🗓 All FinTech news in April 2023
Founded last year by former Adyen product manager Sophia Goldberg and ex-Affirm software engineer JT Cho, San Francisco-based Ansa is building what it describes as a white-labeled digital wallet infrastructure to help businesses process small payments and offset high credit card fees for smaller transactions.
three former managing directors of Amex Ventures in early 2022 branched out to form their own fintech-focused venture firm, Vesey Ventures.
The company, co-founded by Manuel Alemán, Rodolfo Lazo and Paul Cattólica in 2022, is developing a vertical SaaS product for institutions, like banks and credit unions, that want to launch and operate their own credit products.
"Our mission is to build the best infrastructure for exchanges," Jog said, adding that the blockchain also has projects building games, NFT marketplaces and rollups. "It’s not just DeFi, but other applications that derive demand from trading."
Similar to how Plaid leverages a user-permissioned data platform for banking, Axle allows users to connect their insurance account to trusted companies in seconds through a developer-friendly API or one of Axle’s low-code or no-code options.
Hyve is building a multiplayer fintech infrastructure for saving and investing where users can create their network of supporters, and those people can automatically round up their purchases to match the user’s personal cash contributions. The more people added to the “hyve,” the more money the user saves to reach their goals.
LayerZero Labs, a web3 messaging protocol, has closed a $120 million Series B round, raising its valuation to $3 billion from $1 billion, the company said on Tuesday.
The company just changed its name to Zealy, which indicates a larger focus beyond web3 companies. Last year, the startup raised $3.5 million in a funding round led by Redalpine. Other investors included Connect Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Kima Ventures, Purple, STATION F, Founders Future, Pareto Holdings and several business angels from The Sandbox, POAP, DFNS, Starton and Pianity.
Zamp offers a treasury management platform that enables businesses worldwide to invest surplus cash in U.S. Treasury bills and notes, partnering with BNY Mellon Pershing, which manages over $2 trillion. The platform serves businesses of all sizes, it said.
The acquisition is notable for a couple of reasons. For one, if the companies have managed to keep their valuations level (valuations have seen a lot of pressure in the last six months) it would be one of the bigger M&A deals between two fintech startups, coming at a time when startups have found it very challenging to raise further funding — either from private investors, or from the public markets by way of an IPO.