exist in 2020, has raised large sums to allow people to easily pay and share the bill, freeing up wait staff and increasing turnover in restaurants. The payment solution for consumers in restaurants has now raised $17 million in seed financing in a round co-led by Berlin Cherry Ventures and Point Nine Capital of Germany. The benefits for restaurants include a higher potential turnover of tables, more possibility of tips for wait staff and returning customers who enjoy the simple experience. The founding team of Qlub consists of Arun Sharma, Eyad Alkassar, Filiberto Pavan, Gizem Bodur, Jeff Matsuda, Jianggan Li, John Mady, Mahmoud Fouz, Oscar Bedoya and Ramy Omar.
India on Tuesday announced plans to launch a digital currency by next year and tax cryptocurrencies and NFTs as the country moves closer to recognizing cryptocurrencies as legal tender in the world second largest internet market.
Web3 security companies and projects like Certik, Forta, Slithe, and Securify are the equivalents of the code-scanning and application security testing tools that were originally developed for Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications.
Phantom, one of the premier wallet apps for the Solana ecosystem, has seen plenty of momentum as the result of investor and developer attention being paid to the Ethereum competitor which has seen its value explode over the past year — though the relative newcomer is also proving to be a more volatile bet with the token taking a particularly rough hit during the most recent crypto crash.
They differ in the type and class of securities they offer; for instance, Bamboo gives access to U.S. stocks, ETFs and ADRs, while Chaka deals with stocks and ETFs trading on local and foreign capital markets, but all have collectively been subjected to regulatory issues at home.
The firm, with offices in the countries above, is the latest big-sized Africa-focused VC fund that includes the likes of TLcom Capital which recently closed nearly half of its new $150 million fund; Novastar Ventures, a $200 million fund; and Partech Ventures, a $143 million fund.
The founders say that while sellers often want the products at their doorsteps, the availability and flexibility of both options differentiate Brimore from similar social commerce platforms such as Taager. The opportunity in the market can be attributed to the growth in online social sellers in the country, over 1.25 million them, helping little-known brands sell and distribute their goods via different networks.
A startup with the easy-to-remember name of The.com aims to modernize website building while also ensuring that web creators get credit for their work. The founders have a background in website development and design, having run their own web development agency in Boulder from 2012 through 2019, before founding The.com. Instead, The.com’s site builder uses community-created components you can drop into your site and share with others. That means they can pick up a navigation element from one The.com creator, a footer from someone else, and other elements like hero images, headers, banners, body elements, and more from different community members.
The equity portion was led by Index Ventures and included new investors like Distributed Ventures and its anchor limited partner NFP, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Ventures and a group of strategic angel investors. The company signed its first customer last July, and Ascend is now in all 50 states and working with customers like Vouch, Cowbell, Newfront, Boost Insurance, NFP, LuckyTruck, Rogue Risk, Portal Insurance and Riskwell. The new financing follows a $5.5 million seed round announced last September to give the company $39 million in total equity funding raised to date. Today, the company announced $30 million in Series A funding along with $250 million in lending to finance insurance premium loans by Hudson Structured Capital Management (HSCM Bermuda).
Another wholesale NFT heist happened in April 2021 when artist Qing Han aka Quinni’s work was stolen and reposted on the same platform that York used, OpenSea.
If the sale of the Diem Association’s assets goes through, Meta and its partners in the association will get some money back, while Silvergate Capital will become the only company in charge of the Diem project.
Collaboration, not litigation Blockchain technology provides artists a direct way to build a community with their fans by allowing them to identify fans, gift or sell things to fans without intermediaries, and form communities with shared artifacts and signals.
Today it extending the whole process further by launching real estate-backed NFTs in the United States, working on the technological and legal framework to literally turn real estate properties into NFTs.
Finmark wants to put sophisticated financial modeling within reach of startups The company also invested a lot of money into creating content to help early companies understand how to build more accurate financial models to make sure they don’t run out of money, which Essaid points out is the main reason that startups fail.
