FinTech news in acquisition category

In a post on the Shopify Engineering blog, Dion Almaer, VP of engineering at Shopify, said that the purchase of Remix will benefit both Shopify developers and merchants by bringing improvements to Hydrogen. Not coincidentally, Shopify originally used React Router to architect Hydrogen, the company’s frontend web development framework for building custom Shopify storefronts Remix, a startup developing an open source web framework similar to Next.js, has been acquired by Shopify, the companies announced in a joint statement today. Compatible with public cloud environments including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers, one of Remix’s key features is prefetching — the framework can prefetch elements of a webpage in parallel, including buttons and forms, before a user clicks on a link to minimize page loading.

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.

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.

Crypto infrastructure provider Blockdaemon has acquired Danish company Sepior, a digital asset security company providing key management services for institutional clients, for an undisclosed price.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, acquired NFT aggregator Gem.xyz (Gem) to “better serve” its more experienced users, the company said in a blog post. The deal, which comes a few months after OpenSea bought DeFi wallet startup Dharma Labs, will allow OpenSea to “learn from Gem’s expertise and intuition about the advanced NFT community,” the \[…\]

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.