🗓 All FinTech news in March 2023

Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor

Oscilar is entirely self-funded, backed by $20 million that Narkhede and the company’s other co-founder, Sachin Kulkami, themselves contributed. Narkhede says that they opted not to take outside funding so that they could “quickly build and scale the company” as it launches publicly.

This is an extension round as the valuation of the company isn’t changing — €1.3 billion ($1.41 billion at today’s exchange rate). In the current funding environment, raising at the same valuation is already quite impressive.

“The biggest challenge in the global supply chain is the lack of transparency. The manual processes, the paperwork; you would be surprised if you submit a document in a bank in India, they still ask you to sign the document with an ink-based signature, it’s a lot of manual labor.”

During one of the most rapid raises of interest rates we’ve really seen in U.S. history and with the cost of capital gone up, companies realized they need to make the most of every dollar,” he said

Based out of Cambridge, England, says it is building tooling that focuses on “autonomous agents, network infrastructure, and decentralised machine learning” that help enable communication and actions between AI applications, the idea being to make the work produced by them more actionable.

General Atlantic is in talks to lead a $120 million round into Acko, the first tranche of which is about $100 million, a source familiar with the matter said. The round values the Indian startup at $1.5 billion.

One Austin-based startup is out to help people build — or get — credit without taking on debt. And that startup, StellarFi, has just closed on a $15 million Series A round of funding to help it advance on that goal.

The deal includes the purchase of about $72 billion assets of Silicon Valley Bank at a discount of $16.5 billion. About $90 billion in securities and other assets of the California-based lenders will remain “in receivership of disposition” by the FDIC.

Eagle believes Beam differs in that Briq is more focused on building tools for large enterprises to automate their billing process. common refrain in the construction industry is that most contractors are forced to complete projects before getting paid, often having to pay for material and labor out of pocket.

The round was led by Japanese bank Mizuho Bank, a subsidiary of Mizuho Financial Group that contributed $125 million. It included participation from returning investors like Square Peg Capital, Jungle Ventures, Naver Financial Corporation, GMO Venture Partners and Openspace Ventures.

Besides seeking to snag market share from incumbents such as Concur, Brex is also taking on startups such as Navan (formerly called TripActions) — which actually started its business focused on travel expense management before broadening its offering and also Ramp, which itself expanded into travel last year.

F3C’s “secret sauce” is that they are all operators and therefore are intimately familiar with the startup journey and what it takes to develop a successful company.

It has 63 members, including crypto venture capital firms like Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital and Dragonfly Capital, as well as family offices, traditional VCs and corporations.

The company came to an agreement with investors, according to eToro, that the investment would be converted two years after the signing of the agreement based on the following conditions: that it had not pursued the SPAC transaction or raised any additional capital.

OP3N’s chat-based product, Superapp, aims to bridge the gap between Web 2.0 and web3 through implementing blockchain and decentralized technologies into Web 2.0-friendly interfaces. So going forward, Ma realized OP3N has to bridge the traditional market into web3 in a way that’s more understandable.

Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp, has signed a takeover agreement with U.S. regulators for some of Signature Bank assets and loans. But not crypto.

We realized very quickly the scaling limitations of Ethereum, but we never wanted to compete with it. Polygon could help Immutable avoid Ethereum congestion and costs without having to build its own alternative.

PhonePe has raised another $200 million as part of an ongoing round, a deliberation that has now helped it pull $650 million in recent weeks despite the market slump, as the Indian fintech giant bulks up its war chest following the recent separation from the parent firm Flipkart.

All in all, the market madness has seemingly created a bullish sentiment in the crypto economy; as traders responded positively to the news, the overall market cap rose on the week and crypto app downloads increased.

Parker is also working toward profitability, and the company is working on scaling to access the cheaper cost of capital and upsell other products, though there is a path to profitability on just the card business, Sibous said. Parker, a startup offering a corporate credit card for e-commerce businesses, emerged from stealth Thursday with $157 million in equity and debt funding, much of which closed in 2022. In addition, the company offers payment terms that Sibous said make sense in the context of e-commerce — think net terms on every transaction. Sibous believes Parker has a good opportunity to compete in the crowded credit card space that includes other venture-backed companies like Moss and Emburse.

The Ledger Extension is compatible with Ethereum- and Polygon-based dApps and platforms and plans to support more EVM-compatible chains and Solana in the future, the company shared.

Ethereum is promoting smart contract wallets as the future of Ethereum, so dApp developers will feel incentivized to make the switch, reckoned Zeng, an active member of the Ethereum community.

African startups impacted by SVB collapse It is not yet clear how many African startups and VCs were affected by SVB’s collapse.

Digital payments company Stripe announced Wednesday that it raised over $6.5 billion in Series I funding to value the company at $50 billion. Two months ago, journalist reported that Stripe had cut its internal valuation to $63 billion.

