FinTech news in funding 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.

Perhaps persuaded by Slash’s 20,000-person-strong customer base, NEA, Menlo Ventures, Connect Ventures, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Global Founders Capital and angel investors poured $19 million into Slash’s Series A and seed rounds.

LayerZero Labs, a web3 messaging protocol, has closed a $120 million Series B round, raising its valuation to $3 billion from $1 billion, the company said on Tuesday.

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.

OP3N’s chat-based product, Superapp, aims to bridge the gap between Web 2.0 and web3 through implementing blockchain and decentralized technologies into Web 2.0-friendly interfaces. So going forward, Ma realized OP3N has to bridge the traditional market into web3 in a way that’s more understandable.

Tensor, a Solana-centric NFT trading platform, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Placeholder, the team exclusively shared with journalist. Solana is the third largest blockchain for NFTs by sales volume with over $3.7 billion in sales all-time, according to data on NFT aggregator CryptoSlam.

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

Over a 10-year horizon, the idea for a total market for crypto assets will look very different, Diamond said. The biggest difference between this index product and traditional equity indices is the exposure to crypto assets, Diamond noted. Last month, the startup launched its first product, the Alongside Crypto Market Index ($AMKT), which gives people broad exposure to the entire crypto asset market through a single token. In the future, Alongside will consider launching different products centered around DeFi as a category or layer-2 blockchains as a category, Diamond said.

The round included 70 participants, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital and Finality Capital, as well as angel investors like AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant.

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.

Sesame Labs, a web3 marketing platform, raised a $4.5 million seed round co-led by Wing Venture Capital and Patron, co-founders Vinay Jain and Aman Jain exclusively told journalist. Additional investors include Samsung, DoubleJump, Forte, Moonfire, Twin Ventures and angel investors like Balaji Srinivasan, chief technology officer at Coinbase and founder of Earn; Robin Chan, co-founder of Fractal; and Ryan Spoon, chief marketing officer at Sorare. A lot of classic Web 2.0 tools like Facebook ads or Twitter ads aren’t successful in web3 because they don’t fully understand on-chain behavior, Vinay noted. In the long term, the co-founders plan to focus on defining what web3 ads look like and build the product that powers it so applications can connect with users in a more innovative way.

Passthrough competes directly with firms like Anduin and Plus Subscribe, which offer a suite of investment fund services including customer relationship management systems, investor portals and data storage. According to Flannery, Passthrough has processed billions of dollars in investments for more than 12,000 unique investors and over 250 customers, including $50 million venture firms and $100 billion dollar-plus global asset managers. Our goal is that no matter how investors invest into a venture fund, private equity fund, or any other alternative asset, Passthrough will be the one powering it. Flannery says that the round — which values Passthrough at $50 million — will be put toward product R&D, marketing and scaling Passthrough’s core offering.

Some major ZK-rollup blockchains that exist today include Polygon, zkSync and StarkWare’s StarkNet platform, which all aim to increase scalability and security for developers off-chain through higher speeds and lower fees before combining and submitting them to Ethereum. Its SDK wants to help Rust (and eventually C++) developers to use ZK technology across any blockchain without having to be experts in cryptography, both the co-founders said. A rollup is a blockchain that gets security from another blockchain, so it’s a way to add functionality to an existing chain without sacrificing security, Evans said. The capital will be used to build its SDK and hire protocol engineers and researchers with expertise in blockchains and their frameworks, Özer said.

Hypernative, a crypto security-focused startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding as it emerges from stealth, co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie exclusively told journalist. The fourth quarter in 2022 saw the most, with $1.62 billion in total losses across 55 incidents, accounting for almost half of the total losses in the year, the report showed. Its ideal client base ranges from asset managers, hedge funds, traders and market makers interacting with crypto to blockchains and protocols, he added. Even though crypto markets may be down, there’s still billions of dollars invested in the space, which makes it a target for attacks by those looking to make (and take) money quickly.