Two of Fireblocks’ biggest competitors in the crypto custody infrastructure space were acquired last year, Shaulov said. In terms of crypto products, decentralized finance (DeFi) has been an especially hot growth area for the startup, accounting for 10% of Fireblocks’ transaction volume in the past month, according to Shaulov.
Coinbase, one of the world largest crypto exchanges, announced an exclusive partnership earlier this week with crypto tax and portfolio tracking provider CoinTracker, meaning Coinbase users will get access to CoinTracker’s software at a discounted price.
His goal is to raise $10 million for the new fund (of which he has so far brought in $4 million), and already it has a diverse group of LPs.
Esusu captures on-time rental payment data of renters who opt-in to its platform and reports to the three major credit bureaus–Equifax, TransUnion and Experian–to strengthen their credit scores. Esusu, a fintech that targets immigrant and minority groups and provides rent reporting and data solutions for credit building, said Thursday it has raised $130 million in a Series B fundraising round.
Today, Yu and Yang’s new company, San Francisco-based Vesta, is announcing it has raised $30 million in Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from new investor Zigg Capital.
It uses integrations to link to different investment platforms for stocks, crypto, and other illiquid assets, though Gonen declined to share how many platforms are partnered with Compound in this manner.
The data could help Parthean evolve to a platform that can offer consumers financial advice when they need it most, such as budgeting tips after a spend-heavy weekend or investment advice after a big crypto moment.
But in 2021, NALA started testing international money transfers after some users expressed interest in moving money from the U.K. to East African countries (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), thus ushering the Tanzanian fintech into the remittance business.
Identity verification (IDV) provider Veriff, has raised a $100 million Series C round co-led by Tiger Global and Alkeon. He also said he thinks the future of IDV is being driven by the fact that it’s not just essential for financial services companies, but that it’s also now requisite for just about every service online. They were joined by existing investors IVP and Accel, bringing Veriff total funding to date to $200 million. It also claims that last year it grew verification volumes by more than 8x, and by 20x in the U.S., with its financial services operation growing by 10x, while customer growth had grown by 150%.
Founders Fund Partner Matias Van Thienen said his firm had been looking for an investing and savings platform in Latin America that could offer global equities with a high-quality product and a suitable regulatory approach.
For example, one company in the space, Optimal Blue, was purchased by Black Knight for $1.8 billion in 2020 to boost its data and analytics capabilities Carmel believes Polly stands out from others in the industry in that it is helping create a fourth category in the mortgage sector — capital markets.
In his view, CaptivateIQ alleviates these pain points by taking the flexibility of spreadsheets and combining it with the scalability and performance of software technology to configure commissions plans with minimal support.
Susanne Daniels, the founding global head of YouTube Originals, announced her departure, followed soon after by YouTube’s own announcement that it would close its original content studio after six years.
Syndicate’s suite of smart contracts can walk users through the process of formalizing their club with a legal entity and handling things like setting up a bank account and getting tax forms to ensure stuff stays above-board.
This data is analyzed to provide businesses with support ranging from tailored recommendations, reports through daily business tips, monthly business seminars and access to an on-demand business coach.
Consider that late last summer, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested in an outfit, Yield Guild Games (YGG), that invests in NFTs from blockchain-based games, then loans them out to people who use them and generate revenue as they play. To ensure that their games offer enough liquidity to keep users engaged, game makers have already proven open to working with third-party outfits like YGG and other so-called play-to-earn guilds that similarly buy NFT gaming assets and lease them to players under revenue-sharing arrangements.
The company also has a tech hub in Spain (Furio’s home country), where about 20% of the company’s tech team is based. It also runs Creditas Store, an e-commerce platform with a payroll-deductible buy now, paylater model and Voltz, a manufacturer of electric motorcycles in Brazil (and after its strategic investment in Voltz Motors, next-generation EV motorcycles and scooters).
Tribevest plans to use some of the proceeds from its seed round to launch formal partnerships with investment platforms similar to Roofstock, which will allow users on those platforms to make investments directly through their Tribevest account at checkout, Smith said, though he declined to name any specific platforms the company plans to partner with.
As Hunters co-founder and CEO Uri May told us, since its Series B round, the team doubled down on helping enterprises replace traditional Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) solutions with its own tools.
