FinTech news in economy 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.
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.
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.
In the latest development, EQT — the private equity and venture firm based out of Stockholm — is announcing that it has closed a €2.2 billion ($2.2 billion) fund for EQT Growth, which it will be using for investing in European and Israeli founders and startups in areas like enterprise, consumer, health and climate tech, with typical rounds ranging between €50 million and €200 million. Sovereign wealth funds may well be playing a big part here: they have more generally been proving to be strong forces in offsetting current declines, betting when the market is low, with the Saudi state fund recently investing some $7 billion in U.S. stocks; and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, currently the biggest in the world, also still looking bullish.) This is the first fund EQT Growth has raised specifically for tech investments, Brochado added, and it stands as one of the biggest first-time growth funds in Europe to date. The fact that the IPO market very much remains closed for the moment gives a company like EQT a foot in the door for providing finance to companies that might have otherwise looked at that kind of exit, either to position themselves as consolidators, or simply to keep scaling on their own steam, at a time when money is harder to come by, and thus needing to be treated more carefully than before.
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.
While an investment DAO typically can only have up to 100 members in order to stay compliant with SEC rules, Orange DAO has found a way to bring over over 1,000 Y Combinator alumni together to back web3 startups through an associated venture fund. The DAO itself is structured as a Cayman Islands foundation company, Huh said, while the fund is run as a separate legal entity by Huh and a few other general partners. That way, the fund doesn’t have anywhere near the SEC’s cap of 100 investors for a venture group, though Huh and the other GPs leverage the DAO’s hundreds of members to source investment ideas and conduct diligence. Huh said members can capture upside by becoming members of the DAO and voting on what it does with its treasury without needing to be accredited investors in a venture capital firm themselves.
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.
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.
It’s now teaming up with fintech unicorn Revolut to allow users to donate directly to homeless people through the Revolut app, making it the first U.K. homelessness organization added to the Revolut Donations feature. Revolut users will now be able to donate to Beam, help homeless people raise funds for training, work tools, travel costs, childcare or rental deposits, directly through the app. Beam says it has since raised £3.2 million from members of the public and supported more than 850 homeless people into stable jobs and homes by matching them with ethically-checked landlords and employers. Funds donated to Beam through Revolut Donations are distributed equally between Beam’s beneficiaries.
The new fund will invest in crypto projects and companies that focus on layer-1 blockchains, web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFTs and gaming, payments, asset management, exchanges, marketplaces and decentralized applications, Pakman said. Seven-year-old CoinFund is launching a $300 million early-stage web3 venture fund, CoinFund Ventures I, which is backed by institutional investors, family offices and crypto-native founders. Pakman thinks the recent drawdown in crypto asset prices generally provides more favorable entry prices for venture capital funds like CoinFund, but the transition from Web 2.0 to web3 is in its early stages. Even in this bearish crypto market, there more evidence of consumer and institutional adoption than previous cycles, Pakman commented.
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.
The Norrsken Foundation runs Norrsken House in Sweden, a hub for impact entrepreneurs, and incubated Norrsken VC, a $130 million impact VC. The companies that will make it to the final 100 (announced this month) will be nominated by several partner organizations, including the Obama Foundation, SoftBank Investment Advisers, World Fund, Katapult, BMW Foundation, Leaps by Bayer, Summa Equity and several others. The Impact 100 will be judged by a panel including Adalberth, as well as Ulrika Modéer, UN Assistant Secretary General; Matt Miller, partner Sequoia; and Carl Manneh, co-founder Mojang. Niklas Adalberth co-founded Klarna in 2005 but left in 2015 and established the Norrsken Foundation in 2016, contributing $20 million to the launch and an additional $62 million in 2017.
The new capital will assist Pastel in increasing its efforts in this area as it looks to expand its product offerings and develop more productivity and finance management features and tools around group savings, loans and payments for small businesses.
a16z wrote its largest individual check ever, at $350 million, to Flow, Neumann new residential real estate company focused on rentals, the New York Times reported today.
