🗓 All FinTech news in June 2022

Digital collectible platforms, according to the proposal issued by Tencent, Ant Group, and others, should hold relevant regulatory permits, ensure the security of underlying blockchain technologies, enforce user real-identity checks, step up intellectual property protection, resolutely ban financial speculations, and promote rational consumption among users.

Binance said in a press release that Lame will apply this TikTok format to videos about web3, trying to simplify complex concepts for his followers.

Instagram to start testing NFTs with select creators this week Meta to roll out new monetization tools on Instagram and Facebook, including a creator marketplace After debuting NFT support on Instagram in May, Meta has launched digital collectibles support on Facebook with select creators. Zuckerberg has also 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.

OP Crypto is raising $100 million for its new investment, dubbed ‘Fund of Funds’, to deploy capital into emerging fund managers focused on early-stage crypto investments.

CEO Lindsay McLean started the Santa Monica, California-based company in 2015 with attorney and real estate broker Jennifer Stein, after her own home-selling experience. Enter HomeLister, a digital brokerage and real estate site that gives homeowners a way to list and sell their properties online, with support.

In matured markets such as South Africa, Adenuga said BII will have an on-the-ground presence and offer its full suite of services ranging from climate finance, funding for financial inclusion, and equity and debt financing.

While Stake competes against the aforementioned Bilt, which last year raised $60 million for its loyalty program for property renters, Hobbs claims that Stake is growing at a robust pace.

MoHash has been working to solve this challenge for a year and has assembled several experienced tech and finance individuals from firms such as Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Oliver Wyman, India Stack and Samsung.

While banks use rigorous credit policies and don’t care much about small businesses, particularly those without any local credit history or track record, informal lenders act as loan sharks to the detriment of these businesses.

A staff at Customer.io, an email vendor contracted by OpenSea, misused their employee access to download and share email addresses of OpenSea users and newsletter subscribers with an unauthorized external party, the world’s largest NFT marketplace said Wednesday night.

April users connect their payroll, bank statements, mortgage, prior year tax return and other finance apps to the platform and then tell April about significant tax events over the past year (e.g., moving to another state).

Apti said that providing large-scale access to mid- to low-income communities in a cost-efficient way compared to their traditional channels means Mapan is able to offer better prices.

With $18 million in seed funding led by San Francisco-based Human Capital and London Giant Ventures, Tenet says its EV loan offering cuts monthly payments by $200 on average.

At a time when U.S. venture dollars are slowing down, CIBC Innovation Banking is announcing $1.5 billion in growth capital commitments, dubbed “Unicorn Fuel,” to focus on later-stage companies across software, life sciences, healthcare and clean tech industries.

Ozark less-than-satisfactory experience with existing financial compliance software led him and Madhu G. Nadig to co-launch Flagright. Ozkan is the founder of Flagright, a startup that aims to prevent financial crime, like money laundering or terrorist financing, with an API-first product.

Today, Conversion Capital is announcing that it has raised $122 million for its third fund — more than six times the size of its previous fund — to back early-stage fintech and infrastructure startups.

Google has invested in Progcap, an Indian startup that provides working capital to small and medium-sized businesses, the firms said Tuesday, making a new push into a category that has attracted the attention of Facebook and Amazon in recent years.

Crypto exchange FTX is open to partnering with Robinhood Markets, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said in a statement.

At the time of that last raise, Hughes told journalist that Amount’s clients included financial institutions collectively managing nearly $2 trillion in U.S. assets and servicing more than 50 million U.S. customers.

For their second fund, Brand and Rupp will largely continue with the same strategy from Fund I, sticking to making about 15 investments in total after making 12 out of the first fund, they said. In an ecosystem where women make up just 2.4% of partners at venture firms and considering that the vast majority of first-time funds never actually make it to closing.

TLcom Capital has appointed Eloho Omame as a partner six months after announcing the first close of TIDE Africa Fund II, its $150 million second fund.

We found that fintech startups raised $1.5 billion from June 16 to June 23 across 39 deals — compared to $1.4 billion raised across 53 deals the week prior and $1.2 billion across 59 deals 2 weeks prior.

