FinTech news in Index Ventures category

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.

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.

Topi essentially brings together the various components that a seller might need to offer hardware subscriptions, including insurance, logistics, and refinancing providers, so that merchants can easily build rentals into their existing online channels using Topi’s APIs. Pallua previously worked as a strategy and business development manager at Apple in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she led a team tasked with exploring the feasibility of hardware subscriptions — Apple has yet to launch such a service, but reports continue to surface that the Cupertino company is still looking to bolster its recurring revenue via such subscriptions. Hardware as a service At its most basic level, Topi is selling a hardware-as-a-service business model, allowing merchants to rent out their equipment such as smartphones, printers, PC monitors, coffee machines, robotic arms, or whatever industry-specific machinery in which they specialize. At the time, Topi was somewhat vague in terms of what its actual product would be, but the company today announced its first product in partnership with German electronics retailer Gravis, and unveiled a fresh $45 million in equity and debt financing.

The ambition over time is to be able to handle all of the data you would need to apply for something like an apartment and remove all of the friction involved in the current paper-based systems most companies are still using, while allowing users to share their Footprint data with any trusted partners.

The equity portion was led by Index Ventures and included new investors like Distributed Ventures and its anchor limited partner NFP, HSCM Bermuda, XYZ Ventures and a group of strategic angel investors. The company signed its first customer last July, and Ascend is now in all 50 states and working with customers like Vouch, Cowbell, Newfront, Boost Insurance, NFP, LuckyTruck, Rogue Risk, Portal Insurance and Riskwell. The new financing follows a $5.5 million seed round announced last September to give the company $39 million in total equity funding raised to date. Today, the company announced $30 million in Series A funding along with $250 million in lending to finance insurance premium loans by Hudson Structured Capital Management (HSCM Bermuda).