FinTech news in e-commerce category

Parker is also working toward profitability, and the company is working on scaling to access the cheaper cost of capital and upsell other products, though there is a path to profitability on just the card business, Sibous said. Parker, a startup offering a corporate credit card for e-commerce businesses, emerged from stealth Thursday with $157 million in equity and debt funding, much of which closed in 2022. In addition, the company offers payment terms that Sibous said make sense in the context of e-commerce — think net terms on every transaction. Sibous believes Parker has a good opportunity to compete in the crowded credit card space that includes other venture-backed companies like Moss and Emburse.

Highbeam, a startup that provides banking features, credit and cash flow insights to e-commerce customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in debt from TriplePoint as it looks to expand the reach of its digital product portfolio.

Egyptian fintech MNT-Halan lands $120M from Apis Partners, DisrupTech and others It’s been demonstrated that lending is MNT-Halan’s primary business and main revenue generator; however, what’s interesting about the company is how it has layered a digital ecosystem of products, including e-commerce, FMCG delivery and mobile POS payments that feed its lending operations. CEO Mounir Nakhla, who founded the company with Ahmed Mohsen, said MNT-Halan continued where it left off and is presently Egypt’s largest lender to the unbanked: Total loans disbursed now exceed $2 billion per the company’s website (MNT-Halan issued loans north of $65 million last month). In 2021, Halan, operating a digital wallet that offered bill payments, e-commerce and ride-hailing as well as micro, nano and consumer loans, entered into a swap agreement with MNT Investments (a microlending platform operating in Egypt with roots dating back to 2010) to provide financing solutions to the underbanked and unbanked. Egyptian fintech and e-commerce ecosystem MNT-Halan has raised up to $400 million in equity and debt financing from local and global investors as it continues to serve underbanked and unbanked customers in the North African country.

You can tease these out for yourselves, though: payments providers, those providing commerce supply-chain management, and those building ‘headless’ systems for retailers and brands to build their own commerce experiences are all the kinds of platform players I imagine might want to own both the kind of technology that Ordergroove is building, and its substantial client list. Ordergroove currently has close to 500 customers, Alvo said, a list that includes some of the largest brands and retailers in the world — they include Walmart, Nestle, L’Oréal, Bonafide, The Honest Company, La Colombe, and PetSmart — as well as emerging names and smaller businesses. The company is built around the tech stack to create, run and measure subscriptions — which includes integrations with the likes of Salesforce, Magento, Shopify, payments systems and whatever else that merchants and brands are using to build their own commerce technology stacks. Subscriptions are the core of what Ordergroove does right now, so the plan is to build out more services that enhance that, said Greg Alvo, the company founder and CEO, in an interview.

As consumers turn to content creators to influence their online shopping habits, Klarna, the buy now, pay later platform, today launched a new Klarna Creator app for retailers and influencers to collaborate on brand campaigns and to track earnings, performance and sales. So, as Gen Z shoppers turn to video-based platforms like TikTok and Instagram, consumers can also go to Klarna for video content that’s specifically tailored for shopping and discovering products by well-known brands. With today’s announcement, the Sweden-based company hopes to move beyond being just a payment platform but a place for consumers to search and discover, for influencers to create content and for retailers to promote their products. These include shoppable video content, a new search and discovery tool, as well as a donations feature and an upgraded CO2e tracker.

To continue growth due to the rising demand for food and groceries and fuel its expansion across the MENAP region, MaxAB has raised more money, this time a pre-Series A to the tune of $40 million.

Atef argues that while both models have managed to increase e-commerce activities in Egypt, the big e-commerce players neglect the mass market and instead focus more on the three largest cities Cairo, Alexandria and Giza — while smaller social platforms tend to provide unreliable and unorganized service. Online shoppers in Egypt mainly purchase items on big e-commerce platforms such as Souq, which rebranded as Amazon Egypt in 2021; Jumia; and Noon or social commerce platforms that utilize Facebook pages and groups in a B2B2C manner. You can compare the e-commerce landscape in Egypt to fintech across Africa in that there are more startups in that sector than others; reports say 20% of tech startups in Egypt are in the e-commerce and retail sectors. In a statement, Sarah AlSaleh, a partner at Outliers Venture Capital, said the asset-light Kenzz is solving two key issues that current e-commerce incumbents are not addressing: affordable and reliable last-mile logistics and an uncompromising customer trust philosophy.