Payments giants and fintech startups in India on Saturday requested the central bank to treat widely used prepaid payment instruments on par with bank accounts for customers who have undertaken certain verifications, days after the monetary authority signalled industry-wide crackdown. The Payments Council of India, a unit of influential industry body IAMAI, said in a \[…\]

And when you consider all of the elements that go into buying and selling goods and services, there are a lot of areas left for SumUp to tackle — big data analytics, more tools to build, manage and optimize, online sales experiences for its customers, more technology to use to improve how items are sold in physical commerce experiences and so on — all areas that SumUp can approach either through building its own technology, or indeed through more M&A. The solution for a company like SumUp — with the bread and butter of its business, point of sale payments, fundamentally a part of that in-person commerce experience — has been to diversify and double down on a wider array of services for its small business retailers customers. Nevertheless, turning that statistic around, POS payments still represents the bulk of the company’s revenues, so 60% growth is not just a testament to SumUp being able to grow that business in the last two years, but also the fact that in-person and point-of-sale payments remained active areas for transactions. To that end, it has used significant chunks of the debt it’s raised to date for acquisitions and to build out more services beyond POS payments, in areas like business banking (the basic version of which it throws in as a freebie), online payments and business services around both.

The Reserve Bank of India has informed dozens of fintech startups that it is barring the practice of loading non-bank prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) — prepaid cards, for instance — using credit lines, in a move that has prompted panic among — and existential threat to — many fintech startups and caused some to compare the decision to China’s crackdown on financial services firm last year.

Ben Marrel, co-founder and CEO at Breega said in a statement: Our fourth and largest fund to date will allow us to finance later stage companies at Series A stage and above and to continue to support our existing portfolio startups as they grow.

In addition to the announcement of Saga, Yakovenko shared the launch of the Solana Mobile Stack, or SMS, which is a web3 layer for Solana built on the phone. The co-founder and CEO of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, had a Steve Jobs moment when he stood in front of an auditorium in New York City and announced the launch of Saga, an Android web3-focused smartphone.

Eventually, Kasheesh plans to develop its technology so users can use the same card across multiple transactions rather than having to generate a new single-use card each time, Miller said.

The latest to enter the BNPL field attacking the B2B/SME market is Playter a London-based BNPL platform aimed at SMEs. It’s now closed a $55 million funding round from Adit Ventures and Fasanara Capital, with Fin Capital and Act Venture Capital and 1818 Ventures also participating.

In addition, the latest funding will enable SleekFlow to enhance its product development with fintech and data analytics functions, one-click checkouts via social media platforms, and easy in-chat payment integrations for online to offline (O2O) and e-commerce brands’ seamless workflow.

The acquisition comes a month after eBay launched its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf. This is the start of a new chapter in the KnownOrigin story and we couldn’t choose a better time to focus on building and innovating with the team at eBay.

Crypto custody and fintech infrastructure startup Prime Trust is positioning itself to do just that, and the company has just raised over $100 million in fresh funding to add new products to its existing suite.

While they provide digital wallets to help facilitate money transfers, there’s a lack of mobile wallet interoperability outside their ecosystem; in essence, moving money from one fintech wallet to another fintech or non-fintech wallet (in the case of an embedded finance play) is hard.

Those three executives are: Jillian White, general manager of Better’s affiliate businesses known as Better+, which consists of its title/settlement, insurance and home inspection departments; Megan Bellingham, who was senior vice president of sales and operations and John Moffatt, who served as vice president of sales.

A Ukrainian deeptech startup is launching a charity NFT project to sell AI-generated artworks with the twin goal of raising money to support people affected by Russia war of aggression and also — it hopes — keep attention locked on the conflict as it approaches its fourth month, with many in the country concerned that the world’s focus is flagging.

NFT marketplace Magic Eden, launched just nine months ago, has raised $130 million in a Series B round co-led by Electric Capital and Greylock Partners, bringing its valuation to $1.6 billion.

Singapore-based Stashfin has raised $270 million in a new funding round as the neobanking platform, which currently only serves customers in India, looks to expand to Southeast Asia and other South Asian markets, it said Tuesday.

