FinTech news in Mergers and Acquisitions category

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.

The move to terminate the deal has come as a surprise to many direct stakeholders, including BillDesk founders and many of its investors, people familiar with the situation said, who requested anonymity commenting on the failure of India’s biggest payments deal. Prosus indeed now believes the payments market in India has shown cracks in recent quarters and did not wish to go forward with honoring last year’s arrangement, two people familiar with the matter told journalist. The deal would have allowed Prosus, which already owns fast-growing PayU, to dominate the market of payments processing in India. Prosus shares remained largely unchanged on the announcement Monday, indicating that investors don’t think not having BillDesk will materially hurt Prosus.

The insurtech market has been through a rough time this past year, so we reached out to eight active investors in the space to get a read on what been cooking as the markets aggressively recalibrated what an insurtech startup is worth. When insurtech company Metromile went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in February last year, it was valued at over $1 billion. The bulk of the buyers, however, would likely be companies involved in insurance themselves — either insurtech companies acquiring some of their peers or legacy players. As the markets turned early this year, insurtech left most generalist investors’ playbooks almost as fast as Metromile and its peers’ plummeting valuations.

Billtrust, a company developing a platform to automate the invoice-to-cash process, today announced that it agreed to be acquired by EQT, the Sweden-based private equity firm, for $1.7 billion in an all-cash deal. It quickly grew to offer software-as-a-service (SaaS) products to manage billing for companies, including electronic billing and payments for consumer and business billing services. Approved by Billtrust board of directors, the transaction is expected to close in Q1 2023 subject to the green light from Billtrust’s shareholders and regulators. Prior to going public through a SPAC merger in 2020, Billtrust made nine acquisitions — most recently of Order2Cash, a cash processes management platform — and raised over $100 million in venture capital.

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.

Galaxy Digital said Monday it has terminated the $1.2 billion proposed acquisition of crypto custodian BitGo, a high-profile deal they announced in May last year, after the San Francisco-based startup failed to provide its audited financial statements for the year 2021. BitGo’s alleged failure to provide the financial statements by July 31 violated the terms the two firms had agreed upon last year, Galaxy Digital said in a public statement, adding that the termination of the deal won’t incur the company any fee. BitGo, which counts Galaxy Digital, Goldman Sachs, Valor Equity Partners, Craft Ventures, DRW and Redpoint Ventures among its backers, ended last year with over $64 billion in assets in custody, it said. The BitGo purchase was positioned to help Galaxy Digital broaden its offerings for institutional investors by adding services such as investment banking, prime lending and tax services.

The acquisition comes a month after eBay launched its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf. This is the start of a new chapter in the KnownOrigin story and we couldn’t choose a better time to focus on building and innovating with the team at eBay.

At the Permissionless conference in West Palm Beach this week, conversations around crypto M&A were heating up as market players discussed this trend growing at the protocol level for DeFi.