FinTech news in Fintech category

Stripping out all that marketing jargon, Mosaic provides dashboards, modeling and data visualization tools geared toward financial planning use cases, allowing users to quickly share insights with stakeholders.

Gradient Ventures and Fin Capital co-led Vault’s US$3.7 million seed raise, which closed last year and included participation from The Fintech Fund, Exponent Capital and Thirdbase Capital. Vault says it partners with regulated financial institutions and that its customers can see which financial institution is holding their funds via their accounts page.

NY Mag piece detailed a lawsuit brought on by three former employees as well as alleged fabrications and inappropriate behavior on the part of Curtis. The startup also planned to build out a LGBTQ+ business marketplace and a platform that offered discounts and rewards when members shop at merchants whose actions support the queer community.

But Chu points to firms like Apollo Global Management (full disclosure: the owner of journalist’s parent company), Ares Management and Blackstone, all of which have developed large private credit operations, as supporting evidence that private credit has its merits.

Obie, a real estate-focused insurance technology company, has raised $25.5 million in a funding round led by Battery Ventures. Since the company last raise – a $10.4 million Series A – nearly two years ago, the startup says it has gone from securing insurance for over $3 billion worth of property to $20 billion worth.

The Mint will be a three-month accelerator, based out of San Francisco, that cuts $500,000 checks in exchange for 10% equity in between six to ten startups.

A majority of consumers approved for Petal credit cards since its 2018 launch had either thin or no credit history when they were first approved, according to Rosen. Prism Data essentially takes the cash flow underwriting technology the company initially developed for use at Petal, and makes it available to any lender, fintech or financial institution.

Down the line, the goal is to build an age-based, risk-tolerance-based deaccumulation ETF, Nazemi said, as well as a product called a home pension, where Charlie can enable users to use a portion of their home equity to supplement their social security check.

Peter Ackerson has departed from his role as general partner at fintech-focused venture firm Fin Capital and started a new firm, Audere Capital.

On May 2, as first reported by Barron, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, wrote a letter to FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg expressing concerns about Tellus’s claims

So far, it processed more than $300 million in payments through a closed beta with several consumer brands in the region ($20 million of that was processed in the first two quarters of 2022), and now says it’s ready to open access to cross border and local merchants across Latin America.

Essentially, Green-Got guarantees that your savings and the money that is sitting in your bank account aren’t going to finance fossil fuel projects and other polluting industries

As journalist’s Connie Loizos reported at the time, Finix told employees that soon after issuing its check, Sequoia concluded that Finix competes too directly with Stripe, the payments company that represented one of Sequoia’s biggest private holdings and that in turn counted Sequoia as one of its biggest outside investors. Serna believes that Finix’s latest move only drives the two closer toward each other despite the disparity in size (Finix has 130 or so employees and Stripe had just under 7,000 as of last November) and funding (Finix has raised about $133 million in funding and Stripe has raised nearly $9 billion). Block (formally known as Square) is often viewed as a payment processor, is actually built on top of other payments technology and itself works with a number of payment processors to provide direct connection into networks, Serna noted. Serna believes that Finix’s tech stands out because it was built from the ground up, and not built through a number of acquisitions as in the case of some legacy providers.

Founded last year by former Adyen product manager Sophia Goldberg and ex-Affirm software engineer JT Cho, San Francisco-based Ansa is building what it describes as a white-labeled digital wallet infrastructure to help businesses process small payments and offset high credit card fees for smaller transactions.

three former managing directors of Amex Ventures in early 2022 branched out to form their own fintech-focused venture firm, Vesey Ventures.

The company, co-founded by Manuel Alemán, Rodolfo Lazo and Paul Cattólica in 2022, is developing a vertical SaaS product for institutions, like banks and credit unions, that want to launch and operate their own credit products.

Hyve is building a multiplayer fintech infrastructure for saving and investing where users can create their network of supporters, and those people can automatically round up their purchases to match the user’s personal cash contributions. The more people added to the “hyve,” the more money the user saves to reach their goals.

Zamp offers a treasury management platform that enables businesses worldwide to invest surplus cash in U.S. Treasury bills and notes, partnering with BNY Mellon Pershing, which manages over $2 trillion. The platform serves businesses of all sizes, it said.

The acquisition is notable for a couple of reasons. For one, if the companies have managed to keep their valuations level (valuations have seen a lot of pressure in the last six months) it would be one of the bigger M&A deals between two fintech startups, coming at a time when startups have found it very challenging to raise further funding — either from private investors, or from the public markets by way of an IPO.

Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor

Oscilar is entirely self-funded, backed by $20 million that Narkhede and the company’s other co-founder, Sachin Kulkami, themselves contributed. Narkhede says that they opted not to take outside funding so that they could “quickly build and scale the company” as it launches publicly.

During one of the most rapid raises of interest rates we’ve really seen in U.S. history and with the cost of capital gone up, companies realized they need to make the most of every dollar,” he said

One Austin-based startup is out to help people build — or get — credit without taking on debt. And that startup, StellarFi, has just closed on a $15 million Series A round of funding to help it advance on that goal.

Eagle believes Beam differs in that Briq is more focused on building tools for large enterprises to automate their billing process. common refrain in the construction industry is that most contractors are forced to complete projects before getting paid, often having to pay for material and labor out of pocket.

The round was led by Japanese bank Mizuho Bank, a subsidiary of Mizuho Financial Group that contributed $125 million. It included participation from returning investors like Square Peg Capital, Jungle Ventures, Naver Financial Corporation, GMO Venture Partners and Openspace Ventures.

Besides seeking to snag market share from incumbents such as Concur, Brex is also taking on startups such as Navan (formerly called TripActions) — which actually started its business focused on travel expense management before broadening its offering and also Ramp, which itself expanded into travel last year.

The company came to an agreement with investors, according to eToro, that the investment would be converted two years after the signing of the agreement based on the following conditions: that it had not pursued the SPAC transaction or raised any additional capital.

Broom, an Indonesia-based auto-financing startup that wants to help used car dealers work more efficiently by applying the asset-backed lending model to their businesses .

As part of the latest funding announcement Synctera said is also announcing that it is partnering with the National Bank of Canada to help companies launch fintech apps and embedded banking products in the country.

Growfin, a Singapore- and San Francisco–based fintech startup that provides SaaS for finance departments to track and collect payments and to help manage the accounts receivable process, has raised a $7.5 million Series A.

Earlier this year, journalist reported that Thrive Capital was said to have committed $1 billion in fresh capital to Stripe as part of a new investment in the works that would have valued the fintech company at between $55 billion and $60 billion

Revenue can be broken down in three big pillars: cards, subscriptions, and foreign exchange

Even former Amazon employees with vested equity can use the service, according to Better.com, and there are many, following Amazon companywide layoffs.

Founded out of Spain in 2019, StudentFinance partners with educational institutions such as Ironhack and Le Wagon to help finance those looking to upskill into disciplines like software development, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, serving as an alternative to traditional bank or student loans.

Our action products bring together a company’s data and provide APIs to give developers and business stakeholders in a company the ability to build more sophistication in their payment stack to address issues such as churn, risk, and cost

Cred flash, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s foray into buy now and pay later category

We wanted to make sure that consumers would be able to use Klarna everywhere. So we created a browser that allows you to go to any website like Amazon, and you have this Klarna button at the bottom

The goal is that by allowing people to co-buy a home and build equity that way, they can eventually sell their shares and purchase their own home at a later time.

Rex Salisbury and Lee Hower and others on hiring in FinTech industry

Merlos and Estrada say the company’s homegrown credit scoring system allows it to offer credit cards in tiers so that its lending is responsible.

Jake Gibson, founding partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures and co-founder of NerdWallet, said that as his firm evaluated the opportunity to invest in Portão 3, it found that enterprise companies in Brazil have access to corporate cards but, as Pereira mentioned, they rarely utilize the products due to concerns around fraud, reconciliation and decentralization of data.

Founded in 2018 to provide working capital loans for small to medium-sized businesses, Aspire began offering more services, including bank accounts for cross-border businesses, corporate cards, payable and receivable management and automated invoice processing connected to financial management software.

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.

Its API covers over 170 markets for card payments, and 85 markets for local payments collection, which means its customers can accept payments in different countries without having to set up local entities.

Affirm today also posted its second quarter results for the 2023 fiscal year. GMV (gross merchandise volume) of $5.7 billion set a new record but still fell short of an outlook that Affirm itself had provided in November.

The company plans to use its new capital to continue building out its new integrated partner marketplace (similar to what Synctera is doing) and multi-bank network — which is currently made up of 16 banks — as well as develop new products and services, including lending options. Treasury Prime co-founder and CEO Chris Dean believes that the best outcomes for consumers will result from traditional banks and fintechs working together. Over time, it has expanded its offering and today says it gives businesses of all sizes a way to integrate with banks so they can offer new services, lower the cost of deposits and ultimately generate more revenue. San Francisco-based Treasury Prime, which has raised about $73 million since its 2017 inception, started out by building software tooling that helps banks automate and accelerate routine tasks.

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.

Founded by Irish brothers John and his brother Patrick Collison (the CEO), Stripe has raised more than $2.2 billion in funding since its 2010 inception from investors such as Allianz (via its Allianz X fund), Axa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Base Partners, GV and an investor from the founders’ home country, Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). Thrive Capital has reportedly committed $1 billion in fresh capital to payments giant Stripe as part of a new investment in the works that would value the fintech company at between $55 billion and $60 billion. journalist reported last week that Stripe was seeking to raise $2 billion but the number could actually be closer to $2.5 billion to $3 billion, according to reports from the New York Times and The Information. Also, journalist recently reported on how new fintech startup Mayfair is paying Stripe a fee as part of its mission to offer businesses a higher yield on their cash.

Ultimately, Hakimian said, TrueBiz claims it gives financial services providers a way to onboard their business customers faster, and eliminate the churn that can result from verification delays. Its target customers are mid-size financial service providers, such as banks opening new business bank accounts, or payments providers onboarding merchants. Founded by Danny Hakimian  and Max Morlocke, the company recently raised $2.4 million in a seed round led by Flourish Ventures in an effort to reinvent how financial services verify businesses during account opening. Specifically, TrueBiz aims to add color to a business’ background with over 50 data points – such as industry and revenue – from around the web, and then summarize key risk indicators, noted Satya Patel, partner of Homebrew.

Power’s first product is a credit card issuance program, which is designed for companies, brands and banks to offer embeddable fintech experiences, such as customized credit card programs, targeted promotions and personalized rewards, into existing mobile and web applications. Historically, Marqeta was focused on debit and prepaid cards, but in February 2021, it formally expanded into the consumer credit card space to help other brands launch credit card programs. Once the deal closes, Power Finance CEO Randy Fernando will lead the product management of Marqeta’s credit card platform. Marqeta has agreed to acquire two-year-old fintech infrastructure startup Power Finance for $223 million in cash, marking the first acquisition in the publicly-traded company 13-year history.

PhonePe, which is valued at $12 billion, has projected a revenue of $325 million in the calendar year 2022 and $504 million in 2023, according to a valuation report prepared by the auditing firm KPMG and filed by PhonePe. A concern for PhonePe’s growth was Indian regulators enforcing a market cap check on each player, but the deadline for the new guidelines was extended last month and now won’t come into effect until 2025, giving PhonePe another two years of fast-growth. The nine-month financials marks a jump from the $201.6 million revenue that the Bengaluru-headquartered generated in the 12-month period ending in financial year March last year. The startup, backed by Walmart, doesn’t expect to turn EBIDTA positive, a key profitability metric, until the calendar year 2025, KMPG wrote in its valuation report.