A Cloudflare outage on Tuesday knocked out numerous popular web services, including major crypto exchanges FTX, Bitfinex, and OKX, raising questions about the security of centralized crypto platforms.

After extending credit to thousands of customers over mobile phones since 2015, Ghana-based fintech Fido is now in search of additional growth avenues for its expansion across Africa.

While most of what Srinivasan authored is, to a large extent, theoretical, Afropolitan, a community-as-a-service company for the African diaspora, is taking a bold step to bring that vision to life.

The crypto hash rate, which measures the computational power used by proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, in China plummeted to zero between last July and August after the country carried out the harshest crackdown on crypto mining.

GGV’s index leaves exited companies aside and ranks the 50 API-led private companies that have raised the most funding.

Brex decision to stop serving SMB customers surprised many in the startup and fintech community. Businesses affected, he said, are mostly brick & mortar businesses such as bakeries, restaurants and small design agencies — many of whom would argue are being impacted by rising inflation and a challenging macro environment the most.

Opening a business bank account should be fairly easy, but after seeing firsthand just how hard it was, Salomon Zarruk and Sebastian Ortiz decided they didn’t want another Latin American business to run into the same kind of difficulty.

Its fund will also collaborate with other web3 gaming and NFT-focused investors including BITKRAFT, Animoca Brands, Arrington Capital, Double Peak, AirTree, King River Capital and GameStop, as well as strategic gaming publishers, for additional investment opportunities. Immutable, an Australia-based web3 gaming firm, launched an inaugural $500 million developer and venture investment fund, Robbie Ferguson, president and co-founder of Immutable.

He has declined to reveal hard revenue figures, but previously told journalist Brex was still focused on growth and not yet profitable. Three months after announcing it would make a big push into software and enterprise, fintech giant Brex is apparently abandoning the very segment it started out to serve – small and medium-to-sized businesses.

Pazcare, a Bangalore-based employee benefits and insurtech platform, announced today it has raised $8.2 million led by Jafco Asia, bringing its valuation to $48 million. Pazcare currently offers health, term and accident insurance and outpatient health benefits. Malik told journalist the new funding will be used to expand Pazcare’s offerings and double its team size. Pazcare’s last round of funding was a $3.5 million seed round raised in October 2021.

Huobi previously held a digital asset trading license issued by Thailand’s Ministry of Finance that allows its users to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, Huobi Token, and stablecoin USDT using Thai Baht. Huobi, one of the world largest crypto exchanges, will shut down its exchange in Thailand permanently on July 1, it announced on its website.

Represas notes that Able’s focus on the tech that is used for processing, but not decision-making or risk-profiling (which Represas told me is just a small aspect of loan approval and not where the pain point is); the fact that it focuses on commercial loans and not SMB loans (too small an opportunity, he said); and that it does not directly interface with borrowers itself but works through banks I write that it is launching into the wider market because although it’s coming out of stealth, Able’s actually been around since 2020, and the customers it’s picked up are already using Able’s technology — which involves RPA, computer vision and other forms of AI to ingest and process data related to loans as part of their evaluation process.

In January 2020, HomeLight launched its flagship financial products, HomeLight Trade-In and HomeLight Cash Offer. As for the decision to acquire Accept, Uher said it was based in part on the fact that more companies have recently popped up in the proptech space with the goal to help homebuyers and sellers with various aspects of the buying and selling process and that HomeLight wanted to be even more competitive.

Many of us take prescription medication with little to no understanding of just how long it takes — or how much it costs — to get that drug to market. Conducting clinical trials of a given medication usually takes years and lots of money.