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.

Its new ecosystem fund is backed by previous investors like Pantera and Jump as well as other web3 players, including Kraken Ventures, Kucoin Ventures, Delphi Labs, Flow Traders, Gate Labs and IDG Capital. Injective, a layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million fund ecosystem initiative, the platform CEO and co-founder, Eric Chen, told journalist. The group aims to support projects building on Injective or Cosmos blockchains in the interoperability, DeFi, trading, proof-of-stake infrastructure and scalability solutions sectors, it said. In the current market, there’s a lot of quality projects looking for backing but having more difficulty reaching investors, Chen noted.

QuickNode, a blockchain deployment platform, has raised $60 million in a Series B round for an $800 million valuation, the company CEO and co-founder, Alex Nabutovsky, told journalist. While the capital will focus on expansion, the company also wants to use the funding for growing blockchain adoption, Nabutovsky said. QuickNode was founded in 2017 and aimed to bring Web 2.0 infrastructure to web3, but snowballed over time, Nabutovsky said. In total, the firm has raised more than $105 million, Nabutovsky said.

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.

The $1 billion vehicle, Venom Ventures Fund (VVF), is a blockchain-agnostic fund that will invest in pre-seed to Series A rounds for web3 protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) that focus on trends like payments, asset management, DeFi, banking services and GameFi. The fund leadership team includes Peter Knez, ex-CIO of BlackRock and former global CIO for fixed income at Barclays Global Investors, and Mustafa Kheriba, a board member for multiple family offices and long-term investment professional in the Middle East and North African regions. Venom Foundation, a layer-1 blockchain licensed and regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and investment manager Iceberg Capital have partnered to launch a $1 billion venture fund, the two firms announced on Wednesday. In general, the VVF team has experience growing both web3 funds and traditional funds as well as experience in providing growth capital for both startups and scaleups.

Some marketplaces aren’t very social, like OpenSea or Magic Eden, and collectible platforms like Sorare and NBA Top Shot aren’t social media-focused, Sideman said. Revel’s marketplace allows users to create NFTs for their followers, friends or community and also allows people to own editions of the media they like and follow, Sideman said. The capital will be used to expand Revel’s web3 interoperability, generative and collaborative AI functionality, and social features, Sideman said. Instagram is known as a social media platform while Robinhood is known as an investing and trading platform.

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.

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.

One of the most common attacks Yakoa sees is people making copies of NFTs and claiming them as their own work, Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of the startup, said. The funding round was led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital, and Brevan Howard Digital with participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB, as well as angel investors. Yakoa provides tools and an indexer that detects copies or infringement probabilities on original NFTs, ranging from direct forgery to partial or stylistic forgery, which will then notify platforms, brands or creators of these fraudulent activities. Yakoa, an NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to build tools to fight intellectual property fraud in web3, the company exclusively told journalist.

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.

Facing the headwinds, rather than pull out of BNPL altogether, investors appear to be shifting bets to what they perceive as a safer subcategory of BNPL: business-to-business (B2B) BNPL. The beneficiaries are startups like OatFi, which today emerged from stealth with $8 million in new equity and $50 million in debt for its platform that provides working capital infrastructure for B2B payments platforms.

Nibiru, a new crypto derivatives protocol co-founded by Tribe Capital GP Arjun Sethi, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding at a valuation of $100 million, two sources familiar with the matter told journalist. Sethi co-founded the startups with four industry veterans — including Sankha Banerjee, formerly with Credence Capital and Binance; and Boris Revsin, who co-founded Republic Capital. Currently in private testnet, Nibiru decentralized protocol unifies derivatives trading, spot trading, staking and bonded liquidity, and aims to serve users across over 40 blockchains, it says on the website. Nibiru has attracted nearly two dozen contributors from firms including Meta, Reddit, JP Morgan and Yahoo, an investor deck obtained by journalist showed.

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.