Penfold, a digital pensions platform, has closed a £7 million ($8.49 million) Series A funding round led by Bridford Group, an investment group. Also participating in the round was Jeremy Coller, chief investment officer and chairman of Coller Capital. Penfold also raised additional funding via a crowdfund amongst its customer base. The cash will be used to expand Penfold workplace pension division.
The second PV angel fund is backed by some of the U.K.’s more active angels, including Chris Adelsbach, Will Neale and Michael Pennington, alongside founders from Credit Kudos, FreeAgent, BrandWatch, Wayve, Passfort, ContentCal, Griffin, Bibliu, Rahko and Fixflo. PV makes much of its community-driven culture, with a network of founders, investors and others alongside the PV founders Will Martin and Will Brooks who put the fund together in 2014. Starting Funding Club (SFC) is the funding services provider, and all investors are committed to the fund and Portfolio Ventures are discretionary fund managers deploying from a pot of capital put in by these investors. A good example of that is Portfolio Ventures (PV), which has now closed its second angel fund (which they claim was oversubscribed), where many of the investing angels do so under EIS.
Outside of Miami, Quinn said, RealOpen’s crypto focus has attracted a strong pipeline of listings from sellers all over the world. By using RealScore, buyers can defer converting their crypto into cash until the very instant the transaction closes without having to explain to a seller what the value of their offer is beforehand, according to Dumontet.
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.
Given two of the primary hardware wallets, Ledger and Trezor, have roughly 5 million users, there would appear to be plenty of room for growth, since that there are at least 295 million crypto holders who may decide to add hardware wallets to their portfolio.
The latest close marks the first time that BAI Capital has brought in external limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds, large insurance companies, internet giants, funds of funds, on top of capital from its parent Bertelsmann.
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.
It’s almost formulaic: 409A assessors will tell a startup what public market companies they look like, and the more mature the startup is, the higher the impact public stock prices can have on the startup’s valuation. That’s because a low 409A valuation allows companies to grant their employees stock options at a lower price.
Arrenda, a Mexico City-based fintech company, is offering digital financial services to the real estate market of Latin America and closed on $26.5 million in a pre-seed round of equity and debt.
The fund is strategic for Valkyrie in that it is focused on nascent infrastructure the firm might use in its digital asset management operations, including: security, authentication, compliance, data management, storage, networking, communication, governance, payments and transactions companies.
X1 Card is taking a different tack by underwriting customers based on their income rather than their credit scores, which the company says enables it to set credit limits up to 5x higher than traditional card providers.
Fundrise manages over $2.8 billion worth of real estate equity on behalf of the 300,000 active investors on its platform today, and Miller says the company is growing fast enough that he expects it to climb to a top-ten spot by size in private real estate within the next two years.
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.
Ben Marrel, co-founder and CEO at Breega said in a statement: Our fourth and largest fund to date will allow us to finance later stage companies at Series A stage and above and to continue to support our existing portfolio startups as they grow.
Eventually, Kasheesh plans to develop its technology so users can use the same card across multiple transactions rather than having to generate a new single-use card each time, Miller said.
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.
Amex users have been waiting for an announcement like this for some time, as its competitors Visa and Mastercard have already launched their own crypto rewards credit cards through partnerships with digital asset companies, such as Visa’s crypto rewards card offered in conjunction with BlockFi and the Mastercard-powered card issued by crypto exchange Gemini.
Backbase — an Amsterdam-based startup that provides a platform that banks and others can use to better structure and leverage the data that they have, and to then use that to build more personalization and other new features into those banks’ customer-facing services — has raised €120 million ($128 million at today rates).
The company is working to streamline operations at other fintech startups, specifically through its reconciliation software that those companies can use to help ensure they’re working with accurate and precise data even when it comes from different places, said co-founder and CEO Kyle Maloney.