PayPal is taking a step away from the Honey brand, the $4 billion shopping rewards acquisition it made in 2019, with today’s launch of PayPal Rewards. The new program will replace “Honey Gold” — the rewards program for Honey browser extension users, which allows customers to redeem their points for cash, gift cards or PayPal \[…\]

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.

Meet Prediko, a new startup that sits at the intersection of e-commerce, fintech and software as a service. Prediko has built an online dashboard that lets you review your inventory position as well as plan and order more products. Customers connect Prediko with their Shopify store directly — the startup is building integrations with other e-commerce platforms. After that, they can generate inventory reports to see fast-moving products, slow-selling items and the current retail value of the inventory.

Before Capiter, Mahmoud was the co-founder and COO of Egypt-born and Dubai-based ride-hailing company SWVL (the company, which went public via a SPAC deal last year, laid off 32% of its staff this May) Egyptian startup Capiter raises $33M to expand B2B e-commerce platform across MENA B2B e-commerce platforms operate either asset-light or inventory-heavy models. The latter requires more capital and for Capiter, which employs a hybrid model, it’s unclear how the company has exhausted its funds and is already looking to sell after raising millions from Quona Capital, MSA Capital, Shorooq Partners, Savola and others last year. This information was further corroborated in a local news report where Capiter’s Board allegedly said that the founders had not been reporting to the board, its representatives and shareholders during on-site in-person due diligence for a potential merger.

Coinbase and Robinhood already dominate the crypto exchange space, but Rush believes Stack stands out from the crowd by offering features like access to the tax and control advantages of a Uniform Transfers to Minors Act (UTMA) account and a trading environment designed specifically for teens. The founding team has an eclectic background that includes teen fintech app Copper and securities for Rush, while Mascarenas helped digitize the cookie ordering system for the Girl Scouts and Young was a T-Mobile engineer. He would also see Reddit posts from teens trying to get into crypto using their parents’ information to create an account on exchanges like Coinbase or Robinhood and having them be frozen — and rightly so — for not being of-age to have an account. How the upcoming Ethereum Merge could change crypto rewards, costs and reputation Edited to change the name of the company to Stack instead of Stack.io.

Following the company’s seed round, Adrián Yanes joined as chief technology officer and Sarita Bhatt as chief marketing officer to help Boopos scale to Series B and beyond, Garcia Braschi said. Six months after announcing $30 million in equity and debt, Boopos, a Miami-based lending platform for business acquisitions and growth, is back with an even bigger round, a $58 million Series A, again in a mix of equity and debt. Garcia Braschi started the company in 2020 to cater to business owners, mainly company aggregators, leveraging acquisitions as a way to grow their companies. Though Garcia Braschi was not specific, he did say the company’s valuation is approximately double following this round than the previous seed round.

The new product has been created in partnership with National Philanthropic Trust (NPT) and Vanguard Charitable and allows Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) sponsors, community foundations and other grantmakers to move their donations electronically through PayPal’s platform. The company additionally notes it has entered into a commercial arrangement with grantmakers, like National Philanthropic Trust and Vanguard Charitable, to enable them to provide this new solution to their charitable communities. Back in 2016, for instance, PayPal added a new button inside its mobile app to connect users to its thousands of PayPal Giving Fund certified charities, which previously were only available online. In addition to moving money quickly, the system includes an online Grant Payments dashboard available to grantmakers and charities alike where they can view all the grant details, including the donor information, which can be exported to help simplify record keeping.

Other investors in the round include PrimeBlock Ventures, M77 Ventures, ShataCapital, Kryptos, Antalpha Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, 7 O’Clock Capital, Misa Zhu, founder of AR glasses maker Rokid and Fan Zhang, a former co-founder of Sequoia Capital China. Other startups are also using MPC to enable distributed signing of crypto transactions, but Wang pointed to the fact that Safeheron is open-sourced, which gives its clients more transparency into its source codes. Since its product launch in October, Safeheron has powered over 20 clients, which altogether have more than $100 million in cryptocurrencies under custody and have facilitated more than $4 billion worth of transactions using Safeheron’s wallet as a service, according to Wang. Private keys, critical to decentralized crypto apps, let individuals take control over their digital assets through self-custody wallets rather than leaving control to a centralized institution.

