FinTech news in Europe category

Tech-talent marketplace MVP Match has raised €5 million ($5 million) seed funding from Stage 2 Capital to double down its strategy for pairing companies with talent from across the globe. Wense, who founded the startup in 2020 together with Philipp Petrescu, added that MVP Match acts as an Employer of Record, which enables it to manage the whole recruiting process including the establishment of local office spaces and talent onboarding. MVP Match said it uses product and technology executives like CTOs and experienced domain experts to vet talent before recommending them to companies. The plan to grow its reach follows the launch of a new hub in Egypt that MVP Match will use to tap talent in Africa — with the aim of creating more networks in the region.

Investors such as Inovo, Credo, LauncHub, Vitosha, VentureFriends, and Marathon VC are all VCs of varying sizes who are — as we speak — roaming everywhere from Estonia and Poland all the way down to Greece and Turkey looking for early-stage startups to write checks for. Started in 2016, 500 Istanbul began with a $10.5 million fund and invested in 40 companies from Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Ukraine and Poland, and has three unicorns in its portfolio. What happened to Western European VCs in the last 15 years started to happen to Central and Eastern (and South Eastern) VCs about two to three years ago and is now gathering pace. That may be the case but as the past recedes, having those U.S. connections are less interesting, as other VCs in the region will make their own connections to U.S. networks and U.S. VCs.

When DolarApp founders Zach Garman, Álvaro Correa and Fernando Terrés were living in the United States and Europe, they would spend time in Latin America, where they saw problems that friends were having when it came to finances and access to banking in dollars.

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.

The company numbers are small compared to other layoffs that have taken place within Africa’s tech ecosystem over the past few months, especially among startups that have raised vast sums of venture capital within the last year or two; for instance, Swvl laid off 400; Wave, approximately 300; 54gene, 95; and Vezeeta, 50. Meanwhile, it was just last August that the digital bank, which provides zero to minimal fees on cards, account maintenance and transfers and is one of Africa’s soonicorns, raised $55 million — money that it planned to use to not only double down on new services for Nigeria but also to prepare its launch into more countries on the continent like Ghana and Uganda — in a Series B round that saw it valued at $500 million. As Kuda positions itself for pan-African and international expansion amidst an uncertain venture capital environment, it depicts the recent cut in its workforce as part of strategic steps for sustainable growth. When Kuda held a town hall meeting last month, cutting down seemingly redundant roles and dismissing nonperforming staff to reduce costs and extending runway were topics of conversation in light of current macroeconomic trends, according to sources.

Led by Gavin Wood, co-creator of Ethereum and its founding CTO, Parity’s partnership with Watr is designed to co-develop the Watr protocol and key applications, and execute joint R&D on the functionality required to make the platform perform for the $17 trillion dollar commodities industry. Omar Elassar, global head of Ecosystem Growth & Business Development at Parity Technologies, said in a statement: This collaboration will bring Watr’s deep commodities’ expertise to the Polkadot ecosystem and kick-start a platform for web3-enabled solutions that solve pressing industry issues. We covered how the Watr Foundation, a Swiss-registered foundation created by experience commodities founders, plans to do this via the use of blockchains, incorporating the technology into commodities trading. We are thrilled to have the legendary team at Parity join us and our existing partners in enabling commodities’ transition to Web3 business models and liquidity while safeguarding the security and decentralized ethos of a public blockchain servicing both retail and regulated institutional users.

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.

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.

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.

Casavo’s rise has largely come out of three main areas: the pandemic, the gaps in the property market in Europe as it exists today, and Casavo’s particular approach to tackling that.

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.

And when you consider all of the elements that go into buying and selling goods and services, there are a lot of areas left for SumUp to tackle — big data analytics, more tools to build, manage and optimize, online sales experiences for its customers, more technology to use to improve how items are sold in physical commerce experiences and so on — all areas that SumUp can approach either through building its own technology, or indeed through more M&A. The solution for a company like SumUp — with the bread and butter of its business, point of sale payments, fundamentally a part of that in-person commerce experience — has been to diversify and double down on a wider array of services for its small business retailers customers. Nevertheless, turning that statistic around, POS payments still represents the bulk of the company’s revenues, so 60% growth is not just a testament to SumUp being able to grow that business in the last two years, but also the fact that in-person and point-of-sale payments remained active areas for transactions. To that end, it has used significant chunks of the debt it’s raised to date for acquisitions and to build out more services beyond POS payments, in areas like business banking (the basic version of which it throws in as a freebie), online payments and business services around both.

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.

The latest to enter the BNPL field attacking the B2B/SME market is Playter a London-based BNPL platform aimed at SMEs. It’s now closed a $55 million funding round from Adit Ventures and Fasanara Capital, with Fin Capital and Act Venture Capital and 1818 Ventures also participating.

startup platform Bloom has now secured a £300 million / $377 million financing round led by Credo Capital and Fortress Investment Group LLC (NYSE:FIG), making it one of the better-funded revenue-based lending businesses in Europe.