On-chain funding is not a magic bullet — it is simply the best framework we currently have to align the funding process closer with the mechanisms the developers find most useful while keeping the process open and equitable.
To get insurance, these businesses typically go through an insurance broker rather than go directly to the insurance provider, Asaf Lifshitz, co-founder and CEO of Sayata, said via email. Instead, Sayata developed a marketplace that is fully automated and done online to provide several insurance quotes from leading insurance providers based on a few pieces of information about the business inputted by the broker. That and an easy process means clients often go with the insurance offered by Sayata’s broker partners, Lifshitz said. It also enables the company to go after more of the small and medium-sized business insurance market that Lifshitz estimates is over $100 billion just in the United States.
Here’s how to conduct the ultimate litmus test on an NFT project through its creators: Check if both the founder and tech are open The first NFT was created in 2014 and was sold only last year.
If this becomes a reality, value will be lost for a network’s stakeholders through under-pricing higher-value use-cases, while at the same time losing network revenue potentially derived from lower-value, high-volume use cases
The group is a bit opaque on how performance from the fund will translate to returns for DAO members, though Orange Fund’s GPs will be contributing their carry in the fund to the Orange DAO’s internal treasury.
There was an original wave of companies working on partial document automation, which still needs a human review, but Ondrej Antos, Klarity co-founder and CEO, explained that the full document automation market is still very nascent.
Inventa, a Brazil-based company offering a digital marketplace for small and medium-sized companies to discover and purchase new inventory, raised $20 million in Series A funding.
Simone explained that financial advisors don’t often ask clients about their medication costs or health conditions, so some of the pillars the company helps advisors and their clients identify include health plan selection and if you may need long-term care planning — which Simone estimated 70% of people usually do.
Keep an eye on enterprising companies pushing into these areas – specifically collectibles – as a way to broaden the reach of crypto and blockchain in 2022.
What sets Moss apart from its competitors is that it offers credit cards, not debit cards. And if a restaurant doesn’t accept card payments, Moss also handles cash expenses and reimbursements.
David Eduardo Arrambide Montemayor and Maurizio Caló Caligaris, both Stanford-educated engineers, started Calii, a mobile grocery app that connects with producers and brands to automate the supply chain end-to-end and deliver more than 5,000 products, like produce, meat, seafood and prepared items, via a network of micro-fulfillment centers.
The Austrian startup — a platform for documentation and communication in construction and real estate projects — is continuing its funding roll with a $70 million fundraising round co-led by Insight Partners and Quadrille Capital. Back in March Vienna-based PlanRadar snapped up a €30 million Series A to digitize construction and real estate projects. The round also drew participation from existing investors, including Headline, Berliner Volksbank Ventures, aws Gründerfonds and Cavalry Ventures, plus new investors Proptech1, Russmedia and GR Capital. To add context to that, this is a significant raise for an Austrian company, and PlanRadar claims it the third-largest Series B in Austrian history to date.
And with Plaid customers asking for ways to more quickly onboard users per Perret, Plaid knew that it had customer demand for what the smaller company had built; buying Cognito means that Plaid can instantly layer on another service to its already growing customer base.
The company is rolling out NFT Profile Pictures to Twitter Blue subscribers on iOS by way of Twitter Blue early access Labs feature
To qualify for the program, users must enable multi-factor authentication on all transaction types where it is available, set up an anti-phishing code at least 21 days prior to the reported unauthorized transaction, file a police report and provide it to Crypto.com, complete a questionnaire to support a forensic investigation, and not be using a jailbroken device, according to the company.
Karny gives Chari valuable data on the loans provided by grocery stores to their customers and allows Chari to credit-assess the unbanked shop owners, determining the most applicable payment terms to give each.
Vartana plans to use its equity funding to work on its product roadmap, which involves adding more staff to its current headcount of 17 across engineering, operations and sales.