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.
The exchange says it will not receive payment for order flow (PFOF), a method for order fulfillment Robinhood became notorious for that involves the exchange receiving payment from market makers for directing orders their way.
Mossy’s solution for the calamitous sector, a stablecoin called USDTea, is backed by what they claim is America’s most stable asset: cans of AriZona Iced Tea.
Parents must opt into the automatic investment feature, and if they don’t want their funds invested in the ETFs Greenlight pre-determines are relatively safe, they can also choose to invest that cash in other ways through Greenlight investment app or opt for the cash to go directly to their bank account, Sheehan said. The Greenlight-branded card, offered through Mastercard, offers up to 3% unlimited cash back on all purchases and gives parents the option to automatically invest those cash rewards in stocks and ETFs to spend on family-related expenses, co-founder and CEO Tim Sheehan told journalist. Sheehan said the company considered designing the card so cash back accrued into a 529 plan, a tax-advantaged educational savings account parents can open on behalf of their children. Plenty of investment platforms, including Bank of America, Fidelity and Charles Schwab, offer credit cards that automatically invest cash rewards into the market, but Greenlight hopes its focus on families and their needs will help it stand out.
Since its Series C, the company acquired Qualis, which is focused on bringing private market investments to retail investors, according to Nair — a growing area of interest among wealth managers seeking to provide their clients with differentiated returns from the public markets. The round brings the company’s valuation to $842 million, nearly doubling the $447 million it was valued at after its Series C. Investment manager Franklin Templeton and fintech venture firm Motive Partners joined the latest round as new investors, the company says.
UST is an algorithmic stablecoin that leans on a system of traders who swap between LUNA and UST when the value of UST goes above or below its 1:1 ratio, so it could hold to the U.S. dollar. The impact of this event can have broader implications across the market, as seen earlier this week when bitcoin’s value fell below $30,000 and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pushed for more stablecoin regulation during an annual testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee on May 10, right in the middle of when Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin, UST, struggled to retain its peg.
Oriient, which powers the platform that Instacart shoppers use to gather their orders in hundreds of stores in North America, this week announced that it has raised an $11 million Series A round, which brings its total funding to $16 million. The idea behind Oriient, which currently has 35 employees, is to offer an indoor positioning platform that can work without any dedicated hardware, beacons or Wi-Fi to locate you inside an airport, office, store or anywhere else without access to a GPS signal.
Earlier today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pushed for regulation during an annual testimony in front of the Senate Banking Committee, at a time where Terra algorithmic stablecoin UST struggles to retain its peg. Stablecoins by definition are supposed to be stable and hold their value through a 1:1 ratio that is fixed to an external peg like the U.S. dollar or it can be tied to other assets like UST, which is backed by dollars, but also cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Avalanche.
It’s been fairly active in the crypto space specifically — it led an investment in blockchain company Flipside, a data analytics tool for protocols that rewards users for completing queries, last month, and participated in Indian web3 startup CoinDCX’s recent $135 million fundraise. In February, Republic spun out its metaverse and NFT-focused investment division, Republic Realm, as a standalone company called Everyrealm run by Janine Yorio.
Mentum is out to change that in Latin America, and is working on customizable investment APIs and widgets so businesses in Latin America can build and offer fully digital investment products, like local mutual funds, ETFs and stocks, to their customers. All of them came to the U.S. from Latin America to study and work, and in the course of using some of the investment apps offered in the U.S., they struggled to find similar products in Latin America that provided a way to fully invest.
Kard manages the relationships with each business looking to offer rewards to promote their brand, making it easy for a new issuer to mix-and-match from Kard’s offerings and integrate those rewards into the issuer’s own user interface, CEO and founder Ben Mackinnon told journalist in an interview. Kard‘s rewards-as-a-service API streamlines the process for card issuers, allowing them to create a customized rewards program tailored to their particular customer base by choosing from Kard set of merchant partnerships.