Kuila said PhonePe never held any stake in Zopper, and the startup, which counts Tiger Global among its backers, continues to be supported by its early backers and new investors. Zopper currently has presence in over 1,200 Indian cities and has partnered with over 150 players in the industry, including retail group Amazon, ride-hailing startup Ola, retail chain Croma, phonemaker Xiaomi, Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, and Equitas Small Finance Bank. He said Zopper is initially aiming to first reach nearly $1 billion in revenue, and over the course of about five years it will file for an initial public offering. That business, an API platform for insurance infrastructure, said on Tuesday it has raised $75 million in new funding.

These will likely become more acute as customers begin to use BNPL for routine expenses, the agency said — the CFPB found that BNPL customers are increasingly paying for purchases like groceries and gas, spurred by macroeconomic pressures including inflation.

Spectral, a credit risk assessment infrastructure web3 startup, has raised $23 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Social Capital, the company co-founder and CEO Sishir Varghese exclusively told journalist. The startup built an on-chain equivalent to a traditional FICO score, called the Multi-Asset Credit Risk Oracle (MACRO) Score, which allows users to check their on-chain scores through its platform. DeFi doesn’t have credit risk infrastructure, though, Varghese noted. The long-term vision for Spectral is to make credit scoring a publicly accessible network, Varghese said.

Mural, a crypto firm focused on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) infrastructure, has raised $5.6 million in seed funding, the company co-founders Sinclair Toffa and Kevin Alvarez-Fung exclusively told journalist. The company is rolling out a beta for its fintech-focused platform to help brands deploy DAO treasury funds ranging from $50 to $100 million in size, Alvarez-Fung shared. The funds will be used to bring on new talent and work with brands globally that want to create and use DAOs, Alvarez-Fung said. Toffa and Alvarez-Fung said one of the biggest disconnects they saw in the DAO space was between treasuries and communities.

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

Tiger Global has led a new funding round in Jar, the Indian fintech that is helping millions of Indians save small amounts to invest in digital gold as the startup gears up to launch a host of new offerings including insurance, mutual funds and lending. On its eponymous app, the startup allows users to choose from different savings options such as roundups — where the nearest round number after a transaction gets saved automatically, as well as setting recurring savings amounts and performing one-time execution, explained Misbah Ashraf, co-founder of Jar. The funding values the one-year-old startup at over $300 million, it said, and saw participation from Folius Ventures, Panthera Capital, Prophetic Ventures, Yes VC, WealthFront founder Adam Nash and Founders Fund principal Zachary Hargreaves as well as early backers Arkam Ventures, Rocketship.vc and WEH. Jar, which is also looking to hire another 50 people, is developing and testing secured and unsecured lending, mutual funds, fixed deposits, peer-to-peer loans and insurance, he said.

LongHash Ventures, a web3-focused investment firm and accelerator, has launched its second fund for $100 million and its new accelerator LongHashX

The platform provides infrastructure for both emerging creators and enterprises to store, manage and build more functionality into their NFTs, Mike Duboe, partner at Greylock.

HR workers can use the platform to open employer and tax accounts automatically — Mosey shows the requirements in each location across payroll, registration and taxes.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Blockchain ecosystem Topl has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round to help companies track and monetize social impact initiatives.

As capital continues to enter the crypto space, Tribe Capital has raised $25 million from outside investors and has launched its incubator program, Tribe Crypto Labs, its CEO Arjun Sethi.

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.

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.

As a result of the startup’s recent growth and a recent partnership with international financial services provider Allianz, Coalition tells journalist that for the first time since its founding in 2017, it’s planning to offer its cyber insurance policies in the U.K. However, Motta wouldn’t be pressed on whether this will be the company’s last raise before Coalition plots its exit, despite telling journalist back in September that its Series E raise could be its final funding round before the startup prepares to go public. Coalition, a San Francisco-based startup that combines cyber insurance and proactive cybersecurity tools, is preparing to expand outside of the U.S. for the first time following a mega $250 million Series F investment that takes its valuation to $5 billion. The investment, backed by Allianz X, Valor Equity Partners and Kinetic Partners, comes less than a year after the company $205 million Series E raise in September, which valued the company at $3.5 billion.