The startup, valued at $2.85 billion and backed by Tiger Global and Ribbit Capital, said on Wednesday its board members had agreed to Grover request to take a voluntary leave of absence from the startup until the end of March. Grover in the reported email was concerned about the additional time Sequoia Capital India, the most prolific venture capital firm in the South Asian market, was taking in giving a term sheet to the startup. The venture capital firm was not comfortable with Grover selling millions of dollars’ worth of shares in a secondary transaction in the startup’s Series B, the years-old email said, according to the newspaper. Recording of a phone call surfaced and went viral on social media earlier this month in which Grover appeared to have abused and threatened a staff of Kotak Mahindra Bank for refusing him financing to buy shares in online fashion startup Nykaa’s IPO.
But it’s interesting to see that Revolut is still releasing new features in the U.S. in order to build a financial super app that works across multiple markets.
On a call with journalist, QED co-founder and managing partner Nigel Morris said that adding Africa is the final jigsaw puzzle that makes QED Investors a fully global fintech-specialist firm. Before QED Investors, Ajayi worked in different roles across Africa and global fintech/tech.
While Crypto.com is the world’s fourth-largest crypto exchange, it has been pushing hard into U.S. markets in recent months, with stunts including viral advertisements featuring actor Matt Damon and a $700 million purchase of the naming rights to the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers Arena.
POAP, which stands for Proof Of Attendance Protocol, wants to dial deeper into the idea of using NFT to create internet communities, with a protocol that helps build more active communities and award individual participation like taking part in an event.
Interestingly, Inflection defines the open economy as five different verticals — open money, open finance, open data, open media and open orgs.
M2P Fintech, a payments infrastructure startup that has established market dominance in India, has raised $56 million in a new financing round, less than three months after closing its previous funding, as it works to deepen its footprints in several international geographies.
Autograph, an NFT agency co-founded by athlete Tom Brady with a particularly deep bench of star power, has banked new funding from crypto investors who hope the platform can bring a new generation of celebrities and their fans into the fold of crypto collectibles.
The three-year-old company has signed publishing deals for seven games from six studios globally, including Tilting Point, publisher of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, which Carry1st recently launched in Africa.
Given that it’s not a big leap between financial services and fintech — indeed, in cities like London which have strong industries in tech and financial services, the two have long competed heavily to recruit technical talent — it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more banks trying to built personalization in house rather than look to a third-party provider like Personetics.
Ancient8, Vietnam blockchain gaming guild, develops a community and software platform to enable everyone to play P2E (play-to-earn) games and build the metaverse while earning rewards.
Routefusion cofounders Colton Seal and Richard Scappaticci attempted to launch a neobank in 2016, but they ran into significant hurdles when trying to integrate with banks to help their customers move money to other countries.
Nowsta’s web and mobile app rolls workforce management tools, like automated scheduling, time-tracking, payroll and communication, into an all-in-one resource that includes an on-demand labor marketplace that connects employers with a skilled pool of workers sourced by trusted third-party staffing providers.
Vilner says the firm’s name was one he kept hearing over and over, and he and co-founder Danni Friedland were interested in Felicis’ fund for SaaS and software, thinking it would be the right fit. Joining Felicis are existing investors NFX, Eight Roads Ventures and A Capital and a group of strategic angel investors, including Salesforce president and CMO Sarah Franklin, Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, TripActions co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen and Papaya Global co-founder and CEO Eynat Guez. After securing a $15 million Series A in August, Walnut, a company that creates sales and marketing demo experiences, is back to announce its new round of $35 million in Series B financing. Walnut no-code platform enables teams to create customized product demonstrations quickly, be able to integrate them into their sales and marketing processes and then generate insights from the demos. Since the Series A, the company grew a staggering 700% in annual recurring revenue, co-founder and CEO Yoav Vilner told journalist.
NFT marketplace OpenSea is putting some of its freshly raised funds to good use, buying up crypto wallet startup Dharma Labs, the company announced today.
Zanifu works with a number of manufacturers and distributors to extend the credit to these small businesses with retailers already sourcing products from the startup’s partners qualifying for the financing.
Since the Philippines’ payment sector is fragmented, customers can pay back their BNPL loans a variety of ways, including digital wallets, bank transfers, direct debit, linking their bank account or over-the-counter payments in physical stores like 7-Eleven.