Taxfix as you might suspect prefers to talk about the good news stories around tax filing — it’s easy! and it’s often free money owed to you! — so Ott wasn’t keen to talk about how much money it calculated people owed to the state, but there is an opportunity there too to provide financing and longer-term managing of that financing as a different kind of product.
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.
Its API technology can approve businesses for the BNPL in seconds so they can begin offering the installments.
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.
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.
The company decided to develop secured loans for products that enable borrowers to improve their income — like motorcycles, cars and trucks — and unlike their competitors providing used vehicles, Canals said Migrante offers new vehicles.
The $1.5 billion in capital puts Haun Ventures in the company of other crypto native funds like Paradigm and Electric Capital, which have debuted large funds in recent months.
Capital markets focus on giant sums of money handled through foreign exchange, equity swaps and other major capital transactions typical of big banks, but at the end of the day, a lot of the systems in place that big banks use to make these transactions are based on old infrastructure, with money moving through many transaction points that can create delays and, therefore, costs. Canapi Ventures, 9Yards Capital, and SVB Capital led the round.
With these funds focusing solely on crypto and its surrounding ecosystem and investing more in these startups than traditional fintechs at the moment, why is Luno Expeditions choosing a dual focus on crypto and fintech instead of going head-on with crypto?
They started off building a universal e-commerce API for reading and writing data so that tech customers can integrate with commerce platforms and access financial data points to offer loans, launch in new marketplaces and streamline inventory syncing for brand management.
While 73% of financial articles targeting men focused on investing, 90% of the financial articles targeting women focused on spending less. This leads to a disconnect between women’s financial priorities (which may be more focused on longer-term stability as opposed to short, risky financial gains) and what the financial services industry typically emphasizes.
The press release lays out seven major goals of the executive order with added detail: Protect U.S. Consumers, Investors, and Businesses Protect U.S. and Global Financial Stability and Mitigate Systemic Risk Mitigate the Illicit Finance and National Security Risks Posed by the Illicit Use of Digital Assets Promote U.S. Leadership in Technology and Economic Competitiveness to Reinforce U.S. Leadership in the Global Financial System Promote Equitable Access to Safe and Affordable Financial Services Support Technological Advances and Ensure Responsible Development and Use of Digital Assets Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) For those in the crypto sector concerned about aggressive government intervention, the order language seems to signal that the Biden White House is uninterested in sweeping near-term reforms and is instead merely focused on ensuring that agencies are on the same page in researching and observing the national security implications of the crypto industry.
What gives Yep! an edge, according to its founders, is a superior experience in raising debt capital for lending purposes — a practice where agency banking providers supply working capital to their agents who in turn lend to their end consumers.
So, users from different countries — Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, for now — can connect their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash, pay bills, and send and receive money to other users while the platform handles currency conversions.
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.
The simple reason is that people need smartphones more than they need solar systems, evident in M-KOPA’s numbers as of July last year — which in 18 months had already sold 500,000 smartphones, half the units solar systems managed in 10 years. M-KOPA is known chiefly for its pay-as-you-go (PAYG) financing model that allows customers to build ownership of appliances over time by paying an initial deposit followed by flexible micro-payments.
From the link, consumers go to a web page interface on top of the app and can make purchase choices from their favorite commerce site, including Shopify and Amazon, and pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay or PayPal — features not often available because some social media sites don’t often play well with certain payment options, said Ownit co-founder and CEO Payman Nejati.
To keep the momentum going, Cococart raised $4.2 million from Forerunner Ventures and Sequoia, with additional investors including Y Combinator, Uncommon Capital, Soma Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Fitbit CEO James Park and Curated CEO Eduardo Vivas.
The story begins years ago when Root wanted to build new kinds of banking services. Co-founder and CEO Nick Root is a computer science graduate and former CTO, COO, CFO and CEO who did 12 years in the London banking industry before starting Intergiro.