Fintech startup Stripe has set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing, or pursue a transaction on the private market, such as a fundraising event and a tender offer, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Tapping into identity verification data from credit bureaus (e.g. Equifax) and wireless carriers (e.g. T-Mobile) and combining it with real-time data from financial institutions’ core banking systems, Method can collate a person’s liabilities across more than 60,000 institutions in the U.S. and kick off tasks such as balance transfers, payoffs, bill pay and more. While the startup competes with big names like Plaid, MX, Spinwheel and Dwolla, Shah sees Method holding its own, particularly as the platform rolls out new features in the next few months including real-time credit card transactions, instant balance transfers and enhanced live data points for liabilities. Method, a startup that aims to make it easier for fintech developers to embed repayment, balance transfers and bill pay automation into their apps, today announced that it closed a $16 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator (Method a Y Combinator graduate), Abstract Ventures, SV Angel and others. Shah points out that there’s no standard, technically easy way to access all of a person’s financial liabilities — their student loans, credit cards, mortgages and so on — and push money to those liabilities.

Whenever you want to spend money in your Plum account, you can either withdraw money to your bank account or pay with a Plum debit card — but you have to pay a subscription fee to get a card. It can be particularly useful for people who earn enough money to save money every month, but also tend to spend everything they have on their main bank account. The app can connect to your bank account and round up all your transactions in the past week and transfer everything over to a Plum-managed pocket of money. Originally from the U.K., Plum is a money management app that helps you automatically set some money aside.

After years watching deals falls through due to a lack of payment flexibility, they left Motive to build Vartana, aiming to equip companies with a managed platform that helps sales reps close deals. Vartana also secured a $50 million line of credit from i80 Group, which Kella says will ensure financed deals can be managed through Vartana’s new capital marketplace. Vartana helps to manage tasks like contract tracking, payment terms and signature capture, accepting a range of different payment options (e.g., pay in full, deferred payment) and installment plans. But he doesn’t see them as direct competitors, pointing out that Vartana’s model hinges on delivering financing to buyers and targeting late-stage tech companies.

With the funds from the recently-closed Series A, Shoykhet says that Link will launch account verification, which will verify bank accounts and ownership information to bring merchants in compliance with Nacha’s new account validation rule. Link customers pay by bank transfer, sending funds directly from their bank to a merchant’s business account. Recently, Discover dove into the accounts-to-accounts space, partnering with payments fintech Buy It Mobility so that its partner merchants can accept card-free payments, Link claims to be one of the first companies in the U.S. to enable customers to make online payments using their bank accounts.

Existing backer Bain Capital led the extension, with participation from previous investors such as Access Ventures, CLSA Capital Partners Lending Ark Asia, D3 Jubilee Partners, 500 Global, Kakao Investment, TBT Partners and IBX Partners. PeopleFund plans to use its new capital to continue to advance its AI-powered risk management and credit scoring system for its users, which includes borrowers and lenders. In 2021, PeopleFund raised $63.4 million (75.9 billion won) in equity for Series C, also led by Bain Capital, to further develop its credit-scoring system. Korea’s P2P lending startup PeopleFund gets $63.4M Series C led by Bain Capital

Multiple due diligence mashups, hot M&A and more FinTech news in the first two weeks of 2023. Major banks are on the acquisition roll.

Beyond providing access to higher interest rates, Mayfair says its software gives businesses a way to choose how much they need for operations and earn yield on the rest via automated cash management. Stripe in turn pays Mayfair and Mayfair pays its customers, keeping what Chopra described as a small cut. The pair teamed up with serial entrepreneurs Kent Mori and Kevin Chan in February 2021 to start a company, exploring different business models before settling on Mayfair current offering. Mayfair itself is not a bank, but rather a fintech company that offers FDIC-insured products through an Arkansas-based bank called Evolve Bank & Trust.

Investment giant BlackRock announced Friday it is taking a minority stake in, and leading a financing round for, venture-backed fintech startup Human Interest. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Human Interest’s digital retirement benefits platform allows users “to launch a retirement plan in minutes and put it on autopilot,” according to the company.  It \[…\]

Remote payroll startup Deel has acquired fintech Capbase for an undisclosed amount in a cash and stock deal, the companies have told journalist exclusively. With its acquisition of Capbase, Deel plans to pair those services with a new product dedicated to equity management and issuance. It was drawn to the fact that Capbase works to help companies with incorporation and fundraising in their early days as well as with compliance filings and granting equity as they mature, according to Bouaziz. Services it offers include helping companies send offer letters, grant equity to new employees, manage their cap tables and get a 409A valuation report, among other things.

The Qonto and Penta teams are going to merge with Penta’s co-founder Lukas Zörner acting as the new VP of Germany for Qonto. As for existing customers, Qonto now expects to move all Penta customers to Qonto banking platform by the end of 2023. While Penta is no longer accepting new customers, new German companies looking for a bank account can sign up to Qonto directly. At the time of the acquisition, Penta was serving 50,000 companies in Germany while Qonto had 300,000 customers in France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

While German startup Trade Republic is better known as a mobile app that helps you buy and sell stock, the company is adding interest on uninvested cash. With this new feature, Trade Republic will likely attract new customers who are looking for higher interest rates as inflation impacts the savings of European consumers. Users who hold cash in their Trade Republic account will receive 2% in annual interest. More precisely, Trade Republic says that interests will be calculated on a daily basis and the startup credits user accounts once per month.

Pakistan markets regulator issued new guidelines for digital lending in the country, cracking down on several sketchy practices that it said have become prevalent in the South Asian market. The non-banking finance firms will be required to share these key facts with consumers through audio or video and emails and text messages in both English and Urdu languages. Neighboring nation India also introduced strict rules surrounding digital lending in a move that has toppled the local fintech industry. (You can read the full-guidelines here {PDF}.)

Indian fintech Money View said on Monday it has raised $75 million in a new funding round, its second this year, despite the market slump as it looks to scale its core credit business and build more products in the South Asian market. The eight-year-old startup offers personalized credit products and financial management solutions to customers who otherwise don’t have a credit score and so can’t avail credit from banks and other financial institutions. Apis Partners led Money View Series E funding round, valuing the Bengaluru-headquartered startup at $900 million, up from $615 million in a $75 million Series D funding round in March. Money View plans to deploy the fresh funds to grow its credit business, broaden its product portfolio with services such as digital bank accounts, insurance, wealth management and hire more talent, it said.

The new capital will help also Toss accelerate growth for the challenger bank Toss Bank— launched last year by Via Republica — and a Robinhood-like retail investment app, Toss Securities, which both look to turn a profit next year, according to Seo. Viva Republica, an operator of South Korean finance super app Toss, has finalized a $405 million Series G funding and it says it is now valued at 9.1 trillion won ( $7 billion), up from 8.5 trillion won in June 2021, when it raised $410 million in pre-Series F funding at a $7.4 billion (8.5 trillion won) valuation. Viva Republica with Toss Securities, Toss Payments and Toss Insurance is expected to post about 1 trillion won ($ 767 million) in revenue next year, according to the company. In fact, Viva Republica claims it has the largest market share with its fintech super app in the country in terms of monthly active users (MAUs), with 24 million registered users for Toss and 14 MAUs as of August this year.

Into this fray has stepped Bling, a startup founded by a 20-year-old, that offers a finance platform aimed specifically at families, which is designed so that parents can do financial planning for their children, from pocket money to first investments. It now raised a €3.5M Seed round of financing from Peak (based out of Amsterdam); La Famiglia
; angels such as Lea-Sophie Cramer, Verena Pausder, Felix Haas (co-founder IDnow), Jakob Schreyer (Co-Founder Orderbird), former ING-Diba CEO Ben Tellings, football world cup winner Andre Schürrle, family ‘influencer’ Carmen Kroll, Angel Invest and Prediction Capital
. Prior to Bling, Feigenwinter founded three other companies in the youth segment, including Switzerland’s largest student magazine, family merchandise and licensing house, as well as a consultancy agency specialized in young adult topics, leading him to be described as the ‘fintech wunderkind’ by German media. After that, family members and the community join Bling via links, thus contributing to savings pots and investment plans, managing household spending and prepping for critical financial events.

I asked Guillaume Pousaz if Checkout.com’s new valuation was similar to a 409A valuation update. It has implications when it comes to taxes as employees usually pay taxes on the difference between the price of their options and the new share value as defined by the new 409A valuation. Fintech startup Checkout.com was in the news this morning because the Financial Times reported that the payment company had slashed its internal valuation to $11 billion. Unlike Klarna’s down round, the new valuation wasn’t determined by a VC firm willing to invest in the company.

Akros Technologies wants to disrupt the current asset management industry via its AI-driven asset management software platform that mines market data for stocks. The outfit aims to maximize the finance management performance of data-driven ETFs and offer a portfolio management solution via the PMaaS for Akros’s users to help them compete with global ETF institutions like Vanguard or JPMorgan. To build a slew of investment strategies that lower the cost of portfolio modeling and generate scores of investment portfolios, Akros applies a generative AI model based on a decision transformer, which predicts future actions through the sequencing model, Chung said, adding the company also employs GPT-3 natural language processing (NLP) to analyze unstructured language data. The latest funding, which brings Akros’s total amount raised to $6.1 million since its 2021 inception, will help Akros to scale its software platform and asset management products and ramp up its users, including local and global financial institutions and fintech companies.

Nagpal isn’t worried about the seasonality of the 401(k) product because of the upcoming product roadmap, which includes the education product, investment flows into the retirement product like being able to invest in startups and ETFs, and even HSAs, often described as a 401(k) for healthcare. It would be a few years of self-employment, and building a venture firm later, before Nagpal returned to the moment as one of the early catalysts for his newest startup, Ocho. Perhaps the unique connection between Nagpal’s first company, to his firm, to his newest startup, could hint at what his approach to personal finance may be: diversify across multiple vehicles, redefine what a supercharged investment could look like, and keep on learning. To power that ambitious product spree, Ocho has raised $2.5 million from Nagpal’s own venture firm, Vibe Capital.

Earlier this year, Stripe announced a new product called Financial Connections, which gives Stripe’s customers a way to connect directly to their customer’s bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions. More recently, Plaid announced that it had named Meta veteran John Anderson to serve as its new head of payments as it began personally facilitating payments through its Transfer offering, in addition to facilitating its partners’ payments. In a practice that is becoming increasingly common, the company is also accelerating equity grants for employees who worked at the company for more than one year to the February 15, 2023 vesting date. Fintech decacorn Plaid is laying off 260 employees, or about 20% of its workforce, the company announced today.

Other African startups on the list include: OVEX, a South African digital asset exchange and OTC trading desk ($5 million from FTX at a $122 million valuation); Kenya-based payment automation and settlement company AZA Finance ($25 million promissory note/loan); African mobile money unicorn Wave ($10 million in equity); South African crypto exchange platform VALR ($4 million equity); Nigerian crypto exchange startup Bitnob ($500,000 from FTX at a $20 million valuation); Nestcoin, a Nigerian web3 platform whose assets got stuck on SBF’s bankrupt crypto exchange platform ($250,000 equity from FTX at a $30 million valuation), and Congolese-based web3 startup Jambo ($500,000 in tokens). According to FT, the four-year-old fintech was one of over 450 investments Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to offer as collateral in an attempt to raise money for the FTX group, which includes 10 holding companies such as Alameda Research, FTX Ventures, FTX Trading, Maclaurin Investments and Clifton Bay Investments (the arm used to invest in Chipper Cash.) FTX processed billions monthly in Africa before going bust It’s not clear if Chipper Cash will maintain this valuation in its next priced round seeing as its lead investor FTX is currently bankrupt. Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX led the round and Chipper Cash’s valuation skyrocketed to $2 billion, becoming one of Africa’s five unicorns last year.

To get the product up and running as soon as possible, Robinhood is inviting anyone with an existing Robinhood account or who is eligible to create a Robinhood account — meaning they are 18 and over and meet other standard criteria — to join the waitlist. (Waitlisting users is a move that Robinhood has used numerous times, including with its crypto product, to both build buzz and ensure a smoother experience for users as they are moved past the figurative velvet rope.) To head off similar criticism with this new product, the company is taking early steps to provide what Tenev described as in-app guidance, education and guardrails for users. Once onboarded, users will have the choice of investing in stocks and ETFs through either a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA, says Robinhood.