The funding, a Series C, is coming from a single investor, Blackstone Growth, and PayCargo — based out of Coral Gables, FL — said that it will be used to expand into more geographies, to build out more products around financial and business data, and potentially also for M&A, since the area of providing services to the shipping industry is as fragmented as the shipping industry itself. The core of the PayCargo platform is a set of cloud-based tools for those ordering shipping services by land, sea or air to send payments, and for vendors to receive them, a set of APIs to integrate the tools into a company’s existing FMS and other IT, as well as financing services for those who do not want to pay for the shipments up front. PayCargo is not disclosing its valuation, but notably, the company is an example of one of the kinds of startups that is not finding it challenging to raise money at the moment: it is profitable, and it has been since it was founded in 2009; it is working in an enterprise vertical that still has a long way to go before it saturated with competing services filling the same need PayCargo is;  and that enterprise vertical itself represents a massive opportunity with the continued growth and globalization of e-commerce overall. As with others building IT services for the freight and shipping industries — they include Zencargo, FreightHub, Sennder, Flexport, and Cargo.com — the opportunity is about building more cloud-based services that work smoothly and securely and with other pieces of the operations puzzle; but in many cases, it’s still just about providing tools to replace paper and fax machines.

The Toronto-based company has been a leader in the realm of democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and peer-to-peer money transfers. And now it appears that Wealthsimple is an example of another company that experienced a boom during the early days of the pandemic and is now seeing a slowdown in business. It will scale back its efforts in areas such as peer-to-peer payments, tax and merchant services.

Christina Ross, Cube’s CEO and co-founder, told us she came up with the idea for the startup after working in CFO or head of finance roles at Eyeview, Criteo and Rent the Runway. And while Ross declined to reveal hard revenue figures, she said that ARR has grown five times — or 400% — in the past year, as the company has added new customers such as Acorns,

Narmi offers products including digital account opening, business digital account opening, consumer digital banking, business digital banking, and an administrator console. While New York, New York-based Narmi isn’t a bank, it provides mobile, online, and digital account banking to regional and community financial institutions.

And last November, Metropolis announced a partnership with Uber, Uber Park, which allows Uber riders to use the Uber app to access locations within the Metropolis network. Metropolis, a startup building payment infrastructure for parking facilities, today announced that it raised $167 million in a Series B round co-led by 3L Capital and Assembly Ventures.

The safety and risk of crypto-based financial products are in question this week as Celsius Network, a major crypto lender that lets users make deposits to earn interest and take out loans in crypto, paused withdrawals this week, sending the price of its token tumbling.

While Binance.US says it’s not a subsidiary or affiliate of Binance itself, the company launched as a legal independent entity in 2019 and is tied to Binance through its founder, Changpeng Zhao, as well as through its licensing agreements with Binance that cover its core technology and naming rights.

The fintech also highlighted its efforts in bringing in two hires to chart its next growth phase: Meghan Taylor, an ex-partner at Boston Consulting Group, who is now its chief of staff and Julian Adkins, ex-Africa CFO at telecom operator Millicom, who operates as the company’s group chief financial officer.

While Dcode Capital can’t be a substantial financial backer to its portfolio companies based on its small check sizes at the stage it invests at, it hopes to have an outsized impact with its knowledge of getting tech into the government, something most VCs can’t offer.

Flip has helped over 10 million people in Indonesia as of May this year, up from more than 7 million users in December 2021, to access financial transactions, including online interbank transfers to more than 100 domestic banks, e-wallet top-ups, and international remittances, enabling users to send money from Indonesia to over 45 countries and enterprise payment transfer products.

While much of the deep, fundamental research and infrastructure development in the blockchain space still takes place in the US, Southeast Asia is ideal for web3 startups offering consumer-facing services, said Amy Zhao, lead at crypto investment firm Ocular.

Pan-African venture capital fund Launch Africa Ventures today is announcing the close of its $36.3 million fund, which it has primarily used to invest in B2B and B2B2C startups across Africa.

Celsius allows users to deposit their Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether and receive weekly interest payments. There must be many users who are in a position of leverage and desperately need those funds from Celsius, now locked away.

Amex users have been waiting for an announcement like this for some time, as its competitors Visa and Mastercard have already launched their own crypto rewards credit cards through partnerships with digital asset companies, such as Visa’s crypto rewards card offered in conjunction with BlockFi and the Mastercard-powered card issued by crypto exchange Gemini.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of Work Bank, plans to make an equity investment of up to €25 million ($26.43) into the Partech Africa Fund II (PAF II) by the Paris-based VC firm Partech.

Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey is teaming up with artist Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) to launch The Bitcoin Academy at Marcy Houses, the public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York where Jay-Z grew up.