China billionaire tech boss Jack Ma plans to cede control of Ant Group, the fintech powerhouse closely affiliated with Alibaba, the e-commerce giant he founded, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Ant informed regulators of Ma’s intention to relinquish control as the company prepared to transition into a financial holding company, The Wall Street Journal reported. The pair has been symbiotic, with Ant’s Alipay app deeply integrated into Alibaba’s suite of retail services and its financial services touted to business owners on Alibaba’s marketplaces. Ant started out as a payments processor of Alibaba, which Ma, at the time the e-commerce firm’s CEO, spun out in 2011.

Although it’s currently not making any money in its Russian operation, Viber, which is end-to-end encrypted, has kept the service live where it hasn’t been blocked by Russian authorities, since a lot of communication happens between Ukrainians and Russians (there remain a lot of links between the people, despite the actions and rhetoric of the Russian government), and it’s continuing to operate its service in Ukraine where it can — the occupied territories where Russia has taken control of communications being the exception. The company is not quick to disclose exact monthly active user figures, but in 2016, Viber was widely reported to have 823 million users (note: not active users — one citation of this number from its PR firm here); in that same year, an exec told journalist that it had 266 million monthly active users. Now it is making a move to double down on that strategy: it launching Payments on Viber — a new service that will let users set up digital wallets tied to their Viber accounts. Viber, the messaging app owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, has long been dancing around the area of fintech, launching services like money transfer and chatbot payments in various countries over the years.

Joining in on the new round are Salesforce Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Lyra Ventures, Gramercy Ventures and a group of B2B e-commerce leaders as angel investors, including former Shopify CMO Jeff Wisener and Faire co-founder and CTO Marcelo Cortes.

The acquisition comes a month after eBay launched its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf. This is the start of a new chapter in the KnownOrigin story and we couldn’t choose a better time to focus on building and innovating with the team at eBay.

Represas notes that Able’s focus on the tech that is used for processing, but not decision-making or risk-profiling (which Represas told me is just a small aspect of loan approval and not where the pain point is); the fact that it focuses on commercial loans and not SMB loans (too small an opportunity, he said); and that it does not directly interface with borrowers itself but works through banks I write that it is launching into the wider market because although it’s coming out of stealth, Able’s actually been around since 2020, and the customers it’s picked up are already using Able’s technology — which involves RPA, computer vision and other forms of AI to ingest and process data related to loans as part of their evaluation process.

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.

The margins might be thin on any digital payment — one reason why even a company that looks like it’s growing and doing a lot of business might still fail: The numbers need to be huge to work out in its profitable favor — but this is why so many payments companies work on vast scale, and why building in a number of extra valued-added services in hopes of them getting picked up by customers (and customers’ customers), as Stripe is doing here, is smart business, one way that it hopes to sustain itself for the long (and likely public) haul. Stripe has been making a number of acquisitions to bring in extra functionality into its platform to close up some of the gaps — for example almost exactly a year ago it acquired TaxJar to help automatically calculate sales tax and provide related tools to its customers — but it looks like Financial Connections was built in-house, but powered by MX and Finicity (as pointed out by Mary Ann here). Stripe’s selling point for these tools, beyond a more seamless integration with its other products, is that it helps its customers make more transactions. Details like these can in turn be used to help underwrite risk for loans; to track spending patterns and automatically pay bills; and more — in other words, financial data that’s useful or necessary to run financial transactions over other Stripe services like Stripe Connect, ACH payments or Stripe Capital-powered loans. Just yesterday, I wrote about an interesting startup called Kevin (okay, kevin.) that’s building a whole new set of payment rails and APIs for account-to-account payments that link straight into bank accounts, bypassing card rails and legacy account-to-account payment methods that are harder to implement.

In 2021, Gandhi started Creative Juice alongside Ezra Cooperstein, the president of Night, a management company representing top digital creators like makeup maven Safiya Nygaard, underwater treasure hunter DALLMYD and stunt YouTuber MrBeast, who also sits on the Creative Juice cap table.

PayU, as a provider and builder of fintech solutions, will be able to leverage Treinta as a channel for getting its own customer-facing tech deeper into the market in Colombia and the rest of Latin America, but Treinta will also become another retail channel for PayU’s under-the-hood technology.

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

After a decade at Alibaba and its fintech affiliate giant Ant Group, Max Ma founded SwooshTransfer in 2021 to facilitate cross-border payments for small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as individuals such as overseas students, for whom tuition payments are often a hassle.