Finclusion Group, a fintech that uses AI algorithms to provide financial services to African customers via an array of credit-centric products, has raised $20 million in debt and equity pre-Series A financing.
Pinwheel is also the only company providing direct deposit switching and payroll data that is classified as a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, meaning that if consumers are adversely affected by Pinwheel’s data, the company would be legally accountable.
Mexican revenue-based investment startup Fairplay secured $35 million in Series A funding to invest in the online marketing campaigns of direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands and marketplace sellers in Latin America.
We believe HR teams deserve world-class software to manage and service their employees, but today it’s clear that many organizations still use spreadsheets or legacy products to make ends meet, said Haenam Chang, CEO of flex. The company said its deep understanding of cultural nuances in people management and the HR regulations in the country help flex to be well-positioned to offer a set of products tailored to South Korean businesses. At flex, we empower customers with a reliable source of employee data and a rich set of tools to manage their people, maximizing individual and organizational performance. Currently, flex is focused on growing in South Korea by offering a SaaS solution that modernizes the HR functions and processes, which have been slow to adapt to technical progress over the past 20 years.
Spendesk customers can order physical cards for employees, team members can use the platform to pay outstanding invoices, file expense reports, manage budgets and generate spending reports.
Crypto.com, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, has extended its venture arm fund size to $500 million as it looks to more aggressively back early-stage startups to help the nascent ecosystem grow, following similar moves by rivals Binance, Coinbase and FTX.
Tiger Global, Steadview Capital, and Dragoneer co-led the startup’s $75 million Series D funding, said Ashish Kashyap, founder and chief executive of INDmoney, in an interview with journalist.
Today, the startup has also partnered with Standard Bank, headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa and with a presence in 20 countries across the continent, to offer financial services to millions of workers (like motorcycle taxi operators) in the informal sector through the startup’s proprietary digital loan origination system.
In addition to flexible credit lines for businesses to cover cash flow gaps, Float also has software tools for businesses to manage accounts and wallets in one dashboard, as well as automate bills, vendor or supplier payments and invoice collections.
The startup sells a salary-advance service to employers to offer their staff — charging companies a commission for the tech rather than levying a fee on users to withdraw a portion of their salary early (as some other salary startups do).
Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia started the company in 2016 with an initial focus on startups and small businesses, trying to find product-market fit (as one does), but finding that legal usage among companies of that size was often project-based, infrequent and short-term if the company folds. In 2019, the company pivoted to working with mid-market and enterprise-level companies by selling into legal departments, and that when growth took off, Ahmed told journalist. Similar to other industries embracing contract work, Lawtrades is giving legal professionals a way to become independent and run their own virtual law practices. Ahmed plans to use the new funding to rebrand the company, launch an iOS app, expand into other professional categories, like finance and management consulting, and gain an international footprint.
The fund invests in at least half of companies that explicitly address the energy needs of women consumers and entrepreneurs in Africa, and those offering renewable energy solutions to businesses and households.
In discussing Bolt’s rise to total funding near the $1 billion mark, Breslow explained that the company operates in a space with competitors that are actually worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
GoFundMe doesn’t charge a platform fee from fundraisers (aside from standard transaction fees), but when people donate to a campaign, they can add an optional tip that helps keep GoFundMe running. The Public Benefit Corporation employs a team of 200 and will become a subsidiary of GoFundMe, operating as a separate entity under GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan leadership. GoFundMe announced today that it will acquire Classy, a nonprofit fundraising software company. The company said that $5 billion was raised on GoFundMe and Classy combined in 2021.
The funding will be used to continue growing GPS’s business — which includes a range of fintech services such as payments, direct debits, and standing orders; virtual cards; mobile wallets; fraud prevention; expense management; cryptocurrency management; BNPL and more.
In its bid to traverse Africa, where opportunities abound as e-commerce and alternative credit sources grow, Lipa Later will have to contend with competition from South Africa’s Payflex (which was recently acquired by Australian BNPL Zip) and PayJustNow, and Nigeria’s PayQart and Carbon Zero.
