FinTech news in articles category
As previously reported in the Irish media, documents filed in the Companies Registration Office in Dublin, Ireland, where Web Summit was originally launched, show that Cosgrave, Web Summit CEO, is listed as a director of the Web Summit Ventures Management Ltd. While it’s been previously reported that Web Summit co-founder, Paddy Cosgrave, will imminently launch his new vehicle, Web Summit Ventures (WSV), the nature and size of the fund has not, until now, been revealed. The move follows an acrimonious fallout between Web Summit’s co-founders, who first started the now-defunct Amaranthine VC fund in 2018, in part to join the ballooning investment ecosystem that had grown up around the Web Summit events. The Amaranthine Fund was set up by Cosgrave; David Kelly, a Web Summit co-founder; and Patrick Murphy, a fund manager, in 2018.
Though Halliday plans to charge an initial fee to customers using the product to cover the startup’s costs, Malhotra hopes to eliminate the fee over time as his goal is to keep the product as low-cost as possible for gamers.
The new division will be built upon the acquisition of blockchain-based loyalty platform for games WonderBlocks, as well as a strategic alliance with blockchain infrastructure gaming developer Forte.
Interplay current offerings include a venture capital arm that houses two early-stage funds, a foundry that helps build companies from scratch, an incubator to support existing companies and a family office.
Specifically, the SEC framed the following assets as securities: Power Ledger’s POWR token, Flexa’s AMP token, Rally’s RLY token, DerivaDEX’s DDX token, XY Labs’ XYO token, Rari Capital’s RGT token, Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange’s LCX token, DFX Finance’s DFX token and Kromatika Finance’s KROM token.
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.
Solomon co-founded Sunscreen last year alongside threshold cryptography veteran MacLane Wilkison of Y Combinator-backed NuCypher.
Smolin references the great lengths users go to at the end of the year to reach the next level of airline status as a way to signify how they price the value of the service; he wonders whether more services could build this relationship and create better membership programs for users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wagner also noted that the company recently launched a new product line around CRM data sharing and since the company is seeing a lot of traction around its file-sharing capabilities, it is also investing in that as well.
Akinin narrated how merchants would use a platform’s BNPL offering, generate revenue, and proceed to pay for the next invoice with this profit or purchase stock from another supplier in an entirely different supply chain.
Larsen said the situation with Hannum didn’t affect investors’ attitude towards the funding round, and that ZenLedger had already secured ParaFi as a lead investor before Hannum’s misdeeds were made public.
Primitives’ ultimate goal is for the digital wallet to become a central location for a user to hold NFTs and cryptocurrencies, interact with friends, store music, play games, and more, Gabeau said.
Of the total funds raised in this round, $32 million came from venture capital firms and $38 million from the sale of Flowcarbon’s Goddess Nature Token (GNT), a crypto token on the Celo blockchain backed by carbon credits, Reuters reported.
Doppel indexes NFT data across various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, and others, and uses models that incorporate keywords and metadata to spot fraud, Tian said.
Tel Aviv-based Classiq, a startup that wants to make it easier for developers to build quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised additional funding for its service.
The fund, which is backed by Dapper’s venture arm and Dapper investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Union Square Ventures, Coinfund, Digital Currency Group and Cadenza Ventures, among others, is aiming to incentivize more crypto devs to choose Flow as the blockchain they build their projects on with investments, token grants and development support.
The startup’s web3 infrastructure works with over 10,000 off-chain data sources from credit bureaus, bank data aggregators, and alternative data across 78 countries allowing Masa to create on-chain credit scoring for its users. Masa Finance, a hybrid credit protocol and decentralized credit bureau founded by Pngme CEO Brendan Playford in late 2020, has raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding.
Americana Technologies, a startup founded early last year by designer Jake Frey, allows brands and creators to turn physical items such as streetwear, collectibles, cars and artworks into NFTs.
Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm’s commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still don’t understand.
Sienna is among several other blockchain startups trying to prevent “front-running”, where transactions on Ethereum can be preempted by someone else simply by them paying a higher transaction fee — just like trumping a trade on the stock market by paying a higher fee to a broker.
This is part of the reason you read about layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) networks so often; VCs are making bets on competing L1 blockchains to take advantage of this deficit and L2 blockchains that sit on top of Ethereum are designed to improve the speed and price of transactions. It’s a technology that has been pretty widely accepted as a near-term solution for the Ethereum network and VCs have already christened a number of other unicorns in the optimistic rollup space including Optimism and Arbitrum.
This has pushed some founders to build competing blockchains on entirely unique infrastructure, while others in the developer community are focusing their resources on building modular blockchain solutions that sit on top of Ethereum, bundling transactions faster and cheaper while keeping a record of the movements on the central chain.
The e-commerce boom that started with the Covid-19 pandemic shows little sign of slowing down, and today a company called Shopware, which provides a set of open source tools to power online shopping experiences for some 100,000 mid-sized and larger brands, is announcing $100 million in funding to capture the opportunity.
Many crypto detractors contend that the web3 space is buoyed by meme money, so Coatue leading a $69,420,000 Series B in a blockchain startup shouldn’t leave them too surprised. The investment — made in crypto analytics platform Dune Analytics — brings the startup valuation to $1 billion.
To underscore the demand for solutions to address this, today a startup called Wayflyer — which has built a new kind of financing platform, using big data analytics and repayments based on a merchant revenue activity — is announcing a big round of funding, $150 million. In terms of competitors, the size of the loans it typically makes, and the frequency — depending on the nature and size of the customer, loans could be made as frequently as monthly — has partly meant that Wayflyer doesn’t compete against, but complements, some of the other companies that have emerged as financiers to e-commerce businesses. E-commerce has continued to boom in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but running an e-commerce business has also become significantly more chaotic, with unpredictable supply chains, logistics hiccups and overall higher costs upending even the best-laid plans. The company’s technology is a classic big-data play: It uses a number of sources of data, from Shopify and Woo Commerce through to TrustPilot reviews and Google Analytics and even wider information about how shipping services are performing, to determine how a merchant is doing as a business.
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.
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.
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.