Some venture investors have also shown appetite to invest in banks in recent months – Accel and Quona recently backed Shivalik Small Finance Bank, for instance – but a growing number of other banks including RBL and Federal Bank have employed a similar strategy as SBM and courted many startups in the past two years. The Indian arm of SBM Bank, one of the banks that has aggressively worked with fintech startups in the South Asian market, is engaging with investors to raise capital and pitching the vision of becoming one of the top banking-as-a-service providers in the country, according to a source familiar with the matter. The firm sees its deep partnerships with fintech startups such as Bengaluru-headquartered fintechs Razorpay and Slice as a key growth pillar, according to an investor presentation seen by journalist. The bank has actively courted fintech startups as customers, offering them co-branded cards and powering their neobanks, as it sought to differentiate itself from the large competitors that for years avoided engaging with the younger firms.

Providing a complement to the longer process of applying to banks directly for loans, to facilitate lending on its platform, KreditBee works both with non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and banks registered with the Reserve Bank of India, including Krazybee Services, IIFL Finance, Incred Financial Services, Vivriti Capital, Northern Arc Capital, PayU Finance, Poonawalla Fincorp, Piramal Capital and Housing Finance and Cholamandalam Investment and Finance. The startup said it is planning to use the fresh funds to invest in its product development, specifically to expand from unsecured personal loans to secured loans, home loans and credit lines, and to start work on adjacent services such as insurance, credit score reports and merchant-side offers. The digital loans business in India has been the subject of a lot of controversy, not least for over-predatory and un-transparent practices, yet that existed alongside the rise of a handful of startups that hoping to apply tech to build products that are clearly understood and fill a need in the market for quick, short-term access to capital. KreditBee today offers instant personal loans of up to $3,700 (3 lakhs Indian rupees) as well as loans for salaried individuals and purchases via e-commerce platforms.

It also is not only not a down or a flat round, the cash infusion boosts X1’s valuation by 50%, according to Deepak Rao, co-founder & CEO of X1. X1, a consumer fintech startup which recently launched an income-based credit card to the public, has raised an additional $15 million in funding. Also, notably, X1 latest financing comes just six months after the San Francisco-based company raised $25 million in a July Series B round. The startup’s long list of previous backers include FPV, Craft Ventures, Spark Capital, Harrison Metal, SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, the Chainsmokers, Global Founders Capital, actor Jared Leto, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie, Jeremy Stoppelman, Affirm and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and Y Combinator Partner Ali Rowghani.

The startup, which offers users the ability to manage and pay their credit card and scores of other bills on time as well as access to D2C brands and loans, backed peer-to-peer lender Liquiloans two months ago, invested in lender CredAvenue earlier this year and expense management platform HapPay in December. CRED is acquiring CreditVidya, a SaaS startup that helps firms underwrite first-time borrowers, in the latest of a series of investments from the Bengaluru-headquartered fintech as it broadens its infrastructure and offerings. The two firms will continue to operate independently and CRED will extend its employee stock program and other benefits to CreditVidya workforce, CRED said in a statement. The 10-year-old CreditVidya — headquartered in Hyderabad and backed by Navroz Udwadia, Kalaari Capital and Matrix Partners — had raised $10 million in previous financing rounds and was last valued at about $30 million post-money.

The startup declined to name its crypto mining-related customers, but notably, Pipe had a public partnership with Compass Mining, a now beleaguered crypto mining company that is reportedly facing its own fair share of struggles. Meanwhile, a Form-D signed by Pipe Senior Counsel Peter Chiaro with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late September reveals that the company recently secured $7.12 million in debt financing, which could be construed as a positive alternative to the kind of highly structured inside round that many startups are closing currently. Besides Fin Capital, other VCs to lead investments in Pipe on the part of their investment firms include Marlon Nichols, a managing director at MaC Venture Capital, and Ashton Newhall, a longtime investor with Greenspring Associates and now a partner with StepStone Group, which acquired Greenspring in September of last year. Other backers in the company include Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund, 3L, Japan’s SBI Investment, Marc Benioff, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, Republic and Craft Ventures, which led the company’s $6 million seed funding in February 2020.

Narayanan and O’Dowd were used to card alternative payments after living in Singapore, and saw an opportunity to use the U.K. open banking payments stack to build a Visa and Mastercard alternative, Narayanan told us. Atoa co-founder Sid Narayanan told journalist that he and co-founder Cian O’Dowd developed the idea for Atoa after selling their previous startup, expense management platform KlearCard, to Singapore fintech Validus in 2021. Mastercard and Visa payment rails can cost small merchants and their customers net margins of 51%, with card machine fees of about 1.75%, Narayanan said. To incentivize more customers to use Atoa, the startup also plans to add rewards and loyalty benefits, like digital scratch cards that can let them get cash rewards into their existing U.K. bank accounts.

Crowdz, which secured $10 million in capital co-led by Citi and Dutch growth equity firm Global Cleantech Capital, said this year it expanded from providing invoice-based financing to SaaS-focused SMEs to also providing them with recurring revenue access to upfront capital they need without having to dilute their equity. With that buy — its first — Pipe created a new media and entertainment division called Pipe Entertainment with the aim of giving independent distributors the opportunity to trade their revenue streams in the same way a SaaS company could. The three co-founders of alternative financing startup Pipe are stepping down from their roles as executives of the company in one of the most dramatic management shake-ups seen in the fintech startup world in some time. Since its founding, the startup says that 22,000 companies have signed up for Pipe and $7 billion of ARR (annual recurring revenue) has been connected to the platform.

Users can also leverage Taktile to experiment with off-the-shelf data integrations and monitor the performance of predictive models in their decision flows, Wehmeyer said, performing A/B tests to evaluate those flows. To allay the fears of privacy advocates, customers and regulators, Wehmeyer says that Taktile built technology that enables its clients to host decision flows in their country of choice and process data locally — a requirement for many regulatory agencies. As a piece in The New York Times recently detailed, some lenders are increasingly drawing on outside-the-box data sources to evaluate creditworthiness, presenting opportunities to consumers historically barred from certain financial products but at the same time amplifying the risk of perpetuating biases or making inaccurate predictions. Taktile puts the onus on its fintech customers to communicate the types of data and models they’re hosting and deploying via the platform.

In an interview with journalist, Anderson explained that while Plaid will be personally facilitating payments through its Transfer offering, it will also continue working with its dozens of payments partners, which include the likes of Square, Stripe, Marqeta, Gusto and Silicon Valley Bank. In its own way, Anderson pointed out, Plaid has been involved in digital payments for years, by enabling nearly a billion ACH transactions for things like account funding and account-to-account transfers. In working with its payment partners over the years, Anderson said that Plaid saw a consistent challenge — that it usually took several days for an ACH transfer to complete. Specifically, Stripe’s Financial Connections was designed to give that company’s customers a way to connect directly to their customers’ bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions — exactly what Plaid has done historically.

Customers can offer their customers a charge card, credit card, revolving loan or any other credit products that Unit’s bank partners offer. Charge cards, which are more popular than credit cards for small businesses, give Unit a way to enable customers to build and offer lending products, even though the startup is not a lender itself. Unit claims that a card swipe transaction will yield 0.5% more interchange revenue when done with a credit card compared to a debit card. The company gives companies a way to embed financial services into their product — and after already launching debit cards, Unit is officially breaking into the charge card game.

Because it is using its retail customers’ savings deposits to fund these loans at a 3.85% to 4.5% yield, Tellus makes its money on the spread of what it’s paying out in interest versus what it’s charging its borrowers. The six-year-old fintech startup claims it can offer people yields of 3.85% to 4.5% on their savings balances by using the money to fund certain U.S. single-family-home loans. Tellus says it promotes financial literacy by quizzing users on financial terms, for example, and then rewarding them with higher interest rates. With mortgage interest rates having more than doubled since a year ago, one might think that this is not the best time to be a digital mortgage lender.

So the pair spent nights and weekends building a prototype for Loop, a startup that sits at the intersection of logistics and payments, before leaving Uber in May of 2021 to focus full time on the business. And, McKinney claims, it can bring payments down Loop makes money by taking a percentage of total payments volume. Matt McKinney was a data science manager at Uber, helping launch Uber Freight, along with software engineer Shaosu Liu. One of the tailwinds that helped Loop, believes McKinney, is the COVID pandemic-driven secular shift of paper to electronic methods of payments.

In the memo, Britt said that he and co-founder Ryan King are re-calibrating marketing spend, decreasing the number of contractors, adjusting workspace needs and renegotiating vendor contractors. The company memo, along with the fact that Chime has paused its public debut plans, suggests that growth trends may have changed. Chime was notoriously one of the first neobanks to hit EBITDA profitability, a milestone it shared when it hit $14.5 billion two years ago. Digital bank Chime confirmed today that it is laying off 12% of its workforce, or about 160 people.

Decentro has partnered with scores of industry players including Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, Visa, RuPay, Quickwork, Equifax, Aadhaar and National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) to offer solutions for prepaid payment instruments, no-code workflows, conversational banking via WhatsApp and enable document verification and KYC process. Indian angel investors including CRED founder Kunal Shah, Groww co-founder and CEO Lalit Keshre, Gupshup co-founder and CEO Beerud Sheth and former CBO of BharatPe Pratekk Agarwaal also participated in the funding round. India Decentro, the Y Combinator-backed startup that helps companies enter the fintech market by deploying its APIs, has raised $4.7 million in a Series A round. The Bengaluru-based startup offers banking and payments APIs that allow development of fintech products such as banking, payment cards, neobanking and collections and payout services in a short period of time.

The daughter of divorced parents herself, Jacklyn Rome founded Onward in 2020 with the aim of helping divorced and separated parents more easily manage their shared expenses. Since that time, Onward has launched a number of new features, including the ability to pay your co-parent back through the platform, partial payments, and the ability to track other expenses not related to children, such as shared mortgages or telephone bills. Rome, who previously led new product launches at Uber and Blue Apron, said she built the app with the intent of not only alleviating headaches for the parents but also helping reduce family tension overall. By partnering with influencers who are co-parents, Rome said, the startup has boosted awareness of its offering.

As N26 and Bitpanda have likely agreed to share revenue coming from N26 Crypto, the new feature should contribute to the company’s bottom line. Similarly, when you cash out with N26 Crypto, you will get EUR in your main N26 account — no need to transfer money back to your bank account. Challenger bank N26 is launching a new trading feature in its app — N26 Crypto. N26 is going to slowly roll out N26 Crypto across Europe.

Banyan, a platform for product purchase data that allows customers such as banks, fintechs, hotels and merchants to automate expense management and more, today announced that it raised $43 million in a Series A funding round — $28 million in equity and $15 million in debt — led by Fin Capital with participation from M13, FIS Impact Ventures and TTV Capital.

Visa’s network is now connected to Thunes’ B2B platform, which means Visa Direct can reach more than 1.5 billion new endpoints (for a total of 7 billion) and that the 78 digital wallet providers already integrated with Thunes get a new send-to-wallet capability.

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.

FinTech, PropTech, VCs and startups from last week

To help fuel continued growth, the startup is announcing it has raised $67 million in a Series B funding round that included participation from Battery Ventures, Don Griffith, NFL player Drew Brees, Ferst Capital Partners, FinTLV, Next Play Capital, Operator Stack, Redpoint Ventures, Tencent, Tom Williams and Wedbush Capital.

Ayoconnect’s new funding will be used for leadership hiring, and on its Ayoconnect’s product and technology, including new solutions for payments, data and banking and new APIs for account opening and card issuing.

U.K. fintech GoHenry is announcing $55 million in funding to double down on the opportunity. This also played out, interestingly, among young people, GoHenry said, with the company seeing a surge of new users during the pandemic and an increased rate of activity among existing customers.

Ntropy, a company offering an API that enriches transaction data for financial services businesses, today announced that it raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Lakestar with participation from QED Investors and January Investors.

After the layoffs, Brex has just over 1,150 employees. Unsurprisingly, Brex cited the challenging macro environment in its decision.