The one-year immersion program, the Visa Creator Program, will bring together a global cohort of creators including artists, musicians, fashion designers and filmmakers the ability to build their businesses with NFTs It previously made headlines for buying a popular CryptoPunk NFT in August 2021.

The credit card is one of two options — the second via the mobile app — consumers can use to access CredPal’s BNPL services when they visit a partner store to shop for items ranging from electronics, particularly smartphones, to furniture and groceries. To that effect, CredPal, one of the earliest pioneers of buy now, pay later in Nigeria, has closed a bridge round of $15 million in equity and debt — the latter constituting a very large chunk of the financing — to expand its consumer credit offerings across Africa.

Kwik, a Nigeria and French-based startup that provides logistics services to B2B merchants, from social vendors to e-commerce platforms, has raised $2 million in Series A funding. Since launching in Lagos in 2019 and extending its presence to Abuja, the company has onboarded more than 100,000 merchants who use Kwik’s site and mobile apps to run the logistical, commercial and financial needs of their businesses.

Originally founded by Nick Ogden, who was also the founder of WorldPay (which Fidelity acquired for $43 billion, which was at the time the biggest deal ever made in international payments sector), ClearBank currently has 200 customers — large financial institutions and fintechs using its infrastructure to enable faster transactions — with the list including UK businesses like Tide and Oaknorth, but also international companies like Coinbase, which uses ClearBank for clearing and payments services for its UK customers.

The round of funding is good news for both employees and early backers who took a bet on Wasoko years ago as new investors Tiger Global and Avenir Growth Capital lead its Series B round (the pair also co-led Flutterwave’s Series C investment last March).

OkHi’s grand mission, the founder says, is to get these people who don’t have a physical address included in the global address system.

Tabby, the Dubai-based buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform that lets users shop, pay later and earn cash from over 3,000 global brands, including Adidas, IKEA and Bloomingdale, has completed a Series B extension of $54 million.

Shop owners who intend to offer loans to their end consumers get higher credit lines from Chari, which shares the data collated from Karny (on end consumers’ purchasing behaviour) with FMCG companies that pay for the cost of the higher loans.

Say a company uses Sudo Africa to issue cards for employee expense management; what happens is that employees are given cards with a low balance so whenever they need to use the card, an API is called each time to decide whether to approve or deny that transaction in real time.

Integration with payment providers in sub-Saharan Africa (mainly serving Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa) like Yoco, Paystack and Flutterwave will follow suit, said the chief executive, without giving specifics about when it would roll out the product for the region.

Consumers are able to pay without entering financial data, no need to create an account, no financial details are shared, authorization is biometric and the merchant receives the funds in real time.

On the call, Pillay, who co-founded Stitch with Natalie Cuthbert and Priyen Pillay, didn’t give any update on this metric but said Stitch had seen a 104% month-on-month growth in payments value since launching the product last April.

Yele Oyekola, a former product lead at Carbon, started Duplo based on his experience as an economic policy officer for the UN in Africa, where touring different countries opened his eyes to how people and businesses were heavily reliant on cash.

The fund is supported by G Squared Management Co.; Scott Shleifer, co-founder and partner of Tiger Global Management; Sebastián Mejía, co-founder and president of Rappi; Fabián Gómez, co-founder and CEO of Frubana; Roger Laughlin, co-founder of Kavak; and founders of iFood and Mercê do Bairro.

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.

Melonn, a Colombian startup that provides fulfillment and software services to small and medium-sized e-commerce companies in Latin America, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by QED Investors.

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.

The founders say that while sellers often want the products at their doorsteps, the availability and flexibility of both options differentiate Brimore from similar social commerce platforms such as Taager. The opportunity in the market can be attributed to the growth in online social sellers in the country, over 1.25 million them, helping little-known brands sell and distribute their goods via different networks.

Karny gives Chari valuable data on the loans provided by grocery stores to their customers and allows Chari to credit-assess the unbanked shop owners, determining the most applicable payment terms to give each.

It has raised a $6.2 million pre-Series A round while rebranding to ANKA, the SaaS platform it launched for sellers in partnership with DHL and Visa in April last year. In an interview journalist had with the chief executive last year, he touted ANKA as the largest e-commerce exporter startup on the continent, claiming it ships over 10 tons of cargo per month from Africa.