CRED is raising $140 million in a new financing round, its fourth funding in the past year and a half, as the Indian fintech startup courts millions of high credit score customers and broadens its offerings.

Luis Cervantes, managing director and head of General Atlantic’s Mexico office, told journalist in an interview that overall, the market opportunity in Mexico for digital banks is one of most attractive ones in the world.

According to Mack, Middesk allows service providers to form a picture of their customers and offer products they might need to establish, operate, and maintain their businesses.

Backbase — an Amsterdam-based startup that provides a platform that banks and others can use to better structure and leverage the data that they have, and to then use that to build more personalization and other new features into those banks’ customer-facing services — has raised €120 million ($128 million at today rates).

all had track records of working in digital businesses where they saw, not just for themselves but their customers, an opportunity to build a bank that took all of that into account (so to speak) and built a financial management service that fit those dynamics.

While Apple has partnered with payment providers and others on the financial side of things before in order to make Apple Pay and Wallet work, Pay Later represents the first time the company is handling the actual loans, risk management, and credit checks itself.

Pacific also attributes Entropy’s edge to their own willingness to deviate from the traditional business model for custodians, wherein users pay them a fee to safekeep funds, and to work towards finding a model that can generate revenue not just for the custodian but also for the protocol itself, as well as crypto users.

The role of that guide is to give a member ongoing personalized advice for $98 a month on a variety of financial matters, from budgeting to establishing savings and investments to 401(k)s, buying a home, putting away funds for kids’ college and paying taxes.

Orman said she pushed back on a number of product roadmap suggestion from her other two co-founders, including making it look less like Mint, a personal finance platform adorned with graphs and data and more like a wallet that can inspire people to save.

Curio taps into several different sources of data to provide a powerful analytics tool for both browsing and tracking the value of NFTs. Cofounders Chrys Bader and Sean Dadashi started working on Curio about two years ago, but it wasn’t called Curio back then.

Who knows whether it FOMO or actual customer demand for such a thing, but Salesforce announced today that it’s launching a pilot of NFT Cloud, a new platform for buying and selling these crypto assets.

Delphia’s data token model will function as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), votes for which are tied to its ERC-20 token that data-providing users receive for sharing their information.

The company is working to streamline operations at other fintech startups, specifically through its reconciliation software that those companies can use to help ensure they’re working with accurate and precise data even when it comes from different places, said co-founder and CEO Kyle Maloney.

The $1.5 billion venture capital firm is entering the crypto market with a new $110 million fund dedicated to the sector that it will operate jointly with Ledger, a French startup focused on digital asset security, said Cathay co-founder Dennis Barrier.

Branch, according to co-founder and CEO Steve Lekas, is the only insurance company that he is aware of that can bind insurance through an API, and the only one that can bundle auto and home insurance in a single transaction.

Like other European fintech players like open banking specialists Tink and Truelayer, as well as others in the embedded finance space like 10x and Thought Machine — both of which have raised healthy amounts of funding also from investors that include large financial incumbents.

In the future, Salary Hero plans to add neo banking products, including at-source savings accounts, insurance products, remittances and other financial services like micro-investments and debt restructuring advice. Rakhra said that by addressing the financial needs of their workers, companies are able to improve employee satisfaction and reduce turnover in a competitive labor market. These other products will go live in 2023, while Salary Hero earned wage access and financial education features are already live. By being able to access their earned wages on demand, workers are able to better handle emergencies and unforeseen expenses, instead of being forced to borrow from lenders who charge 10% to 30% interest per month, Rahkra said.

Solana Ventures and Solana Foundation have set up a $100 million investment and grant fund to deploy capital into South Korean web3 startups, Johnny Lee, general manager of games at Solana Labs, told journalist.

The new functionality is only available to users in the U.S., and for security reasons, PayPal says it has implemented an additional identity verification process for users before they can transfer any crypto.

Ecuadorian payments infrastructure company Kushki has raised $100 million in an extension to its Series B round, more than doubling its valuation to $1.5 billion. Put simply, Kushki aims to help make it easier, cheaper and more secure for businesses across LatAm to send and receive/process digital payments.

