FinTech news in Australia category

It a tough market for venture capital, but Square Peg Capital is plowing ahead with its focus on Australia (where it is based), Southeast Asia and Israel. Square Peg has a growing footprint in Southeast Asia, where partners Tushar Roy and Piruze Sabuncu are based. Part of Square Peg’s new capital will be used for its core venture fund, which invests in seed to Series B startups. Some of Square Peg’s investments so far from Southeast Asian include LottieFiles, Doctor Anywhere and FinAccel.

Oberoi said that people in many markets including the U.S., Australia and Canada still prefer to use SMSs over any third-party offerings, but added that it’s within reach for the startup to quickly adopt WhatsApp or any other instant messaging service onto the platform. Emitrr, founded by Oberoi and his partner Pulkit Gambhir in December 2020, claims that that over 150 local businesses in the U.S. use its platform. Oberoi said that Emitrr has so far built seven to eight different automation models that work over the short messaging service (SMS). Now a young startup, Emitrr, is aiming to bring the benefits of this model to small and local businesses in the U.S.

We spoke to a dozen Chinese founders and investors to find out how this group is trying to build global web3 businesses while still keeping their roots in China and taking advantage of the home country’s abundant tech talent

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.

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.

Fintech startup and alternative credit asset manager Viola Credit, has closed its latest $700 million fund which provides asset-based lending capital to FinTech, PropTech, and InsurTech startups.

Babel has evolved from a crypto lending business targeting miners and others into a comprehensive crypto asset manager for institutional investors. The growth of Babel Finance, which offers a suite of institution-facing crypto financial products, could be an indicator of how banks, investment funds, and other traditional investors are embracing the emerging digital asset class. It’s one of the many crypto firms to have recently opened an office in Singapore, which is competing with Hong Kong to be the crypto nexus of Asia.

For one, it’s working on a price stabilization mechanism to ensure the cost of its coins is always at a rate that the shoes are affordable for new users but also not so cheap that existing users lack the incentives to mint new shoes, that is, create new shoes on the blockchain and sell. Since its launch in December, StepN, an app that lets users walk and run to earn tokens, has quickly become a household name in the play-to-earn blockchain gaming, or GameFi, world.

Its target investors are similar to those participating in crypto, Auslander said — retail investors, collectible lovers, and people who are fans of events like the Met Gala or the Oscars who not only read editorial coverage of those events but also want to participate in the ownership of related assets.

The idea with Wagestream is not just to give those workers faster liquidity when they need it, but to give them the ability to use that money in different ways — for example with features to invest small amounts into stocks, and to bring in controls to save money incrementally in a way that makes the most practical sense for those users.

First, it will help it expand the company expand its geographic footprint: Azimo currently has payment licenses in the U.K., the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong, and it operates a payment network in more than 160 countries, while Papaya Global (not to be confused with the other fintech called Papaya) operated services in 150 countries just prior to this deal, Eynat Guez, Papaya Global CEO and co-founder.

Zepto, an Australian real-time account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments platform, said Monday it raised a $25 million AUD Series A (about $18.8 million USD) co-led by AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners. More than 100 Australian organizations, including banks, fintech companies and credit unions, use NPP (new payments platform), Australia’s open-access infrastructure for fast payment, according to the NPP website.

In the works is Zeller Financial Services, which will include credit and debit cards and expense management tools, as well as enhanced analytics through Zeller’s dashboard. Zeller’s product roadmap includes new omni-channel commerce capabilities, like the ability to accept online payments through integrations with website and e-commerce platforms.

While CTC pulls in all the data needed to build a transaction history and performs tax calculations for its users, Brunette still advises advanced crypto users to consult a tax professional to help them interpret regulatory grey areas to determine what they actually need to pay, and what rules apply to their activity.

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.

Coinbase, one of the world largest crypto exchanges, announced an exclusive partnership earlier this week with crypto tax and portfolio tracking provider CoinTracker, meaning Coinbase users will get access to CoinTracker’s software at a discounted price.

The Austrian startup — a platform for documentation and communication in construction and real estate projects — is continuing its funding roll with a $70 million fundraising round co-led by Insight Partners and Quadrille Capital. Back in March Vienna-based PlanRadar snapped up a €30 million Series A to digitize construction and real estate projects. The round also drew participation from existing investors, including Headline, Berliner Volksbank Ventures, aws Gründerfonds and Cavalry Ventures, plus new investors Proptech1, Russmedia and GR Capital. To add context to that, this is a significant raise for an Austrian company, and PlanRadar claims it the third-largest Series B in Austrian history to date.