Red River West led Jiko’s Series B financing, which also included participation from Trousdale Ventures, Owen Van Natta, Temaris & Associates, La Maison Partners, BPI France, Airbus Ventures, Anthem Ventures, Upfront Ventures and Radicle Impact.

To help meet SMEs’ financial needs in the country, Seoul-based fintech startup Korea Credit Data (KCD) said Thursday that it has raised $24.7 million in Series D extension financing. KCD claims that it has more than 1.7 million registered merchants in South Korea and its app has grown into a super app among small and mid-sized business owners.

Embedded banking — used by companies that do not build financial products like credit, payments or deposits from the ground up but want to offer those services to their customers to grow revenues — has been on a big growth tear in the last several years, and today one of the bigger players building finance as a service tools like these and others is announcing a round of funding to continue its growth.

South Africa’s Talk360 raises $4M to build single payment platform for Africa Talk360 told us in a past interview, that its decision to be a payment aggregator was informed by the challenges it encountered in implementing digital payment options, which affected the bottom line of its internet calling business.

On September 28, LinkedIn released its Top Startups list, which is its self-described annual ranking of 50 emerging U.S. companies “gaining attention and recruiting top talent.” The professional networking site takes into consideration a variety of criteria based on its own data when coming up with the list: employment growth, engagement with the company and its employees, job interest and ability to attract talent from companies.

Series A investment was led by AlbionVC and includes Aldea Ventures, as well as previous investors Seaya Ventures, Speedinvest, SIX FinTech Ventures and angel investors, including Leandro Sigman, board member at Endeavor Spain.

At one point, John began having more visibility into the company’s records and found there were inconsistencies in how Better was managing loan documents, post-closings and HR documents. To get a better understanding of what’s happening on a human level, we talked to several former employees of the embattled startup who have been laid off in recent months, as well as current ones impacted by the new leave policy. In the meantime, workers who stayed at the company despite all the goings-on of the past year — only to be laid off with far less in severance pay than those who were laid off before them — feel betrayed.

A number of high-profile angel investors also put money in the round including 12-time NBA All-Star Chris Paul, Super Bowl Champion Vernon Davis, early-stage investors Tim Fong, VSC’s Jay Kapoor and athletes Jimmer Fredette and Kyle Hines.

While French retailers, online shops and businesses can use Stancer starting today, Iliad has already been using Stancer for many of its activities already, including as the payments processing platform to bill Free mobile and internet subscribers. When it comes to online payments, Stancer clients can accept card payments as well as SEPA direct debits. There are many ways to accept Stancer payments — an API, a pop-in or iframe, a Stancer-hosted payment page and CMS plugins. Stancer is already teasing more products down the road, such as split payments and Stancer-designed online shops.

Ultimately, Cohen-Shohet’s goal is to build a holistic, all-encompassing business management platform for small business owners in the beauty and wellness space. GlossGenius has over 40,000 customers in the beauty and wellness space today and sees about $2 billion in annualized transaction volume on its platform, CEO and founder Cohen-Shohet told journalist in an interview. The company plans to use the new funding to grow its employee base of 150 with a focus on engineering, product and design as well as marketing, Cohen-Shohet said. Helping small businesses run big operations is core to the company’s mission, Cohen-Shohet said.

Given that building a new accounting platform is extremely complex if you want to comply with all accounting rules, Regate partners with software companies that have been working on accounting software for many years. For accounting firms, they can add Regate to their accounting stack and communicate with their clients directly from Regate. There are two types of clients for Regate — companies that have their own accounting department, or accounting firms working with small and medium companies. Regate is currently working with 10,000 clients — many accounting firms as well as many companies directly, such as Le Slip Français, Jimmy Fairly, Cityscoot and Skello.

Giesecke message was sent to around 500 Klarna employees, including in IT and and recruiting, though Klarna tells us in a separate statement that the job cuts will impact fewer than 100 employees globally. In May, the company shrunk its global workforce by an estimated 10%; it also raised funds at a $6.7 billion valuation in an $800 million round, down from the somewhat aspirational $45.6 billion valuation that Klarna was assigned by SoftBank when the Japanese conglomerate led a $640 million round in the company in June of last year. Our organization is built on 700 fast-moving teams that are constantly changing, and Klarna employees move between teams and departments every week. When layoffs follow layoffs, as is happening at a growing number of companies (TC’s Natasha Mascarenhas has observed this trend at Robinhood, On Deck, Gemini and others, for example), morale can sink further still.

Mark Mullen, co-founder of Bonfire Ventures, the firm that invested in Brightflow’s seed stage, said the company’s initial customers were e-commerce, which made it easier to understand the pain points. However, Brightflow founder and CEO Robbie Bhathal told journalist that the company differentiates itself by focusing on the automation of financial services and disseminating that information in a way that a business owner can understand. The San Francisco–based company cash flow calculator grabs financial data from platforms like Shopify, Amazon, QuickBooks, Facebook and Google Ads, and then provides a real-time look at cash flow. Brightflow AI is injecting technology into this problem with its forecast and analysis tools so that small businesses can assess their cash flow and make data-driven decisions in real time.

Pie Insurance, which provides workers’ compensation insurance to small businesses, has closed on a $315 million Series D round of funding. Notably, workers’ compensation insurance is the only commercial insurance mandated for nearly every company in the United States, points out Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital.

Noble today emerged from stealth and announced the close of a $15 million Series A round led by Insight Partners with participation from Cross River Digital Ventures, Plug & Play Ventures, Y Combinator, Flexport Fund, TLV Partners, Operator Partners, Verissimo Ventures, Interplay Ventures and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

Nilos also helps you manage your crypto transactions as you can orchestrate crypto-to-crypto payments as well as crypto-to-fiat payments. The startup currently takes a fees on crypto-to-fiat transactions, but the company plans to move to a more traditional software-as-a-service subscription model as it’s more transparent for the end users. Meet Nilos, a startup that wants to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional business bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that displays all your transactions — whether those are fiat transactions or crypto payments.

An investment is typically part of a broader strategic play by the banking industry juggernauts, and Monese’s latest tie-up is no different — HSBC is looking to leverage Monese’s banking-as-a-service platform, which it unveiled last year to help other financial institutions easily develop online money management and related digital services.

Baldwin describes Boundless Rider as a standalone motorcycle, e-bike and power sports product that can be purchased directly from the company or eventually, bundled with another carrier’s homeowner or car insurance product or purchased through a manufacturer at the time of purchase. CoverTree CEO Adarsh Rachmale – who left his product management role at LinkedIn to focus on building the insurtech with Rishie Modi and Divyansh Sharma – says the goal of the company is to only focus on pre-fab or manufactured home residents. As of 2019, about 10% of new single-family homes (including manufactured homes) were categorized as manufactured homes. Boundless Rider is a new insurance company founded specifically to serve riders of motorcycles, e-bikes and power sport vehicles.

Payall differentiates itself from other startups in the cross-border payments space in that rather than competing with banks, it works with them by white labeling its software. Indeed, with the COVID-19 pandemic fueling more remote work globally, the need to provide cross-border payments for business and individual clients has never been as pressing for banks. He founded Payall, a cross-border processor for regulated banks, in 2018.

He notes that by using Kojo, supervisors spend about 38% less time on materials management, back-office staff save approximately 75% of time processing purchase orders and customers save around 3 to 5% on materials. Earlier this year, the startup rebranded to Kojo and expanded from serving just one construction trade — electrical — to eight, including mechanical, concrete, drywall, roofing, flooring, site preparation and self-perform general contractors. In other words, it provides software to help contractors get the best price for the materials they use in construction projects so they save a lot more money, move faster and have less waste. Kojo claims it can help contractors save as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials annually due to far less waste, while also cutting down their order process time by 50%.

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.

Power’s first product is the credit card issuance program, which is designed for companies, brands and banks to offer embeddable fintech experiences, like customized credit card programs, targeted promotions and personalized rewards, into existing mobile and web applications. Power, a fintech infrastructure startup, is now kicking off its full-stack credit card issuance platform after a year in stealth mode and with $16.1 million in seed funding and $300 million in a credit facility.

Formerly known as Fazz Financial Group, Fazz goal is to close the $300 billion funding gap for MSMEs, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic, and give them the same tools as larger businesses. The equity investment came from returning investors Tiger Global, DST Investment, B Capital, Insignia Ventures Partners and ACE & Company, with participation from Ilham Ltd, EDBI, InterVest, Y Combinator managing director Michael Seibel and GGV Capital managing partner Hans Tung.

Essentially, Kafene’s model is based on the premise that at the point-of-sale, the prime consumer will probably go with BNPL, while the subprime consumer doesn’t have the credit score to do so and would typically do lease-to-own as their alternative financing mechanism.

Pakistan embedded finance platform Neem has raised $2.5 million in a seed funding round as it works to support underbanked communities in the country.

This week in FinTech, banks vs FinTechs and billion dollar acquisitions

Last batch, YC’s India founders appeared concentrated mostly within the financial services sector, around 30% when you consider that out of 36 Indian startups, 11 were in the fintech world. Out of the 21 startups YC backed in India this cohort, about 40%, or 8 startups, are in the fintech category. Despite a bit of a slowdown in fintech funding for private companies this year compared to the ultra-hot 2021 market, the sector remains much hotter than it was in years past, accounting for nearly 21% of total venture deals as of Q2 2022. YC’s startups are no exception – only time will tell if their approach of focusing in on international companies operating in niche markets will pay off or if consolidation in the sector has already gone too far for new upstarts to see breakout success.

Founded in Israel and now with headquarters in New York, Mesh Payments is one of a growing group of startups focused on helping companies manage their spend through automation. Put simply, Mesh aims to help its clients automate, and get real-time insights about, their spend. For its part, Mesh says it saw its revenue run rate triple in the first half of 2022, since its November 2021 raise.

They also see what factors go into their credit score, including their payment history, credit utilization, the balance versus their secured versus unsecured credit accounts, the age of each of their credit accounts, ID monitoring to see if a financial institution is doing a hard check on their data, the total number of credit accounts they have, both active and inactive, and outstanding balances.

Lightspeed Venture Partners and Avenir Growth co-led Alloy’s latest financing, which included participation from existing backers Canapi Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Avid Ventures and Felicis Ventures.

Listen to an interview with the co-founder of Momo.credit, Sean Grossman. Learn about the inception of his consumer FinTech startup and how he, together with his co-founder, scaled it from 0 to 1. Subscribe to FinTech First podcast to hear more founding stories from FinTech founders.

CEO Yishai Cohen and CTO Amit Assaraf started Landa in 2020 in an effort to make real estate ownership more inclusive. Users can start investing with just $5, and buy and sell shares as well as see real-time updates on their properties from the Landa app.

The gap that Kenya’s embedded finance fintech Pezesha seeks to bridge as it expands into Nigeria, Rwanda and Francophone Africa following a $11 million pre-Series A equity-debt round led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II with participation from Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund, cFund and Cardano blockchain builder Input Output Global (IOG).

This year, Argyle announced a $55 million Series B funding round and the launch of a self-service tool so that consumers can access their employment records with ease. Argyle, which wants to help companies and institutions get access to employment records, has laid off a number of employees across all departments, journalist has learned from sources. CEO and co-founder Shmulik Fishman said he wanted to disrupt the process in which institutions buy records from third parties and instead bring user consent into the mix. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the workforce reduction to journalist, saying that it let go of 6.5% of the team, or 20 people.

Digital mortgage lender Better.com has conducted its fourth round of layoffs since December 1, 2021.

Dubai-based Zywa, a neobank for Gen Z, plans to fuel its growth in the United Arabs Emirates (U.A.E), and to kick-start its expansion to Saudi Arabia and Egypt after raising $3 million seed funding at over $30 million (110 million AED) valuation. The fintech is also adding community-based value-add services like a platform it is building within the app to enable users to apply for internships at Zywa and partner startups, as a strategy for encouraging users to start earning early. They created Zywa as a social banking app and prepaid card to make it possible for the Gen Z (between the age of 11-25 years) to receive money, manage it, and make payments. Zywa also plans to introduce a social element to its app by enabling its users to share photos or videos of their purchases, and to react to their friends’ purchases on different feeds.