The startup, which provides multiple products for the cross-border commerce space in Africa, raised this new financing from a group of international investors co-led by American Express (AMEX) Ventures, the strategic investment group of American Express

Apple is also getting into the game, it announced today, with a service called Apple Pay Later. So we did get to see Apple’s event impact a stock, just not the one that we expected it to; investors are paying attention, at least somewhat.

Despite the rising interest among Asia’s investors, most wealth management firms in the region do not yet offer clients a digital assets proposition — and two-thirds of firms currently have no plans to do so, according to Accenture.

MFS Africa infrastructure merges fragmented and disparate payment schemes across Africa into one seamless network so individuals and businesses within mobile money ecosystems can transact across borders and currencies.

Lalji said that Ivella will focus on products to support couples at any stage of their relationship, including joint accounts, credit products and joint investment products, long-term.

So lenders can use Indicina for credit scoring and bank sentiment analysis, getting access to ML-driven financial analytics and improved insights into consumers they currently don’t have and derisk unsecured loans.

The bill specifically is targeting proof-of-work mining, which is one of the two most popular mechanisms cryptocurrencies use to verify new transactions on the blockchain and make new tokens, but it uses a lot of energy to validate blockchain transactions.

Coinbase announced today that it will extend its hiring freeze and revoke accepted offers from some candidates who haven’t started their roles yet. The third-largest crypto exchange by volume, Coinbase began to slow hiring two weeks ago, but this move is more drastic.

Other major crypto companies have also been slowing hiring in response to a downturn in prices – Coinbase, Gemini close competitor, announced plans last month to reverse its prior headcount growth projections, and Latin American crypto exchange Bitso let go of 80 employees last week.

Iyer, a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits, spent the majority of last year honing in on his interest in web3 as a visiting partner at Pear VC and an instructor teaching a DeFi masterclass to over 2,000 students.

Sanlo, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that offers small to medium-sized game and app companies access to tools to manage their finances and capital to fuel their growth, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Konvoy.

Others that have raised money to grow their businesses include team management app Homebase; Fountain for sourcing and hiring hourly workers; another platform for matching shift workers to employers, Shiftsmart; Wagestream, a financial ‘super app’ for waged workers; When I Work to manage shift scheduling; and many others. In one of the latest developments, Hourly.io — which has built an app that tracks working hours, generates payroll, and then calculates and assigns workers compensation insurance to individuals based on that — has closed in on $27 million in funding. Hourly says that its revenues — based on two service tiers with varying levels of features for $40 plus $6/worker/month or  $60 plus $10/worker/month — have been growing 20% month-over-month although it does not disclose actual revenue numbers. They’ve included a growing regard for this segment of the workforce (this one really stood out during the Covid-19 pandemic where front-line workers were seen for the essential role they play to show up for work to keep the wheels of life turning while the rest of us sheltered in place).

The Justice Department and SDNY U.S. Attorney’s Office have begun getting more active in prosecuting crypto crimes, but the NFT space has largely evaded much action, which made the announcement a bit of a shock to those in the crypto space. OpenSea soon fired Chastain after they determined the allegations were legitimate, though Chastain has continued to be active in the NFT community, especially on Twitter.

That where Constrafor comes in: as a SaaS construction procurement platform with embedded financing, it streamlines information and documentation for how general contractors work with subcontractors, while its Early Pay Program assumes the risk for the subcontractor invoice, freeing up cash flow and reliance on traditional and costly lending options.

InfStones, which aims to help clients build applications across a number of blockchain platforms, closed a $66 million round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and GGV Capital, the company announced on Wednesday.

Last week, former Binance executives at Old Fashion Research launched a $100 million venture fund to focus on the metaverse and bringing greater crypto adoption to emerging markets like Latin America and Africa, according to its managing partner, Ling Zhang, who was previously the vice president of M&A and investments at Binance. Venture capital firms continue to deploy and raise capital for crypto markets despite volatility in recent weeks, with Binance Labs closing a $500 million investment fund to focus on web3 and blockchain technology adoption.

Slice, a fintech startup that is bringing credit card features to millions of Indians, has raised $50 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its recently launched UPI payments product and push to make its core credit business profitable.