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.

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).

Ozark less-than-satisfactory experience with existing financial compliance software led him and Madhu G. Nadig to co-launch Flagright. Ozkan is the founder of Flagright, a startup that aims to prevent financial crime, like money laundering or terrorist financing, with an API-first product.

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.

And last November, Metropolis announced a partnership with Uber, Uber Park, which allows Uber riders to use the Uber app to access locations within the Metropolis network. Metropolis, a startup building payment infrastructure for parking facilities, today announced that it raised $167 million in a Series B round co-led by 3L Capital and Assembly Ventures.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of Work Bank, plans to make an equity investment of up to €25 million ($26.43) into the Partech Africa Fund II (PAF II) by the Paris-based VC firm Partech.

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.

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.

Sanlo, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that offers small to medium-sized game and app companies access to tools to manage their finances and capital to fuel their growth, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Konvoy.

Zhang said she has noticed a growing interest of funds coming into the crypto space or new funds launching to invest in crypto after they saw the potentials of blockchain technology and crypto ecosystem.

Larsen said the situation with Hannum didn’t affect investors’ attitude towards the funding round, and that ZenLedger had already secured ParaFi as a lead investor before Hannum’s misdeeds were made public.

As part of the product capabilities around workflow, Zaparde said that Zip provides a no-code interface for building approval workflows within the product and has specifically focused its workflow capabilities on solving the intake-to-procure problem.

The round brings Fashinza’s total raised to $135 million, which Gupta says is being used to refine the company’s supply chain technology and expand into new markets, including raw materials procurement. In an endorsement of Fashinza’s approach to supply chain management, the company today announced that it raised $100 million in Series B funding ($60 million in equity and $40 million in debt).

The raise includes strategic investors such as Carta, Circle Ventures, OpenSea and Uniswap Labs’ new venture arm, as well as institutional funds-of-funds, nonprofits and web3 talent networks.

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.

Ondo is primarily focused on building many of the functions typically associated with the middle and back office of an investment bank on-chain, Allman explained, noting that it does not currently have plans to directly offer advisory services to DAOs or crypto companies as a traditional investment bank might.

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.

Using EvolutionIQ, Vykruta claims that a claims adjuster, who may have hundreds of cases active at a time, can better understand short-term disability, long-term disability, workers comp and property and casualty claims.

The NFT market was worth $41 billion at the end of last year — nearly as large as the conventional art market by some estimates — and it’s expected to nearly double in size by the end of 2022, according to a report released this week by blockchain analytics firm Nansen.

The startup, founded by a former Palantir engineer and a Freddie Mac exec, is taking a data-integration focused approach inspired by the data giant and applying it to the real estate capital markets, its co-founder and CEO Charles McKinney

Demonstrating that there a robust market for contract management solutions, LinkSquares, a company developing intelligent software that helps brands maintain and ink new contracts, today announced that it raised $100 million in Series C financing led by G Squared.

Another relatively new company delivering data analytics to retailers is Black Crow AI, which today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Imaginary Ventures.

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.

The company has built on top of many of its virtual properties — for example, it launched a retail store concept in Decentraland two weeks ago, which it plans to expand into other metaverse platforms, Yorio said.

GoFundMe doesn’t charge a platform fee from fundraisers (aside from standard transaction fees), but when people donate to a campaign, they can add an optional tip that helps keep GoFundMe running. The Public Benefit Corporation employs a team of 200 and will become a subsidiary of GoFundMe, operating as a separate entity under GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan leadership. GoFundMe announced today that it will acquire Classy, a nonprofit fundraising software company. The company said that $5 billion was raised on GoFundMe and Classy combined in 2021.