The corporate spend startup launched its bill pay feature in October of 2021, building upon its corporate card business and accounting software product. If the business pays back the money within 30 days and did not use their card, Ramp won’t actually make any money off it using the bill pay feature.

Enter Deposits, a Dallas-based finance startup offering a cloud-based, plug-and-play feature to simplify the implementation of digital banking tools for companies like credit unions, community banks, insurers, retailers and brands.

Showing that the regtech industry remains robust to economic headwinds, private equity firms Centerbridge Partners and Bridgeport Partners today announced plans to acquire the publicly-traded Computer Services, Inc. (CSI), a provider of payments processing and regulatory compliance services, for $1.6 billion in an all-cash deal. Centerbridge and Bridgeport note that the deal, if approved by shareholders and regulators as they expect in Q4 2022, will net CSI shareholders a 53% premium over CSI’s closing stock price as of August 19. CSI’s board unanimously approved the plan to take the company private; post-acquisition, its stock will no longer be listed on the public market. Throughout the 1980s, CSI built a network of data centers, began selling its first PC software, and developed what it claims was one of the first online ATM systems.

LatAm FinTechs prevail in the new rounds, while larger FinTech companies go after M&A via SPACs, according to NASDAQ

Stripe has laid off some of the employees that support TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that it acquired last year. In July, Stripe went through a 409A valuation process that saw its internal valuation cut by 28%. Stripe’s new and lower internal valuation, explained Fintech hasn’t been immune from the downturn – for evidence, you need to look no further than the stock prices of Block (formerly Square) PayPal, Robinhood and Affirm.

We sat down with General Partners Angela Strange and Anish Acharya to learn more about why the pair believes that the fact that more people are working globally spells huge opportunity for fintech companies. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Uni, which is backed by General Catalyst, Elevation Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirmed in a statement to us that it is suspending card services on its products (Uni Pay 1/3rd Card and the Uni Pay 1/2 Card) and expects to roll out the change to entire customer base by Monday.

Launchpad Capital led Rocketplace seed round, which also included participation from TTV, Accomplice, Menlo Ventures and Soma Capital. But Beryl maintains that the startup’s biggest differentiator lies in the fund distribution model. Meanwhile, points out CEO Louis Beryl, customers will need appropriate disclosures and compliance, especially as regulation increases in the industry. Beryl was also a partner at both a16z and Y Combinator, and also founded Solid Energy Systems, which went public via a SPAC merger on the NYSE earlier this year.

eToro has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gatsby — a fintech startup which also aimed to go head to head against Robinhood — for $50 million in a cash and common stock deal.

Pomelo, Frenkiel’s new startup launching out of stealth today, wants to make it easier to send remittance payments and conduct international money transfer, with a credit twist.

Left Lane led Arc’s Series A financing, which also included participation from NFX, Y Combinator, Bain Capital Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Torch Capital and Atalaya, as well as founders from Wayflyer, Plaid, Column, Chargebee, Vouch and Jeeves.

The two moves put Finix squarely on Stripe’s turf, though its CEO and co-founder Richie Serna told us that Finix differs from Stripe in its focus on creating an open ecosystem. Read more.

Weekly news about Paystand, Alloy, Payday, QED Investors, Metromile, Lemonade, Wiseasy, Attentive, Robinhood, Opendoor, Savana, Lami, Bluecopa, Geopagos, Mudafy, Parafin, FinanZero, PayIt, NG.CASH, Legalpad, Weltio and others.

Kontempo, a startup offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) and interest-free installment plans to business-to-business (B2B) customers, today announced that it raised a $30 million seed round in a mix of equity ($6.5 million) and debt ($25 million).

Prior to helping co-found Geopagos, Núñez Castro spent over 14 years as VP and general manager of Amex´s GNS, LatAm division, where he managed the card business operation in Latin America, including penetration into new markets.

Users aren’t under a legal obligation to repay ZayZoon and ZayZoon won’t take action to collect payments, but nonpaying users will be limited from accessing the service in the future. ZayZoon’s platform allows small- and medium-sized businesses to implement what’s known as an earned wage access (EWA) program.

It’s been a volatile year for retail investment behemoth Robinhood. The fintech company is laying off 23% of its workforce, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The layoff comes just three months after Robinhood cut 9% of full time staff. At the time of its last layoffs in late April, \[…\]

Previ connects users who want cashback deals and ease of payment with partners that want a cheaper way to acquire customers.

Rakuten Capital said that it saw a huge market potential for Indian-based rewards business opportunities, and Twid was well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity to build and scale its business model. In parallel with Rakuten, Google’s addition is expected to help Twid expand its model of enabling customers to make purchases using their multiple reward points.

Sanchez argues that Savana has an advantage in its experience building digital systems for banks and financial institutions. One fintech that competes almost directly with Savana is London-based 10x Future Technologies, which helps larger, established banks build both next-generation services and tools to help their older services work more efficiently.

Publicly traded Lemonade has laid off about 60 employees of Metromile, the auto insurtech company it recently acquired – adding to the volatility the technology sector has seen over the past 18 months.

After assessing the current market conditions and uncertainty we’re seeing across the e-commerce sector, this was the most prudent action to take and was necessary to.

Kompliant’s platform allows customers — mostly acquirer processors, banks and sales organizations — to build credit risk programs by leveraging services such as auditing, application processing and verification, and business monitoring.

Umba, a US-based digital bank with a focus on emerging markets, has acquired a majority shareholding of Daraja, a Kenyan deposit-taking microfinance bank, for an undisclosed amount.

Indonesia's IDEAL has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Venture and Alpha JWC with participation from Living Lab Ventures and Ciputra Group

His community building had accidentally led him into the world of venture, as Salisbury ultimately became a founding member of a16z’s fintech practice alongside general partners Anish Acharya and Angela Strong before becoming a partner in 2019.

Right now, the company gets largely paid through affiliate fees and exchange of data. opts in for a suggested insurance plan Clicks into a location-based offer Answers market research or campaign measurement questions Or scans Pogo card for a discount when buying a prescription In the next iteration, Wong says, Pogo will suggest users to turn to fee-free banking alternatives, and then Pogo can make money through affiliate fees.

After living and working in the United States for almost 25 years, he moved back to Bangladesh in 2018 to digitize micro-credit, with the goal of creating a digital credit platform for micro-merchants that did not require a smartphone or digital literacy.

When Kristy Kim started TomoCredit in early 2019, she was on a mission to help international students more easily obtain credit.

While Glyman did not reveal hard revenue figures, he did point out that the company had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue before its third birthday in March.

Bloom’s seed round is the largest in Sudan, a country whose tech ecosystem can be termed passive and only recently welcomed foreign investment when Fawry backed fintech and e-commerce player Alsoug after 30 years of international sanctions on the country.

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.

On a high level, it’s no surprise that funding flowing into fintech startups was down both globally and in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2022. And it wasn’t only funding. Everything was down. New unicorn births, M&As, IPOs.

BAI Capital, GIC and GGV Capital co-led the equity portion of the deal, which also included participation from other existing and new investors.

Unlike Stripe, Klarna’s valuation was cut by its investors – which include Sequoia, Silver Lake, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the UAE’s sovereign fund Mubadala Investment Company and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments). The Journal reports that the valuation cut comes from a 409a price change, which means that Stripe hasn’t decreased the value of preferred shares sold in the last round.

To power the expansion, which will see Lightyear land in 19 new markets including the Baltics and much of Western Europe, London-based Lightyear has also raised $25 million in a series A round of funding led by U.S. venture capital firm Lightspeed, with participation from other notable backers including Virgin Group,

Plaid, the company building data transfer technologies to power fintech and digital finance products like smartphone-based wallets, today announced that it adding support for thousands of crypto exchanges to its data network.

The Japanese fintech startup said today it has raised a $20 million (2 billion JPY) Series A funding round led by Globis Capital Partners with participation from Z Venture Capital, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, and DBJ Capital.

To help users search these various money transfer options in their region and compare rates and fees, Zazuu initially launched as a chatbot in 2020, informing users of the daily remittance rates of various platforms via Facebook and Telegram groups.

On the employee side, Kadmos serves up a mobile app replete with e-wallet that holds workers’ salaries in U.S. dollars or euros, while also allowing them to send money home instantly, with predictable set fees.

Elivalat Fintech Ltd., Hupesi Solutions, Cruz Ride Auto Ltd and its director Simon Karanja Ngige, Boxtrip Travels and Tours, Bagtrip Travels Ltd. accounts, and Adguru are the entities said to have received the funds from Flutterwave, and whose accounts were also frozen.

Co-founder and CTO Henry Bradlow had previously written algorithms to power rocket ships at SpaceX, so the trio —Calvano, Francisco Enriquez and Bradlow — was determined to find a way for artificial intelligence to streamline the construction back office.

Apparently when ABG became a Bolt customer in October 2020, reported Insider, Bolt entered a deal to award the group stock warrants, which give the holder the right to buy shares at a specified price before a specified date — under certain conditions.

In product terms, Peakflo is a collection of services, per Chauhan, including accounts receivable (money in), accounts payable (money out), a payment layer and an integration layer, linking the service to accounting software and some enterprise resource planning.

In April 2022, American Express and Pymnts.com published a survey that found that about two-thirds of firms that have automated accounts receivable processes report benefiting from improved days sales outstanding (a measure of the average number of days that it takes for a company to collect payment after a sale has been made), while about half said that they achieved lower delinquency rates.

Cash App last week launched Round Ups, allowing customers to invest their spare change into a stock of their choice or bitcoin every time they use their Cash Card. Even that new figure represented both a dramatic decline from Klarna’s mid-2021 valuation of more than $45 billion and the $30 billion figure it was reported to be targeting earlier this year, as our own Alex Wilhelm noted here.

Swedish buy now, pay later giant Klarna is reportedly close to inking a new round of funding that would slash its valuation to $6.5 billion – about 7x of what the company was valued in June of 2021.

CEO Lindsay McLean started the Santa Monica, California-based company in 2015 with attorney and real estate broker Jennifer Stein, after her own home-selling experience. Enter HomeLister, a digital brokerage and real estate site that gives homeowners a way to list and sell their properties online, with support.

While Stake competes against the aforementioned Bilt, which last year raised $60 million for its loyalty program for property renters, Hobbs claims that Stake is growing at a robust pace.

April users connect their payroll, bank statements, mortgage, prior year tax return and other finance apps to the platform and then tell April about significant tax events over the past year (e.g., moving to another state).

Apti said that providing large-scale access to mid- to low-income communities in a cost-efficient way compared to their traditional channels means Mapan is able to offer better prices.

With $18 million in seed funding led by San Francisco-based Human Capital and London Giant Ventures, Tenet says its EV loan offering cuts monthly payments by $200 on average.

Today, Conversion Capital is announcing that it has raised $122 million for its third fund — more than six times the size of its previous fund — to back early-stage fintech and infrastructure startups.

At the time of that last raise, Hughes told journalist that Amount’s clients included financial institutions collectively managing nearly $2 trillion in U.S. assets and servicing more than 50 million U.S. customers.

We found that fintech startups raised $1.5 billion from June 16 to June 23 across 39 deals — compared to $1.4 billion raised across 53 deals the week prior and $1.2 billion across 59 deals 2 weeks prior.

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.

Those three executives are: Jillian White, general manager of Better’s affiliate businesses known as Better+, which consists of its title/settlement, insurance and home inspection departments; Megan Bellingham, who was senior vice president of sales and operations and John Moffatt, who served as vice president of sales.

After extending credit to thousands of customers over mobile phones since 2015, Ghana-based fintech Fido is now in search of additional growth avenues for its expansion across Africa.

