FinTech news in entrepreneurship 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.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Li said that while Goldsky closed the seed round before this summer’s dropoff in crypto prices, the company’s focus on infrastructure has given it an edge to weather bear market conditions. By automating the creation of data pipelines, Goldsky enables its customers to spend more time working on building their core products rather than parsing the data feeding into those products, Li explained. While there are other startups such as The Graph working to solve similar problems, Li said Goldsky’s differentiation lies, in part, in its focus on providing accurate real-time data to companies. Goldsky, a data infrastructure company for crypto startups, has raised $20 million in a seed round led by Felicis and Dragonfly Capital.

Northzone raised half a billion round in Europe, while LatAm VCs raising their biggest funds yet

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.

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.

Complete provides an interactive offer letter product for candidates applying to roles at its client companies and recently began offering a similar product to help employees understand what comprises their total compensation, Mavram said. Complete aims to help companies, particularly early-stage startups, conceptualize and implement a firm-wide compensation strategy, reflective of cash, equity, bonuses and benefits. In today’s job market, where layoffs and hiring freezes abound, getting compensation strategy right is even more important, CEO Rani Mavram of HR tech startup Complete told journalist in an interview. Mavram hopes to expand Complete’s five-person team by bringing on more engineering and design hires to help the company keep up with new customer demand, she said.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bloomberg Beta announced its fourth $75 million fund and also a new $75 million opportunity fund for later-stage checks into startups the firm has already backed. Over at Golden Section, a Houston-based founder studio and venture capital firm, the firm completed the first closing of its second fund in May, but did not disclose the amount. Haris Khurshid, general partner at Chalo Ventures, launched a $50 million second fund focused on investing in Pakistani startups and a smaller percentage in Latin American startups. He did say that LPs wanted to know how the firm would navigate investment in that market, which required the firm to do a bit of educating on why Pakistan needed a focused fund.

The publication reported that Menlo Park-based Sequoia is looking at $1.5 billion for a U.S. growth fund focused on later-stage companies and a $750 million fund targeting earlier-stage startups. The storied venture capital firm announced that it was breaking with tradition, abandoning the traditional fund structure and their artificial timelines for returning LP capital.

For their second fund, Brand and Rupp will largely continue with the same strategy from Fund I, sticking to making about 15 investments in total after making 12 out of the first fund, they said. In an ecosystem where women make up just 2.4% of partners at venture firms and considering that the vast majority of first-time funds never actually make it to closing.

Bonfire Ventures, a Los Angeles venture capital firm, invests in seed-stage business-to-business software companies and aims to change the odds so that more than the average 33% of companies in this sector make it to Series A.

The company doesn’t just look at top-line sales, which Youngstrom believes differentiates his company from competitors but takes in historical sales data to build a sales forecast.

It works with major brands and companies including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Ford, the CBRE Group and 60% of the Fortune 500, which use Near’s interactive, cloud-based AI platform (branded Allspark) to tap into anonymised, location-based profiles of users based on a trove of information that Near sources and then merges from phones, data partners, carriers and its customers

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.

The startup is looking to capitalize momentum behind NFT profile pic collections and ENS (.eth) handles to build out a network of NFT-based avatar identity products. Genies, an LA-based digital avatar startup, announced Tuesday that it had raised $150 million in funding from Silver Lake, with participation from others.

Island, a Dallas-based startup that built a secure browser for the enterprise, has raised $115 million in a Series B round, valuing the company at $1.3 billion just weeks after emerging from stealth with $100 million in initial funding.

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.

Antler East Africa, the Nairobi office of VC firm and venture builder Antler, has closed a $13.5 million fund to invest in early-stage tech startups in the region. Being a female-led VC team, Antler East Africa is particular about investing more in startups founded and led by women in the region, Kebede said

Digging into the Alkami Technology IPO Tacora’s fund is backed by prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose Mithril Capital Management, an investment firm he co-founded with Ajay Royan, left the Bay Area for Austin in 2018.

Among the portfolio of companies, the firm has invested in email security company Abnormal Security, which raised $50 million back in 2020; biotech software developer Benchling, which raised $100 million in Series F funding last November; and Transmit Security, which took in a $543 million Series A last year on a pre-money valuation of $2.2 billion to rid the world of passwords. Artisanal Ventures, a Bay Area venture capital firm investing in B2B cloud startups, closed on its first fund, the oversubscribed $62 million Artisanal Ventures I. Cloud is the big buzzword these days, with people talking about why it a smart move for companies, and lots of venture-backed startups developing easy ways for companies to make the shift. That includes combining the expertise of the firm’s limited partners with Artisanal Talent’s executive search capabilities to help portfolio companies build best-in-class teams.

Alejandro Echavarria and Leon Papu, both managing partners, co-founded the venture capital firm in 2020 with Pablo Navarro, operating partner, to focus on early-stage, business-to-business startups in emerging markets. They started Marathon initially as a company builder in 2020, which is how they ended up investing in Tul, ​​a B2B e-commerce marketplace that optimizes the construction-material supply chain for hardware stores across Latin America. Brazil and Mexico are most known as Latin America hot startup ecosystems, but other countries, like Colombia, are gaining visibility and interest from investors. In addition to Tul, the fund has invested in eight companies and is already seeing an approximate two-time return over the total fund size to date.

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.

The firm, with offices in the countries above, is the latest big-sized Africa-focused VC fund that includes the likes of TLcom Capital which recently closed nearly half of its new $150 million fund; Novastar Ventures, a $200 million fund; and Partech Ventures, a $143 million fund.

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.