FinTech news in business 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.

Much of the shopping technology focuses on e-commerce, but Swiftly’s technology taps into that online shopping experience to make shopping at a brick-and-mortar store just as engaging and easy. It also provides analytics and advertising, so that those stores can compete against e-commerce retailers using their operational strength without being disadvantaged by an aging or non-existing technology platform. If you’re feeling some déjà vu, you would be right: this is the second $100 million the retail technology company has raised in the past six months — and in a tough fundraising market, too. Swiftly Systems entered unicorn territory after announcing today that it grabbed another round of $100 million, this time in a Series C.

The company collects data from places like Shopify, QuickBooks and Google Analytics and gives each customer its own data warehouse backed up by managed data pipelines. Bainbridge Growth, a Boston-based software startup providing data, analytics and financial modeling for e-commerce companies, inked $4 million in seed funding. Tregoe, CEO, told journalist that while helping brands like Casper, Peloton and Warby Parker understand how to do more effective Facebook advertising, they realized they were building big data systems and modeling revenue on a per customer basis. Bainbridge started with a financial model and added analytics to help the financial model make better assumptions and then a data system.

The fourth fund will continue to focus on early-stage investments in enterprise software and deep tech, such as open source software, machine learning, quantum computing startups, finance, education and healthcare. Founded by the teams behind the Acronis and Parallels software companies, Runa Capital has so far more than 100 early-stage investments in Europe and North America. The first investments of the new fund include Barcelona-based embedded finance provider Hubuc and Paris-based open source enterprise software developer OpenReplay. Technology entrepreneur Serguei Beloussov (who has since taken the name Serg Bell and Singaporean citizenship) co-founded Runa after starting Acronis, and has since gone on to also establish the Acronis Cyber Foundation, which has partnered with UNICEF, built schools and educated migrants to Switzerland.

With Dutchie POS and Dutchie Pay, the cannabis tech company is now offering cannabis operators one of the most comprehensive platforms to manage dispensaries. Called Dutchie POS, this comes just weeks after the company announced a new payment platform, Dutchie Pay. Dutchie today is announcing a new cannabis point of sale platform, including a dual-screen terminal for dispensaries. Zach Lipson spoke to journalist ahead of the Dutchie POS launch, saying this solution is built to accommodate dispensaries of all sizes.

Rebill, an Argentina-based startup, raised $3.6 million to continue building automated payment collection and subscription management tools for Latin America. Rebill differs from legacy providers in that it is targeting medium to large companies, is cloud-based and sold on a subscription basis so customers just have to pay a license fee, Candia told journalist. The company automates the collection process and integrates payment gateways and invoicing tools so that customers don’t have to create their own. Candia estimates that Rebill’s process cuts down that implementation process from months to hours.

By focusing on e-commerce, Shergill said Highbeam is able to provide a single financial view of the business, where cash is coming in and going out, and help entrepreneurs decide the right credit option and offer insights on common situations. Highbeam, a New York-based neobank built for people building e-commerce brands on marketplaces like Shopify and Amazon, raised $7 million in seed funding to continue developing banking tools that cater to these entrepreneurs’ needs. The one-year-old fintech startup, started by Samir Shergill and Gautam Gupta, provides banking features, access to transparent credit and cash management insights. Sustainable profit growth has become more important for brands, especially when e-commerce growth exploded during the pandemic and has pulled back some as stores reopened, Shergill said.

There are any number of enterprise software companies in the market today that are addressing the challenges in HR, enterprise training and education, and performance management, but what makes 15Five unique among them is how it is integrating all of these, and how it’s doing it first and foremost from the perspective of performance management, which is a subtle but important distinction as it informs how, say, educational and training tools are built and incorporated, and to what end. Now in use at some 3,400 companies — customers include Credit Karma, Spotify and Pendo, with its sweet spot specifically on businesses with between 100 and 2,500 employees — the startup will double down on what David Hassell, the CEO and founder of 15Five, describes as not just as providing insights, but also outcomes, ushering in a wider move into areas like coaching and education to expand a platform that today is used to help track and set goals for teams and individuals in them. 15Five — an early mover in the world of building technology to help motivate teams, and to improve performance management for execs overseeing those teams — has raised $52 million in a round of growth funding that it will be using to expand its own performance. Tools like 15Five found themselves in an interesting position: whereas previously some might have considered tech to help shape and work towards goals as potentially nice to have, in the absence of being able to see and work with teams in person, those tools suddenly tool on an essential role.

The company is also building out some bonus adds, like billing and subscription management, so that users can start with off-the-shelf, white-label apps and then transition to more specialized offerings when needed, or when they want to control the full experience without interrupting its back end data or services.

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.

The latest to receive funding to continue developing its financial infrastructure for the freelance economy is Archie, which raised $4.5 million in funding from B Capital Group and others. As more people moved to remote work over the past few years, there was also an uptick in people choosing freelance or contract work, leaving companies to figure out how to manage that worker segment.

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.

In addition to flexible credit lines for businesses to cover cash flow gaps, Float also has software tools for businesses to manage accounts and wallets in one dashboard, as well as automate bills, vendor or supplier payments and invoice collections.