Brex decision to stop serving SMB customers surprised many in the startup and fintech community. Businesses affected, he said, are mostly brick & mortar businesses such as bakeries, restaurants and small design agencies — many of whom would argue are being impacted by rising inflation and a challenging macro environment the most.

He has declined to reveal hard revenue figures, but previously told journalist Brex was still focused on growth and not yet profitable. Three months after announcing it would make a big push into software and enterprise, fintech giant Brex is apparently abandoning the very segment it started out to serve – small and medium-to-sized businesses.

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.

Many of us take prescription medication with little to no understanding of just how long it takes — or how much it costs — to get that drug to market. Conducting clinical trials of a given medication usually takes years and lots of money.

The Toronto-based company has been a leader in the realm of democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and peer-to-peer money transfers. And now it appears that Wealthsimple is an example of another company that experienced a boom during the early days of the pandemic and is now seeing a slowdown in business. It will scale back its efforts in areas such as peer-to-peer payments, tax and merchant services.

Christina Ross, Cube’s CEO and co-founder, told us she came up with the idea for the startup after working in CFO or head of finance roles at Eyeview, Criteo and Rent the Runway. And while Ross declined to reveal hard revenue figures, she said that ARR has grown five times — or 400% — in the past year, as the company has added new customers such as Acorns,

Narmi offers products including digital account opening, business digital account opening, consumer digital banking, business digital banking, and an administrator console. While New York, New York-based Narmi isn’t a bank, it provides mobile, online, and digital account banking to regional and community financial institutions.

The fintech also highlighted its efforts in bringing in two hires to chart its next growth phase: Meghan Taylor, an ex-partner at Boston Consulting Group, who is now its chief of staff and Julian Adkins, ex-Africa CFO at telecom operator Millicom, who operates as the company’s group chief financial officer.

Flip has helped over 10 million people in Indonesia as of May this year, up from more than 7 million users in December 2021, to access financial transactions, including online interbank transfers to more than 100 domestic banks, e-wallet top-ups, and international remittances, enabling users to send money from Indonesia to over 45 countries and enterprise payment transfer products.

According to Mack, Middesk allows service providers to form a picture of their customers and offer products they might need to establish, operate, and maintain their businesses.

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).

While Apple has partnered with payment providers and others on the financial side of things before in order to make Apple Pay and Wallet work, Pay Later represents the first time the company is handling the actual loans, risk management, and credit checks itself.

Orman said she pushed back on a number of product roadmap suggestion from her other two co-founders, including making it look less like Mint, a personal finance platform adorned with graphs and data and more like a wallet that can inspire people to save.

Branch, according to co-founder and CEO Steve Lekas, is the only insurance company that he is aware of that can bind insurance through an API, and the only one that can bundle auto and home insurance in a single transaction.

In the future, Salary Hero plans to add neo banking products, including at-source savings accounts, insurance products, remittances and other financial services like micro-investments and debt restructuring advice. Rakhra said that by addressing the financial needs of their workers, companies are able to improve employee satisfaction and reduce turnover in a competitive labor market. These other products will go live in 2023, while Salary Hero earned wage access and financial education features are already live. By being able to access their earned wages on demand, workers are able to better handle emergencies and unforeseen expenses, instead of being forced to borrow from lenders who charge 10% to 30% interest per month, Rahkra said.

The new functionality is only available to users in the U.S., and for security reasons, PayPal says it has implemented an additional identity verification process for users before they can transfer any crypto.

Lalji said that Ivella will focus on products to support couples at any stage of their relationship, including joint accounts, credit products and joint investment products, long-term.

Other major crypto companies have also been slowing hiring in response to a downturn in prices – Coinbase, Gemini close competitor, announced plans last month to reverse its prior headcount growth projections, and Latin American crypto exchange Bitso let go of 80 employees last week.

While saying that the calling business will continue to grow in Africa, Talk360 co-founder and managing director for Africa Dean Hiine anticipates great growth for its payment platform, which he says will also make it easy for international merchants to sell to users in Africa too.

Affirm — which was founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin — has built technology that can underwrite individual transactions, and once determining a customer is eligible offer them the option to pay on a biweekly or monthly basis. Some customers are in fact charged interest but Affirm says it doesn’t charge late fees and that there are no surprises with the amount of interest it charges. In an interview earlier this year, Libor Michalek, Affirm’s president of technology emphasized the company’s efforts to be transparent.

Finix is not coming out of nowhere. The SaaS startup — which started out in early 2020 by selling its payments tech to other businesses — raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia.

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.

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.

In response to the allegations and reports, Kuruvilla then said that Bolt has seen a 131% year over year increase in shopper accounts and a 192% year over year increase in total active merchant accounts. One-click checkout startup Bolt has laid off at least 100 employees, and counting, across go-to-market, sales and recruiting roles.

PayPal layoffs, while just now coming to the surface, were conducted around a week before the fintech confirmed that it was shuttering its San Francisco office. PayPal, which has over 30,000 employees, told staff during a recent all-hands meeting that there will be no mass layoffs, sources say.

Nowports, an automated digital freight forwarder in Latin America, has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round which values the company at $1.1 billion.

Unfortunately for Klarna employees, the company hasn’t said who will be affected by the job cuts. Cutting 10% of the company’s workforce means that around 700 people will lose their job at the fintech company.

Sources say the down round comes as MainStreet also pursues a recapitalization, in which older investors are selling their stakes at a discounted valuation with new ones entering at friendlier terms. Thus, MainStreet’s new said value could be a sign of investors needing cash, and yet another data point of tech startups experiencing valuation haircuts.

Belong, a startup that aims to address both these issues while giving renters a way to save toward home ownership, has just raised $50 million in equity and secured $30 million in debt to expand its offerings and markets it serves.

When Pedro Conrade started Brazilian digital bank Neon in 2016, he was a 23-year-old business school student who was frustrated with the service and costs associated with traditional banking in his country.

The investment marks SpotOn third raise in the past year alone and Dragoneer’s sixth time investing in the company over a three-year period. For context, SpotOn’s Series E raise at a $3.15 billion valuation was about 5x of its $625 million valuation at the time of its Series C round. It comes on the heels of a year in which the company says it saw 100% year-over-year ARR growth.

By partnering with existing financial services platforms such as Acorns, Truebill and Albert, Trellis aims to help businesses that have an audience that are already engaged, and that they are having financial conversations with, help bring insurance into the conversation.

Beyond those new offerings, in what is perhaps the most surprising new news to come out of the company today, Plaid said it is also hoping to turn new users into active customers through account funding, which will give people a way to pay, or be paid, for goods and services.

In other words, Unit touts that companies using its technology in a variety of industries — such as freelance or creator economy and personal financial management, for example — can build financial products directly into their software.

Key among these are features for managing podcast storage across devices, tools to enable annual podcast subscriptions and the newly announced Apple Podcasts Delegated Delivery system that will soon allow creators to more easily distribute their podcasts directly to Apple Podcasts from third-party hosting providers.

A trio of PayPal Ventures alumni has raised $158 million for Infinity Ventures, a new early-stage venture firm dedicated to investing in fintech startups globally. Infinity’s inaugural fund has not been previously announced until today, but to date, Infinity has backed 11 companies in the U.S., Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

The round brings the company’s valuation to $842 million, nearly doubling the $447 million it was valued at after its Series C. Egyptian fintech Paymob, which enables merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store, raised $50 million in Series B funding. The rise of digital payments has changed the nature of how people do business with each other; and open banking — a movement in banking where incumbents are finally adopting newer technology such as APIs to open their systems to modern integrations — is leading to a wave of new payment methods, all of which are hoping to become as standard as cash or paying with cards. Last week, a company called Paddle, which has built a large business out of providing the billing backend for those SaaS products, announced a large funding round of $200 million as it gears up for its own next stage of growth.

Specifically, an S-4 filing by Aurora states: The Better Founder and CEO, in his personal capacity, has agreed to enter into a side letter with SoftBank, pursuant to which he may be liable for realized losses or receive payments in certain circumstances from SoftBank in connection with the Post-Closing Convertible Notes, which could divert the resources and attention of the Better Founder and CEO from our business and have a negative impact on his personal financial situation.

Facebook has been in payments since 2009 and says people use its platforms to make payments in 160 countries and 55 currencies, including person to person, business to business, and business to consumer payments. Facebook Pay will soon be renamed Meta Pay, according to a blog post written by Meta head of fintech, Stephane Kasriel.

Altro (Perch) announced today it has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round led by Pendulum, with participation from Marcy Ventures, as well as Citi Ventures, Black Capital Fund, Concrete Rose Fund and individual investors such as Dick Parsons and Deborah Quazzo.

In 2014, Riverwood Capital and Antonio Soares — who now serves as Dock’s CEO — bought out 100% of Conductor and essentially created the company that is Dock today. The company’s client base includes fintechs, retailers, banks and technology companies that are focused on not only improving the customer experience for the currently banked population, but also on helping bring previously unbanked and underbanked consumers into the digital payments and banking systems.

Robinhood brokerage cash sweep program used to offer an interest rate of 0.5% to customers that were enrolled for its Cash Management feature, according to the company. 1% APY (annual percentage yield) may not sound like a particularly sexy return.

However, now that consumers have grown comfortable with BNPL as a concept and are increasingly using it as an alternative to credit cards, we’re seeing opportunities for new BNPL products for recurring bills, such as rent or streaming service subscriptions.

Meld’s customers bring their own third-party service providers onto the platform, and Meld is responsible for integrating each service provider onto the singular API and dashboard the customer uses. Bengani, who previously ran Square’s platform and partnerships team, said he noticed while he was onboarding developers there that they often had to spend more time building and managing third-party integrations than on developing their own products.

Based in the U.K., Yapily offers a single, unified open banking API to interact with bank accounts. Companies can leverage open banking to check the balance on a bank account, fetch the most recent transactions, but also initiate payments directly from a bank account. Like Yapily, finAPI clients can obtain account information and initiate payments using an API.

Stripe’s launch of its new Financial Connections product. The product launch in and of itself was newsworthy, yes. But what elevated it in the world of newsworthiness was that it sparked some controversy, as it is pretty much exactly what Plaid, a one-time partner of Stripe’s, does

Robinhood to let users lend out their shares in its attempt to diversify revenue On Deck cuts 25% of staff, scales back accelerator On Deck, a tech company that connects founders, laid off about 72 people this week, which amounts to about 25% of staff Over the past week, we’ve witnessed an alarming amount of layoffs across the startup ecosystem, from buzzy, big names like Cameo, On Deck and Robinhood, to B2B platforms like Workrise and Thrasio. Amazon aggregator Thrasio begins layoffs, names new CEO Thrasio’s business model is to buy up and consolidate third-party Amazon sellers, but apparently, that strategy is rife with ups and downs.

MainStreet, a startup that helps other startups uncover tax credits that was valued at $500 million last year, has laid off about 30% of its staff, according to a tweet from CEO Doug Ludlow.

Walnut works with healthcare providers so that a patient’s bill can be paid back through $100-a-month increments for 30 months, instead of one aggressive credit card swipe Many BNPL startups, Walnut included, do cash-flow underwriting, in which the company connects to users’ bank accounts to see daily income, spending patterns and savings to see if a loan will likely get repaid by the end of month.

Enduring Planet, a new fintech firm that exclusively funds climate entrepreneurs, is taking the wraps of its first product after securing $5 million in debt and equity financing. Out of the gate, Enduring Planet offers revenue-based financing to companies that bring in more than $25,000 per month.

In an interview with journalist, Neo co-founder and CEO Andrew Chau shared that he and co-founders Jeff Adamson, Chris Simair and Kris Read started Neo to challenge the Big Five banks that own some 90% of the country’s market share.

Those updates to Stripe’s ACH Debit product were a hint of the news today considering that it was launched with the ability to instantly verify bank accounts, a feature that is competitive with Plaid’s Auth product.

As long as the shares have been fully paid for by the customer, Robinhood says it will match customers with interested borrowers to take the loans and that customers will get paid once their shares are successfully placed.