As a 1:1 fully collateralized stablecoin backed by offshore Chinese yuan, CNHC needs approval from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and is obliged to submit audit reports at the local government’s request, the company told journalist. Circle Ventures, the venture arm of the USDC issuer Circle, has invested in an offshore Chinese yuan-backed stablecoin project, CNHC.

The distressing loss prompted Le Nguyen to develop security solutions for crypto transactions with the help of his co-founder Jake Harwood, an effort that eventually became Staging Labs.

Broom, an Indonesia-based auto-financing startup that wants to help used car dealers work more efficiently by applying the asset-backed lending model to their businesses .

A Meta spokesperson told journalist that it is shifting its investments away from NFTs toward products like Meta Pay, as well as features that enable creators to earn money directly on Meta platforms, like its tipping feature called gifts.

YC refused to admit that today’s layoffs and departure from growth stage is related to the banking crisis, it’s hard not to see the news amid the backdrop of a tech reckoning

In light of the downfall of centralized crypto services like FTX, Gemini and Babel itself, Yang is touting Hope, which blends centralized finance (CeFi), decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi), to deliver the kind of transparency and security that come with DeFi but provide the easy access offered by CeFi.

Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras is currently working to raise over a billion dollars in a weekend to help fund an emergency bridge credit line that he believes will help startup customers impacted by Silicon Valley Bank collapse be able to make payroll next week.

The bank’s CEO Greg Becker, serenely addressing the bank’s customers in a Zoom call to alleviate their fears, managed to scare them further, telling viewers: “The last thing we need you to do is panic.”

According to Circle’s January attestation report, the firm had about $9.88 billion in cash deposited at regulated banks to back its stablecoin’s value, among other assets. If Circle did have more than a smattering of cash at SVB, concerns could mount that the backing of USDC may no longer be complete and instead be more fractional than is needed for a stablecoin to remain steady.

As a threat of a bank run looms at Silicon Valley Bank, days after Silvergate’s meltdown FDIC takes over SVB

Meet Tweed, a startup coming out of stealth today that has been working on a white-label cryptocurrency wallet and payment solution. Users are in charge of their crypto assets, and Tweed handles the fiat-to-crypto infrastructure.

As part of the latest funding announcement Synctera said is also announcing that it is partnering with the National Bank of Canada to help companies launch fintech apps and embedded banking products in the country.

One company that is demonstrating how blockchain can come in handy in real life is Kansas-based Redeem, which allows users to claim non-fungible tokens using phone numbers rather than having to set up crypto wallets.

The accelerator program’s first cohort accepted 30 startups from a pool of over 220 applicants across 76 countries.

Coinbase wallet as a service (WaaS) is a scalable set of wallet infrastructure APIs that allow companies to create and deploy customizable on-chain wallets to their users.

Slice has acquired a 5% stake in the Indian bank North East Small Finance in what analysts say is a key step in the unicorn fintech startup journey amid mounting challenges from the central bank that has toppled many young firms.

Back in December, Congress passed the SECURE ACT 2.0, which created provisions for employers to match student loan payments for those with debt while also adding to retirement accounts. Late in February, the Supreme Court heard arguments related to a lawsuit trying to block Biden’s debt relief program.

Founded out of New York in 2012, Droit serves to bolster financial institutions’ trading decision-making by integrating regulatory knowledge into the pre-trade process, highlighting key information on things like whether the transaction is allowed according to the regulations of each market as well as internal policies, ensuring that all obligations are met.

Tensor, a Solana-centric NFT trading platform, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Placeholder, the team exclusively shared with journalist. Solana is the third largest blockchain for NFTs by sales volume with over $3.7 billion in sales all-time, according to data on NFT aggregator CryptoSlam.

The round was co-led by FinTLV Ventures and existing investor Harel Insurance, which were joined by new and existing investors, including Lumir Ventures, Hamilton Lane, New Era Capital Partners, MS&AD Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, Poalim Equity, EquiTrust Life Insurance Co., Akilia Partners and Samsung Next.

Less than one year after Upload Ventures spun out of SoftBank investment arm, the Latin American-focused investment arm is seeking to raise a $250 million fund, filings show.

Growfin, a Singapore- and San Francisco–based fintech startup that provides SaaS for finance departments to track and collect payments and to help manage the accounts receivable process, has raised a $7.5 million Series A.

The vulnerability in Fortra’s GoAnywhere file-transfer software came to light on February 2 after security journalist Brian Krebs publicly shared details of Fortra’s security advisory because the tech company had put the advisory behind a login prompt.

Earlier this year, journalist reported that Thrive Capital was said to have committed $1 billion in fresh capital to Stripe as part of a new investment in the works that would have valued the fintech company at between $55 billion and $60 billion

The new platform, Chainlink Functions, also lets builders run customizable computations on Web 2.0 APIs within minutes through its network, Kemal El Moujahid, chief product officer at Chainlink Labs

Revenue can be broken down in three big pillars: cards, subscriptions, and foreign exchange