Tencent could hook Easy Transfer with the right local partner with the necessary license for sending money overseas, said Gao, and Easy Transfer will focus on building a local team and an easy-to-use product like WeRemit.
Conduit aims to be a one-stop shop for neobanks and financial institutions to plug their own products into the DeFi ecosystem, which Gertman said is made easier because Conduit itself is regulated and compliant, taking the compliance burden off of companies using its tools.
So far, VCs have been a strong customer acquisition channel for Arc, noted Lombardo, who pointed to the fact that Arc’s largest partnership today is with Y Combinator, which is promoting Arc across its portfolio of thousands of software companies.
Unlike most developed countries, the West African nation lacks an advanced credit bureau system to detail people’s credit histories, so there’s some scepticism to how Fintech Farm will use credit cards to operate.
Accrue Savings, founded in June 2021 by CEO Michael Hershfield, aims to get people saving again with its merchant-embedded shopping experience that rewards consumers for saving up for the things they want to buy.
Aiming to give merchants more control over this, Seel, which focuses on underwriting e-commerce returns, is leveraging artificial intelligence to build proprietary underwriting software that uses hundreds of signals to predict the probability of return as soon as an order is placed.
Other startups in the space using traditional banking infrastructure to make payments more efficient have hit a ceiling on how fast and cheap they can offer payments because of fees charged by these intermediaries, particularly between countries that don’t transact as regularly, said Paysail cofounder Nicole Alonso.
Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor.
Web3Auth, a non-custodial key infrastructure solution for web3 apps and wallets, wants to solve these problems by leveraging social accounts and devices that mainstream users already own to enable users to manage their keys intuitively.
Refyne has raised a new financing round, just seven months after securing its previous funding, as the Bengaluru-based startup scales its platform that helps workers access their earned salaries in real time.
This, in fact, can also potentially provide a steer to Novo on what might be most popular and potentially worth considering as in-house products in the future, but for now it serves another couple of key purposes: it makes Novo more useful for its customers, and it provides more data sources to Novo to build future products.
While Twig may be seeking to minimize/offset its own energy usage/carbon footprint, the bigger potential environmental impact is likely to be from secondary (for want of a better word) usage — aka, any consumption, energy use and CO2 emissions that Twig’s users and suppliers generate as a result of what its platform enables them to do.
As its earlier customers have grown and matured, Brex is now adapting to also serve mid-market to larger businesses which have different financial needs as they grow. In terms of customers, Brex continues to serve startups or e-commerce companies that might be smaller businesses but with higher growth.
KP20 is an $800 million venture fund focused on early-stage investments in enterprise, consumer, hardtech, fintech and healthcare companies, while Select2 is a $1 billion fund — the most the firm has raised at once — that extends its core investment strategy to focus on high inflection investments across those same five areas.
It has raised a $6.2 million pre-Series A round while rebranding to ANKA, the SaaS platform it launched for sellers in partnership with DHL and Visa in April last year. In an interview journalist had with the chief executive last year, he touted ANKA as the largest e-commerce exporter startup on the continent, claiming it ships over 10 tons of cargo per month from Africa.
KoinWorks was originally created to help SMEs, which are often turned away by traditional financial institutions, get access to working capital. Over the last three years, Indonesian fintechs focused on SMEs have grown to include other neobanks and startups that started out as accounting software but are expanding to include working capital loans and other financial services.
And while currently building out its buy now, pay later infrastructure (which gives businesses a chance to sell products regardless of whether customers have money or not), ThankUCash plans to add a fourth offering soon: a remittance product where merchants can sell directly to the diaspora.
Parrot is the latest company raising capital as part of a broader trend of companies helping restaurants thrive in this new digital world, including Zak, also developing point-of-sale technology for restaurants, payment system Sunday and restaurant management software company MarginEdge
AskNicely is the latest company attracting capital for its app targeting shift or frontline worker success as more businesses rightly begin to see how valuable these employees are to their bottom line and how technology can ensure these key employees are empowered to help the company grow.
While there are still a lot of SMEs that are not using Qonto in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, Qonto also plans to enter new market in 2023.