He estimates that only 55% can get a life insurance product with a traditional insurance company. The company wants to make it easier to access life insurance products in Europe.

Truist — one of the nation largest financial institutions — has acquired Long Game, a 12-person fintech startup that has raised over $20 million in venture capital, executives told journalist exclusively.

But in this case, that may actually be serving as a tailwind for Point and companies like it, although Lim emphasizes that Point is not out to replace refinancings, for example. Point then values the home — often with an in-home appraisal — and updates the final offer.

In early April, Bolt announced plans to acquire crypto startup Wyre for $1.5 billion, a staggering amount for any company, but especially one in a space as mired with controversy as this one. After a week of making headlines, one-click checkout startup Bolt has issued a public response to questions about how it faring in the competitive space.

According to antitrust investigators, Apple abused its dominant position, as competitors can’t provide NFC-enabled contactless payments on the iPhone to develop other mobile wallets and compete fairly with Apple Pay.

Akshay Krishnaiah, the founder and CEO of Line, thinks he can get users onboard for his vision of a more inclusive financial network. The company also said registrations are up 100% month over month, and have grown the service from instant cash to larger checks as rapport is built.

Acknowledging that credit card issuing and loyalty programs are certainly not new, Duncan claims that Concerto’s approach is unique in that it applies technologies including machine learning to measure and predict risk.

Accern provides AI-powered apps and natural language processing (NLP) models trained to recognize, classify and extract domain-specific financial language. Accern, which uses AI to analyze online conversations around particular companies, trends and industries, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Mighty Capital alongside Tribe Capital and others.

When I met with Lydia’s co-founders Cyril Chiche and Antoine Porte, they both had read my recent article on Zenly, another popular social app designed in Paris.

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.

A lot of B2B payments tech is built on top of B2C tech, such as Stripe, that was engineered to handle consumer card transactions, according to de Souza. As such, according to de Souza, a company accounting department can waste time manually searching for payments, and then even more time trying to reconcile individual invoices.

Seattle-based Copper offers features such as personalized debit cards, access to 50,000 ATMs and support for digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Fiat Ventures General Partner Alex Harris, who was head of growth at digital bank Chime in its early days, is joining Copper’s board as part of the financing.

A developer-focused bank Column emerges from stealth today to — if Hockey’s pronouncements are to be believed — turn the fintech industry on its head. By contrast, Column, a nationally chartered bank with a direct connection to the Fed, has an in-house ledger and data model to power various fintech services.

Its acquisition of Pry is not only reflective of Brex’s new emphasis on offering strong software products, but also its continued commitment to early-stage startups — the demographic which was the company’s target customer in its own early days. Dubugras said that Brex valued the startup less on its own metrics and more on the value it believed it could generate for Brex by cross-selling into its existing customer base.

Tokio Marine, a Tokyo-headquartered insurance corporation, said Tuesday it has launched its $42 million corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, dubbed Tokio Marine Future Fund, to invest in early-stage startups around the world.

Immigrants to the United States face myriad challenges besides having to learn a new language. In many cases, they are dealing with a foreign and complex financial system, may struggle with finding adequate housing and health care and just generally feeling lost. Welcome Tech, a startup aiming to build “an operating system” for immigrant families.

What if you could buy a Peloton with pre-tax dollars? How about vitamins and supplements? Skincare products? Or even mattresses and massages? All of those may likely qualify as purchases you could make through a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) or Health Savings Account (HSA).

Digital mortgage company Better.com is gearing up for another round of layoffs, multiple sources with knowledge of internal happenings at the company have told journalist.

ransparency into money goals and boundaries is a side effect of using Braid, which is important to the founder, and, in her view, missing from the general fintech landscape right now.

With 12 million users and nearly $200 million in annual recurring revenue, expense software provider Emburse has built much of its business in the enterprise. Historically, it has competed with legacy players like Concur and Expensify and ERP players. But now Emburse is making a big push into the SMB space and going head-to-head with \[…\]

Today, decacorn Brex revealed that it is making a big push into financial software with the release of a new spend management product called Brex Empower. Brex is one of a number of companies in the corporate spend management space that has grown increasingly crowded — and competitive — in recent years.

Umba said it brings a wide range of transparent and accessible financial products to those underserved by legacy banks across Africa — only 43% of the region’s population are account holders at financial institutions. However, the new funding will allow the company to test this out as it prepares to launch in new markets, including Egypt, Ghana and Kenya, where mobile money is prominent.

Today, said Sathyanesan, Winden offers digital entrepreneurs features such as free ACH, wire and check payments and the ability to manage transactions, payments and expenses in one place. In August 2021, Winden was born as a neobank that offers deposit banking, spend management and other financial products for digital entrepreneurs.

Diane Yu, CTO of Better.com, is transitioning from her position as chief technology officer to an advisory role a day after the digital mortgage lender announced a voluntary separation program to certain employees, according to an internal memo obtained by journalist.

Notably, dozens of angel investors also put money in Truora’s latest financing round. Truora, a Colombian user authentication startup, has raised $15 million in Series A funding co-led by two Silicon Valley-based venture firms.

ImaliPay’s pilot was based on Furusa’s encounter: a buy now, pay later (BNPL) fuel product, but for two-wheeler gig platforms as the company partnered with a few fuel stations in Ibadan, Nigeria to offer this service to SafeBoda riders.

Merritt Hummer, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said she doesn’t view Fidel API as a competitor to expense management players, but rather an enabler of them. Fidel API says it has tripled its growth metrics and quadrupled its card base year-over-year since launching in 2018, according to CEO and co-founder Dev Subrata.

The credit-oriented fintech platform Liquidity Group, which funds later-stage technology companies, has announced a new raise of $775 million from private equity house Apollo and MUFG Bank. The commitments include $425 million from Apollo Funds for a credit facility to help Liquidity scale its lending activity for late-stage technology companies. Founded in 2018, Liquidity employs machine learning and real-time data to automate the full credit investment lifecycle, committing more than $1 billion in capital. It also includes $300 million from MUFG Bank (NYSE: MUFG), for a debt fund joint venture named Mars Growth Capital.

Affirm is giving job offers to the ‘vast majority’ of Fast engineers Fast posted a paltry six-figure revenue total in 2021, despite raising a $102 million Series B led by Stripe.

Like Tink, Klarna offers an open banking application programming interface (API) with Klarna Kosma. Klarna now wants to compete directly with Tink with a new business unit that has its own brand — Klarna Kosma.

Khazna plans to launch additional products before the end of the year; this product expansion and user growth is what Saleh points out when asked how Khazna stays ahead of the competition. The company, founded by Omar Saleh, Ahmed Wagueeh, Fatma El Shenawy, and Omar Salah in 2019, provides basic banking and various financial services focusing on middle and lower-income earners. In a country where 50% of its 100 million people are active smartphone users, two out of every three individuals have little or no access to formal financial services in Egypt.

Bijan Moallemi, Joe Garafalo and Brian Campbell started San Diego-based Mosaic in 2019 after meeting at Palantir Technologies, where they worked on building out that company finance organization as the company grew to 2,500 people and over $750 million in revenue. Mosaic, which aims to change the way CFOs of high-growth companies operate, has raised $25 million in a Series B round of funding led by Founders Fund.

The latest round marks the third time that a16z has put money in Cross River Bank, with the first time being in the company’s first institutional round that closed in October of 2016 — a $28 million financing which ended up closing at $30 million as others added to it.

Put even more simply, January strives to be a tech-enabled collections agency service that collects the debt on behalf of creditors in a civilized way. Their other alternatives are to outsource collections to third-party agencies or sell their accounts to entities known as debt buyers, who then place the accounts with agencies and attorneys. Brewer Lane Ventures led the company’s latest financing, which brings January’s total raised to $16 million.

Vinik’s experience in the hedge fund world has informed Equi’s data-driven approach to investment management and risk assessment; the portfolio team leverages Equi’s in-house technology to help them identify and structure deals with fund managers, Reiss said.

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.

Zepto, an Australian real-time account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments platform, said Monday it raised a $25 million AUD Series A (about $18.8 million USD) co-led by AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners. More than 100 Australian organizations, including banks, fintech companies and credit unions, use NPP (new payments platform), Australia’s open-access infrastructure for fast payment, according to the NPP website.

Ola said on Thursday evening it has reached an agreement to acquire Avail Finance, a financial services startup that serves the blue-collar workforce, as the ride-hailing giant looks to expand its financial services offerings.

The company operates with an asset light model, Rubin said, in that it doesn’t need cash to buy homes and rather uses money from when people are rolling in their equity from their homes. He was drawn to Flock’s ability to allow any landlord to roll their properties into the portfolio it has created, while still providing the former landlord with the same income stream with no immediate tax consequences A startup called Flock Homes wants to give landlords a similar ability to own shares of a portfolio that is made up of multiple properties and it just raised a $26 million Series A funding round toward that effort.

Less than seven months after closing on a $57 million Series B, fast-growing fintech Jeeves has raised $180 million in a Series C round that values the company at $2.1 billion. For example, Jeeves says that since its Series B was announced in September, it has seen its revenue climb by 900% and doubled its client base to more than 3,000 companies.

Nikhilesh Goel, co-founder and Group CEO of Validus, told journalist that Validus expects to create synergies with the loan portfolio of CitiBusiness, Citi Singapore small banking unit. Validus, a Singapore-based lending platform for small and medium-sized enterprises, is acquiring CitiBusiness’ loan portfolio for an undisclosed amount to bolster its top-line revenue and customer base and expand its growing loan book.

Earlier this month, Ramp also announced a partnership with Amazon for Business, in which customers can connect their Amazon Business account to Ramp and then anytime an employee uses one of its cards to make a purchase, Ramp automatically pulls the receipt. Notably, Ramp is college friends Glyman and Atiyeh’s second venture in the spend management industry following the sale of online price tracker Paribus to Capital One in 2016.

When asked about its B2B business, Kyash carved out its white-labeled card issuing platform to infcurion last year and is focused purely on direct channel business, Takatori said in an interview with journalist. Founded by Takatori, who previously worked in the banking and consulting industry, Kyash offers a mobile banking app that enables consumers to make online and offline payments, remittances, and ATM withdrawal services. Takatori said Kyash currently focuses on the Japanese retail market.

Bloomberg reported this afternoon that Paytm digital bank was barred from adding new customers because it violated India’s rules by allowing data to be shared with China-based entities that indirectly owned a stake in Paytm Payments Bank.

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.

But starting today, Stilt said, any fintech or digital bank that wants to offer credit building tools, revolving lines of credit or personal loans to its customers could do so using its API-powered product.

The ability to raise a relatively large seed round so soon after inception speaks to the experience of the company’s founders, which include Juan Pablo Ortega, the co-founder of on-demand delivery unicorn Rappi (which as of last July was valued at $5.25 billion) and Julián Núñez, an early Rappi employee. Yuno wants to bring to Latin American companies an easy online checkout solution that solves the pain point of managing multiple payment methods.

Last year, when the company planned to go public via a SPAC, it had projected revenue of $126 million for the year, according to its deck, as analyzed by our own Alex Wilhelm. Savings and investing app Acorns has raised $300 million in a Series F funding round that values the company at nearly $2 billion.

Branch, which aims to power faster payments to contract workers with its technology, has raised $75 million in a Series C funding round that has closed just six months after it announced its last financing round.

The mass layoffs at digital mortgage lender Better.com have reportedly started, according to employees and other sources at the company, and affected workers are finding out by seeing a severance check in their Workday account — the company payroll app.

At that time, New York-based Selfbook was valued at $125 million — so it has essentially seen a 2.4x increase in valuation from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022 and a 38x increase after it raised a $2 million seed round in April of 2021. Hotel payment software provider Selfbook has completed a $15 million extension of its Series A financing that values the company at $300 million.

And today the startup is emerging from stealth with $10.8 million in pre-seed and seed financing from Contour Venture Partners, Infinity Ventures (from the team that led PayPal Ventures), B Capital, Portage Ventures, Amex Ventures and other prominent venture funds and fintech angels, it tells journalist exclusively.