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.
While some customers use these accounts, others still exchange currency from their cards or domiciliary bank accounts with limited bank partners supporting foreign exchange transfers in Nigeria.
The approach is a relatively new one in the U.K., although Fenwick believes that this will likely (and rapidly) evolve not just because HELOC businesses like Selina’s are being given the green light, but because of the ubiquity of home ownership; and the fact that more people, as they move around less due to the pandemic, have turned their attention to spending bigger amounts on things like home renovations or less-frequent but much bigger vacations.
Earlybird, best known as the Berlin-based VC which has backed myriad German and European startups such as SoundCloud and N26, is today expanding its reach in Europe with the creation of a team and adjunct fund based out of Paris, France. According to most annual European surveys, France regularly appears as the third biggest startup ecosystem in Europe, (behind first the U.K. and then Germany) and last year investment in French startups doubled. The background to this of course is that European VC is (finally!) becoming more competitive as it feels the heat both from U.S. VCs, and also other European VCs using remote working and deal-making to suck up deals well outside their territories. The fund’s core focus lies on early-stage companies — predominantly seed and Series A — and will be supporting French entrepreneurs with initial investments of between €1 million to €10 million.
French startup Sunday, which didn’t even exist in 2020, has raised large sums to allow people to easily pay and share the bill, freeing up wait staff and increasing turnover in restaurants. The payment solution for consumers in restaurants has now raised $17 million in seed financing in a round co-led by Berlin Cherry Ventures and Point Nine Capital of Germany. The benefits for restaurants include a higher potential turnover of tables, more possibility of tips for wait staff and returning customers who enjoy the simple experience. The founding team of Qlub consists of Arun Sharma, Eyad Alkassar, Filiberto Pavan, Gizem Bodur, Jeff Matsuda, Jianggan Li, John Mady, Mahmoud Fouz, Oscar Bedoya and Ramy Omar.
It uses integrations to link to different investment platforms for stocks, crypto, and other illiquid assets, though Gonen declined to share how many platforms are partnered with Compound in this manner.
Simone explained that financial advisors don’t often ask clients about their medication costs or health conditions, so some of the pillars the company helps advisors and their clients identify include health plan selection and if you may need long-term care planning — which Simone estimated 70% of people usually do.
Given that it’s not a big leap between financial services and fintech — indeed, in cities like London which have strong industries in tech and financial services, the two have long competed heavily to recruit technical talent — it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more banks trying to built personalization in house rather than look to a third-party provider like Personetics.
Pinwheel is also the only company providing direct deposit switching and payroll data that is classified as a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, meaning that if consumers are adversely affected by Pinwheel’s data, the company would be legally accountable.
Other startups in the space using traditional banking infrastructure to make payments more efficient have hit a ceiling on how fast and cheap they can offer payments because of fees charged by these intermediaries, particularly between countries that don’t transact as regularly, said Paysail cofounder Nicole Alonso.
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.
And while currently building out its buy now, pay later infrastructure (which gives businesses a chance to sell products regardless of whether customers have money or not), ThankUCash plans to add a fourth offering soon: a remittance product where merchants can sell directly to the diaspora.
The Bay Area startup wants to take a more blended solution to crypto lending with its protocol, building up capital pools and allowing fintech organizations outside the U.S. to make their case to lenders operating on the protocol and get access to funds while showing non-crypto collateral. Goldfinch is a crypto startup building a decentralized lending protocol that allows organizations to receive crypto loans without owning massive amounts of crypto already.
The firm ballooning valuation, which surged from a $1.5 billion valuation it was given just six months ago by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, is reflective of their own volume growth but also that of other flagship NFT firms including Dapper Labs, which raised at a $7.6 billion valuation last year. The NFT space saw plenty of action in 2021, but OpenSea realizing this valuation will rely on its continued success and its ability to entice newbies into the burgeoning world of crypto collectibles.