FinTech news in business models category

Founded last year by Kelly Ifill, the company aims to narrow the racial wealth gap by providing financial services to Black small businesses and creators. As a result, Ifill hopes Guava will help Black entrepreneurs receive access to the financial support needed to weather every kind of financial storm, especially as another recession looms. And yet, Black founders receive less than 2% of all venture capital funding, and only 3% of Black women run mature businesses. At the same time, Bloomberg reported that Black founders — Black women specifically — were the fastest growing cohort of entrepreneurs.

Sold as a SaaS itself — basic pricing is 5% + 50 cents per transaction — Paddle premise follows the basic principle of so many other business tools: payments is typically not a core competency of, say, a video conferencing or security company (one of its customers is BlueJeans, now owned by Verizon, which used to own journalist; another is Fortinet).

In addition to building the card product, Sample intends to use the new funding to acquire its first customers for the loans and card businesses — the majority of its customers are using the grant matching product — and onboarding new employees.

Its API technology can approve businesses for the BNPL in seconds so they can begin offering the installments.

Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia started the company in 2016 with an initial focus on startups and small businesses, trying to find product-market fit (as one does), but finding that legal usage among companies of that size was often project-based, infrequent and short-term if the company folds. In 2019, the company pivoted to working with mid-market and enterprise-level companies by selling into legal departments, and that when growth took off, Ahmed told journalist. Similar to other industries embracing contract work, Lawtrades is giving legal professionals a way to become independent and run their own virtual law practices. Ahmed plans to use the new funding to rebrand the company, launch an iOS app, expand into other professional categories, like finance and management consulting, and gain an international footprint.