This noticeable shift of influence toward ultra-high-net-worth individuals and firms among bitcoin and other crypto circles goes against the very ethos that the Bitcoin white paper was based upon when it described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Dedicated crypto platforms like Coinbase or even Paypal, Venmo and Stripe, which recently added abilities to use crypto for payments, could evolve into the U.S. versions of super apps, assuming crypto issuers can work with regulators to find a middle ground between protecting the consumer and creating new financial and investment opportunities.
Here are 5 NFT trends that will bring social media audiences into web3 en masse: NFT verification Skeptics are quick to point out that NFTs are dumb because you can simply right-click and save the underlying files.
Bfree was founded by Chukwudi Enyi (COO), Moses Nmor (CPO) and Flosbach (CEO), who were looking to develop better, ethical and tech-inspired debt-collection tools and processes following their firsthand experience working for digital lenders in Nigeria. Ethical debt collection standards ensure the privacy of customer information during the process.
The Bay Area startup wants to take a more blended solution to crypto lending with its protocol, building up capital pools and allowing fintech organizations outside the U.S. to make their case to lenders operating on the protocol and get access to funds while showing non-crypto collateral. Goldfinch is a crypto startup building a decentralized lending protocol that allows organizations to receive crypto loans without owning massive amounts of crypto already.
Rupifi has raised $25 million in a new financing round as the Indian startup, which currently provides buy now, pay later service to several marketplaces to serve their merchants, looks to expand its business-to-business payments offerings. Buy now, pay later is Rupifi’s marquee offering today, but Jain, who previously worked at American Express and Razorpay, and sold his edtech platform StudyBud in an all-cash deal, said that the startup will be expanding its product offerings in the next few months. Rupifi works with more than two dozen business-to-business marketplaces.
But Bankaya, a Mexico City-based financial services startup, is attributing its early traction on the opposite model — going after target customers in person.
A majority of Petal members had thin or no credit history when they first applied for a Petal card, and more than 40% of new members approved for a Petal card in 2021 were first denied credit by a major bank, the company said.
With 700 employees in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and London, PayFit now wants to diversify its product offering, integrate with more third-party products and improve its customer service.
Over the last year, he said that companies have begun to come around to a solution like Xage, driven by the increase in ransomware attacks and growing government regulations around critical infrastructure. The company intends to take a hybrid approach to work as they enter 2022, with some people in the office and some fully or partially remote, depending on their needs, but he believes some work requires people sometimes being together in the same room to build software this complex.
Some ultra-wealthy investors have made a windfall investing in alternatives using tax-advantaged accounts, a strategy billionaire Peter Thiel used to grow his Roth individual retirement account from $2,000 to $5 billion in 20 years, tax-free. While crypto is one of the fastest-growing areas of interest for Alto users, Satz said he expects demand to grow in other areas, including private company investing and artwork.
For example, these included four new payments products — Direct, for account-to-account bank transfers; Disburse for remittances directly from accounts; Pay, a no-code solution for micro-businesses to collect payments; and for enterprise customers, IPG, a platform created for large financial institutions to collect payments on behalf of merchants.
The firm ballooning valuation, which surged from a $1.5 billion valuation it was given just six months ago by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, is reflective of their own volume growth but also that of other flagship NFT firms including Dapper Labs, which raised at a $7.6 billion valuation last year. The NFT space saw plenty of action in 2021, but OpenSea realizing this valuation will rely on its continued success and its ability to entice newbies into the burgeoning world of crypto collectibles.
The continent is already a global leader in mobile money adoption, accounting for the bulk of the mobile money transactions made in 2020 — a year that saw the number of mobile money accounts rise by 43%. For instance, M-Pesa, a mobile money service by East Africa’s biggest telco, Safaricom, does not require internet connectivity for its customers to send and receive money, as well as to pay utility bills — the wallet turns subscribers’ phone numbers into a sort of proxy for bank accounts.
Ribbit Capital, a venture firm best known for its fintech investments, has raised $1.15 billion in new capital in what appears to be a close of its seventh fund, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).