FinTech news in investment category

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.

Penfold, a digital pensions platform, has closed a £7 million ($8.49 million) Series A funding round led by Bridford Group, an investment group. Also participating in the round was Jeremy Coller, chief investment officer and chairman of Coller Capital. Penfold also raised additional funding via a crowdfund amongst its customer base. The cash will be used to expand Penfold workplace pension division.

Two firms stuck out in recent days, including Urban Innovation Fund, which closed with commitments of $100 million for its Fund III and $20 million Opportunity Fund, and VMG Catalyst‘s $400 million Fund II.

Fundrise manages over $2.8 billion worth of real estate equity on behalf of the 300,000 active investors on its platform today, and Miller says the company is growing fast enough that he expects it to climb to a top-ten spot by size in private real estate within the next two years.

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

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

The 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.

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

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

This capital raise pushes the Palo Alto-based fund toward the company of larger firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which closed a $2.2 billion crypto fund this past June, and crypto VC Paradigm, which debuted a $2.5 billion fund in November.

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

They differ in the type and class of securities they offer; for instance, Bamboo gives access to U.S. stocks, ETFs and ADRs, while Chaka deals with stocks and ETFs trading on local and foreign capital markets, but all have collectively been subjected to regulatory issues at home.

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).

Tribevest plans to use some of the proceeds from its seed round to launch formal partnerships with investment platforms similar to Roofstock, which will allow users on those platforms to make investments directly through their Tribevest account at checkout, Smith said, though he declined to name any specific platforms the company plans to partner with.

As Hunters co-founder and CEO Uri May told us, since its Series B round, the team doubled down on helping enterprises replace traditional Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) solutions with its own tools.

KP20 is an $800 million venture fund focused on early-stage investments in enterprise, consumer, hardtech, fintech and healthcare companies, while Select2 is a $1 billion fund — the most the firm has raised at once — that extends its core investment strategy to focus on high inflection investments across those same five areas.