FinTech news in columbia category

It is a digital wallet and password manager for financial services and banking apps, but Soffio calls it a financial digital passport, which helps with user identification, making the task less cumbersome for both consumers and financial services. Soffio said Portabl chose Harlem Capital to lead the round after a call he’ll never forget: Yenkalov, a Ukrainian citizen, was trapped in the country as the war with Russia broke out in the middle of a fundraising call with the firm. Yenkalov noted the emergence of decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge proofs, saying that the industry is closer than ever to enabling financial organizations to benefit from consumers owning and sharing their own data.

In the world of crypto, where vast amounts of investment are pouring into young and scrappy teams building uncharted technology, it increasingly the VC firms who are investing heavily in research to sweeten their sell to early teams with plenty of offers on the table. On Thursday, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was building out a dedicated crypto research team led by faculty from Columbia and Stanford.

Founded in 2007 by Perez and Oscar Garcia Mendoza, who now serves as chairman of Novopayment’s board, NovoPayment had been bootstrapped since inception until it raised its Series A round earlier this year, the company announced today. Novopayment has been focused since its founding on building out a tech stack that ties all the critical processes together for financial institutions to build out their digital banking services.

The startup sells a salary-advance service to employers to offer their staff — charging companies a commission for the tech rather than levying a fee on users to withdraw a portion of their salary early (as some other salary startups do).