Online mortgage lender Better.com is poised to lay off roughly 50% of its staff of about 8,000 this week, sources familiar with internal happenings at the company told journalist on Monday.

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.

This time, Valar Ventures is leading the Series A with other existing investors Singular, Global Founders Capital and Red Sea Ventures putting more money in the company. In particular, Shares wants to make stock trading more accessible from a financial point of view and less daunting thanks to social features.

The Salt Lake City, Utah-based company’s API-delivered product, which focuses on payroll data, powers 70 banks, credit unions and fintech companies such as Coinbase, Dave and Propel. Atomic, a provider of payroll APIs, has raised $40 million in Series B funding just five months after announcing its Series A financing.

In the works is Zeller Financial Services, which will include credit and debit cards and expense management tools, as well as enhanced analytics through Zeller’s dashboard. Zeller’s product roadmap includes new omni-channel commerce capabilities, like the ability to accept online payments through integrations with website and e-commerce platforms.

Existing backers Accel (which led its Series A) and Point Nine Capital (which led its seed round) also participated, along with Abstract Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap, Daedalus, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Optimism co-founder and CEO Jinglan Wang, Eric Ries, founder of Long-Term Stock Exchange and Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software.

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.

Last week, the board terminated the position of Madhuri Grover, following which she tweeted damaging information about the startup’s other co-founders and questioned the integrity of Rajnish Kumar, a board member of BharatPe and who previously served as the chairman of the State Bank of India.

Leasy, a startup that offers automobile financing to ride-hailing drivers in Latin America via a subscription model, has secured $2 million in equity and $15 million in debt.

The startup also offers renters credit reporting options, so they can have their on-time rent payment reported to the credit bureaus to help boost their credit scores. Piñata wants to reward renters for making on-time payments by giving them in-app currency — dubbed Piñata Cash.

The challenges her father faced as a business owner in the construction industry always stayed in the back of her mind, so when Lin got the entrepreneurial itch, it was a natural move to help start a company that helped trade contractors better control their finances.

Finary also believes that building a new private bank also means that the most active customers should be able to own a stake in the startup. The company is also working on additional features, such as a family mode, a better way to track RSUs (or BSPCE in France) and the ability to separate personal wealth from professional wealth.

Multiple players have emerged with various solutions — from software to corporate cards — to help businesses of all types and sizes better manage their expenses and save money and time while doing it.

By purchasing Purely Capital, Pipe has now created a new media and entertainment division on its platform, giving independent distributors the opportunity to trade their revenue streams in the same way a SaaS company could.

Clearco co-founder Andrew D’Souza tells journalist that he has stepped back from his role as chief executive at the fintech company.

Groundfloor users have a wide range of reasons for using the platform, from new investors who are looking for a safer alternative to public markets to experienced investors who prefer investing through an app instead of using the broker, Dally said.

Philippines-based fintech PayMongo, which enables merchants to accept digital payments, announced today it has raised $31 million in Series B funding with an eye on regional expansion.

The latest events at the company involve the resignations of four more top executives, including Clayton Carol, the company VP of finance; Christian Wallace, head of real estate; Paul Tyger, general manager of purchase; and Stephen Rosen, head of sales.

A year ago, few knew the brand Bolt, a checkout technology company that was founded in 2014, nor its founder, Ryan Breslow, a seemingly archetypal Silicon Valley type: smart, strong-willed and a college dropout who left Stanford after only two years to start a company.

If companies are operating primarily in crypto, Deel says, they don’t have to worry about paying any of the exchange fees to convert it into, say USD, before they pay their employees.

To that end, and like the aforementioned spend management companies, Coast has created a commercial charge card designed for the businesses that operate vehicle fleets, such as trucking companies, plumbers, HVAC businesses or last-mile delivery companies.

Specifically, in addition to guaranteeing rent, Nomad has a financial product embedded in its core offering that allows property owners to tap into their future rental income by requesting up to six months of rent advance.

Genesis, which has built a low-code/no-code application platform specifically for the financial markets, announced today it has landed a $200 million investment led by Tiger Global Management.

Mundi, a financial services platform for cross-border trade, announced today it has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures.

Early-stage fintech-focused venture firm Better Tomorrow Ventures has raised $225 million for its second fund — triple the amount it raised for its debut fund that closed in September of 2020. Founded by Sheel Mohnot and Jake Gibson in November of 2019, San Francisco-based Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) has allocated $150 million to invest in startups at the pre-seed and seed stages.

Today, Funding Societies announced it has raised $144 million in an oversubscribed Series C+ equity round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from new investors like VNG Corporation, and more.

The payment option can be integrated in the payment terminals, or merchants can generate a payment link and share it with customers. Alma has a payment option that lets you buy something and pay 15 or 30 days later. No late fees.

Today, Neo.Tax is announcing that it has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Infinity Ventures with participation from Google Ventures, Acrew Capital and Fin Venture Capita.

Partnering with companies rather than providing services directly to users, she added, helps Addition create a more customized offering by leveraging data on the companies’ employees and their specific financial needs.

Peake’s background as a founder will be crucial for FVS when identifying potential investments and helping portfolio companies grow, said Ryan Falvey, FVS co-founder and managing partner.

According to him, about 87% of Thndr users invested for the first time through the platform; 40% of its users come from outside of Cairo and Alexandria — rural areas with zero access to financial institutions; and Thndr accounts for 36% of all new registrations in the local Egyptian exchanges in 2021.

Like other Southeast Asian investment apps that have attracted venture capital over the past year (a partial list includes Indonesia’s Pluang, which recently raised a $55 million follow-on to its Series B, Bibit, Ajaib, Pintu and Syfe), Infina is focused on first-time Gen Z and millennial investors.

BharatPe co-founder and managing director Ashneer Grover has asked the board for the removal of chief executive Suhail Sameer from the board in the latest of a series of remarkable turn of events at the Tiger Global-backed Indian fintech startup.

While clients interact with Numeral using a modern application programming interface (API), the startup connects directly to bank servers to upload payment files and interact with outdated information systems.

journalist has learned that Sarah Pierce, who served as executive vice president of customer experience, sales and operations, and Emanuel Santa-Donato, who was senior vice president of capital markets and growth, are no longer with the digital mortgage company.

Bold, a technology company working to enable financial access to electronic payments in Colombia, has raised $55 million in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management.

Human rights activist and Mos founder Amira Yahyaoui couldn’t afford to go to college, so when she first launched a platform to connect students to scholarships, the innovation felt full circle. It an evolution from Mos as an edtech business built to help students navigate their way through applying and attending college into a fintech that can support the same user base through all of life’s similarly complicated demands.

PayPal’s Q4 warning PayPal’s fourth quarter saw total payment volume (TPV) at the company rise to $339.5 billion, up 23% compared to the year-ago period, resulting in revenues of $6.9 billion, up 13% on a year-over-year basis.

While this is easier for customers, it has created headaches for many software, or SaaS, businesses that are not equipped with billing systems that can easily charge customers on a usage basis. Woody agrees, adding that Metronome can help companies that have built a new product that they want to get out into the market as quickly as possible.

His goal is to raise $10 million for the new fund (of which he has so far brought in $4 million), and already it has a diverse group of LPs.

Today, Yu and Yang’s new company, San Francisco-based Vesta, is announcing it has raised $30 million in Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from new investor Zigg Capital.

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.

The data could help Parthean evolve to a platform that can offer consumers financial advice when they need it most, such as budgeting tips after a spend-heavy weekend or investment advice after a big crypto moment.

But in 2021, NALA started testing international money transfers after some users expressed interest in moving money from the U.K. to East African countries (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), thus ushering the Tanzanian fintech into the remittance business.

Founders Fund Partner Matias Van Thienen said his firm had been looking for an investing and savings platform in Latin America that could offer global equities with a high-quality product and a suitable regulatory approach.

For example, one company in the space, Optimal Blue, was purchased by Black Knight for $1.8 billion in 2020 to boost its data and analytics capabilities Carmel believes Polly stands out from others in the industry in that it is helping create a fourth category in the mortgage sector — capital markets.

In his view, CaptivateIQ alleviates these pain points by taking the flexibility of spreadsheets and combining it with the scalability and performance of software technology to configure commissions plans with minimal support.

This data is analyzed to provide businesses with support ranging from tailored recommendations, reports through daily business tips, monthly business seminars and access to an on-demand business coach.

The company also has a tech hub in Spain (Furio’s home country), where about 20% of the company’s tech team is based. It also runs Creditas Store, an e-commerce platform with a payroll-deductible buy now, paylater model and Voltz, a manufacturer of electric motorcycles in Brazil (and after its strategic investment in Voltz Motors, next-generation EV motorcycles and scooters).

What sets Moss apart from its competitors is that it offers credit cards, not debit cards. And if a restaurant doesn’t accept card payments, Moss also handles cash expenses and reimbursements.

Vartana plans to use its equity funding to work on its product roadmap, which involves adding more staff to its current headcount of 17 across engineering, operations and sales.

But it’s interesting to see that Revolut is still releasing new features in the U.S. in order to build a financial super app that works across multiple markets.

On a call with journalist, QED co-founder and managing partner Nigel Morris said that adding Africa is the final jigsaw puzzle that makes QED Investors a fully global fintech-specialist firm. Before QED Investors, Ajayi worked in different roles across Africa and global fintech/tech.

Zanifu works with a number of manufacturers and distributors to extend the credit to these small businesses with retailers already sourcing products from the startup’s partners qualifying for the financing.

Since the Philippines’ payment sector is fragmented, customers can pay back their BNPL loans a variety of ways, including digital wallets, bank transfers, direct debit, linking their bank account or over-the-counter payments in physical stores like 7-Eleven.

Spendesk customers can order physical cards for employees, team members can use the platform to pay outstanding invoices, file expense reports, manage budgets and generate spending reports.

Today, the startup has also partnered with Standard Bank, headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa and with a presence in 20 countries across the continent, to offer financial services to millions of workers (like motorcycle taxi operators) in the informal sector through the startup’s proprietary digital loan origination system.

So far, VCs have been a strong customer acquisition channel for Arc, noted Lombardo, who pointed to the fact that Arc’s largest partnership today is with Y Combinator, which is promoting Arc across its portfolio of thousands of software companies.

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.

As its earlier customers have grown and matured, Brex is now adapting to also serve mid-market to larger businesses which have different financial needs as they grow. In terms of customers, Brex continues to serve startups or e-commerce companies that might be smaller businesses but with higher growth.

KoinWorks was originally created to help SMEs, which are often turned away by traditional financial institutions, get access to working capital. Over the last three years, Indonesian fintechs focused on SMEs have grown to include other neobanks and startups that started out as accounting software but are expanding to include working capital loans and other financial services.

While there are still a lot of SMEs that are not using Qonto in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, Qonto also plans to enter new market in 2023.

But Bankaya, a Mexico City-based financial services startup, is attributing its early traction on the opposite model — going after target customers in person.

A majority of Petal members had thin or no credit history when they first applied for a Petal card, and more than 40% of new members approved for a Petal card in 2021 were first denied credit by a major bank, the company said.

For example, these included four new payments products — Direct, for account-to-account bank transfers; Disburse for remittances directly from accounts; Pay, a no-code solution for micro-businesses to collect payments; and for enterprise customers, IPG, a platform created for large financial institutions to collect payments on behalf of merchants.

The continent is already a global leader in mobile money adoption, accounting for the bulk of the mobile money transactions made in 2020 — a year that saw the number of mobile money accounts rise by 43%. For instance, M-Pesa, a mobile money service by East Africa’s biggest telco, Safaricom, does not require internet connectivity for its customers to send and receive money, as well as to pay utility bills — the wallet turns subscribers’ phone numbers into a sort of proxy for bank accounts.

Ribbit Capital, a venture firm best known for its fintech investments, has raised $1.15 billion in new capital in what appears to be a close of its seventh fund, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).