Tel Aviv-based Classiq, a startup that wants to make it easier for developers to build quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised additional funding for its service.

The previous share purchases refers to an existing relationship between the two: Nets already had a stake in Orderbird as a result of an acquisition it had made of payments company Concardis, and it increased that stake to 40% in a secondary transaction in September 2021.

Grover has been on a steady pace of growth in the last several years — CEO and founder Michael Cassau said that across its footprint of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and most recently the U.S., Grover doubled subscriptions and business in the last year, and it currently has half a million items in its catalog available for subscription, 2 million registered users and 250,000 active customers.

Datanomik’s goal is to connect financial institutions across LatAm through its B2B open finance API, which gathers a company’s banking information on one platform, Strauss told journalist. Now, dLocal and AstroPay co-founder Sergio Fogel has teamed up with AstroPay’s former head of product, Gonzalo Strauss, to launch another fintech out of Montevideo, Uruguay, called Datanomik.

Dapio’s launch is a sign of where the U.K. payments scene is currently — where contactless payments aided by NFC technology have exploded, making up a quarter of all payments in the country.

Delivery Hero worked within what you might think of as the hat trick of the e-commerce world — its three-sided marketplace comprised independent and larger restaurants, delivery people and millions of consumers ordering food; and, as an added layer of difficulty, all of them were making calls into and out of a payment system in real time, 24 hours a day, across dozens of markets, currencies, preferred payment methods and so on. By that, he means that it isn’t necessarily initially positioning itself as a point-of-sale provider or payment facilitator; it’s built a platform that will make it easier to integrate and work with any of these by way of APIs, to work more easily with a wider variety of third-party businesses (paying money in and taking it out), freelancers (payouts) and consumers (paying in), and with a wider variety of payment methods depending on the locale in question.

Moove, an African mobility fintech that provides vehicle financing to drivers of ride-hailing platforms like Uber and other gig networks, has raised $105 million in new Series A2 financing.

With regard to continued funding into the autonomous retail space, it still seems to be flowing, as evidenced by AiFi and some additional companies, including French convenience store startup Boxy, which announced $28 million in funding a few weeks ago, and Focal Systems, which works with retailers like Walmart.

UK-based TrueCircle, a computer vision startup founded just last year, has nabbed $5.5 million in pre-seed funding in a bid to bring data-driven AI to the recycling industry to improve recovery rates and quality — with the overarching goal of transforming the economics of waste reuse to shrink demand for virgin materials.

London-based early-stage European VC fund Backed is bolstering its position by adding €75 million to its seed fund, while adding another €75 million via a new follow-on fund vehicle.

At $3 billion, Flutterwave is currently the highest valued African startup, surpassing the $2 billion valuation set by SoftBank-backed fintech OPay and FTX-backed cross-border payments platform Chipper Cash last year.

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.

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.

In a market full of challenger banks — and some very close Vivid competitors such as Sequoia-backed neobroker Trade Republic — Vivid’s backers believe the company’s traction and all-in, easy approach that appeals to new consumer investors will see the company picking up more users and usage as it expands.

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.

The Austrian startup — a platform for documentation and communication in construction and real estate projects — is continuing its funding roll with a $70 million fundraising round co-led by Insight Partners and Quadrille Capital. Back in March Vienna-based PlanRadar snapped up a €30 million Series A to digitize construction and real estate projects. The round also drew participation from existing investors, including Headline, Berliner Volksbank Ventures, aws Gründerfonds and Cavalry Ventures, plus new investors Proptech1, Russmedia and GR Capital. To add context to that, this is a significant raise for an Austrian company, and PlanRadar claims it the third-largest Series B in Austrian history to date.

Routefusion cofounders Colton Seal and Richard Scappaticci attempted to launch a neobank in 2016, but they ran into significant hurdles when trying to integrate with banks to help their customers move money to other countries.

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).

The funding will be used to continue growing GPS’s business — which includes a range of fintech services such as payments, direct debits, and standing orders; virtual cards; mobile wallets; fraud prevention; expense management; cryptocurrency management; BNPL and more.

Unlike most developed countries, the West African nation lacks an advanced credit bureau system to detail people’s credit histories, so there’s some scepticism to how Fintech Farm will use credit cards to operate.

Bfree was founded by Chukwudi Enyi (COO), Moses Nmor (CPO) and Flosbach (CEO), who were looking to develop better, ethical and tech-inspired debt-collection tools and processes following their firsthand experience working for digital lenders in Nigeria. Ethical debt collection standards ensure the privacy of customer information during the process.