FinTech news in money category
It is a digital wallet and password manager for financial services and banking apps, but Soffio calls it a financial digital passport, which helps with user identification, making the task less cumbersome for both consumers and financial services. Soffio said Portabl chose Harlem Capital to lead the round after a call he’ll never forget: Yenkalov, a Ukrainian citizen, was trapped in the country as the war with Russia broke out in the middle of a fundraising call with the firm. Yenkalov noted the emergence of decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge proofs, saying that the industry is closer than ever to enabling financial organizations to benefit from consumers owning and sharing their own data.
Northzone raised half a billion round in Europe, while LatAm VCs raising their biggest funds yet
The company numbers are small compared to other layoffs that have taken place within Africa’s tech ecosystem over the past few months, especially among startups that have raised vast sums of venture capital within the last year or two; for instance, Swvl laid off 400; Wave, approximately 300; 54gene, 95; and Vezeeta, 50. Meanwhile, it was just last August that the digital bank, which provides zero to minimal fees on cards, account maintenance and transfers and is one of Africa’s soonicorns, raised $55 million — money that it planned to use to not only double down on new services for Nigeria but also to prepare its launch into more countries on the continent like Ghana and Uganda — in a Series B round that saw it valued at $500 million. As Kuda positions itself for pan-African and international expansion amidst an uncertain venture capital environment, it depicts the recent cut in its workforce as part of strategic steps for sustainable growth. When Kuda held a town hall meeting last month, cutting down seemingly redundant roles and dismissing nonperforming staff to reduce costs and extending runway were topics of conversation in light of current macroeconomic trends, according to sources.
The new product has been created in partnership with National Philanthropic Trust (NPT) and Vanguard Charitable and allows Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) sponsors, community foundations and other grantmakers to move their donations electronically through PayPal’s platform. The company additionally notes it has entered into a commercial arrangement with grantmakers, like National Philanthropic Trust and Vanguard Charitable, to enable them to provide this new solution to their charitable communities. Back in 2016, for instance, PayPal added a new button inside its mobile app to connect users to its thousands of PayPal Giving Fund certified charities, which previously were only available online. In addition to moving money quickly, the system includes an online Grant Payments dashboard available to grantmakers and charities alike where they can view all the grant details, including the donor information, which can be exported to help simplify record keeping.
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.
An unknown actor had drained funds from 7,767 wallets on the Solana network as of 5am UTC on Wednesday, Solana’s Status Twitter account said. Solana spokesperson Chris Kraeuter declined to answer our questions, but referred us to Solana’s Status Twitter account.
Given two of the primary hardware wallets, Ledger and Trezor, have roughly 5 million users, there would appear to be plenty of room for growth, since that there are at least 295 million crypto holders who may decide to add hardware wallets to their portfolio.
Specifically, the SEC framed the following assets as securities: Power Ledger’s POWR token, Flexa’s AMP token, Rally’s RLY token, DerivaDEX’s DDX token, XY Labs’ XYO token, Rari Capital’s RGT token, Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange’s LCX token, DFX Finance’s DFX token and Kromatika Finance’s KROM token.
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.
The new fund will focus on a handful of areas in the crypto ecosystem, including web3 infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs) tooling, and new business models to collaborate on intellectual property, to name a few.
It’s a bold move, and one of the reasons why we’re excited to announce that Solana’s co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, will join for a fireside conversation on stage on October 18-20 in San Francisco.
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.
At a time when U.S. venture dollars are slowing down, CIBC Innovation Banking is announcing $1.5 billion in growth capital commitments, dubbed “Unicorn Fuel,” to focus on later-stage companies across software, life sciences, healthcare and clean tech industries.
Crypto exchange FTX is open to partnering with Robinhood Markets, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said in a statement.
And when you consider all of the elements that go into buying and selling goods and services, there are a lot of areas left for SumUp to tackle — big data analytics, more tools to build, manage and optimize, online sales experiences for its customers, more technology to use to improve how items are sold in physical commerce experiences and so on — all areas that SumUp can approach either through building its own technology, or indeed through more M&A. The solution for a company like SumUp — with the bread and butter of its business, point of sale payments, fundamentally a part of that in-person commerce experience — has been to diversify and double down on a wider array of services for its small business retailers customers. Nevertheless, turning that statistic around, POS payments still represents the bulk of the company’s revenues, so 60% growth is not just a testament to SumUp being able to grow that business in the last two years, but also the fact that in-person and point-of-sale payments remained active areas for transactions. To that end, it has used significant chunks of the debt it’s raised to date for acquisitions and to build out more services beyond POS payments, in areas like business banking (the basic version of which it throws in as a freebie), online payments and business services around both.
The company is working to streamline operations at other fintech startups, specifically through its reconciliation software that those companies can use to help ensure they’re working with accurate and precise data even when it comes from different places, said co-founder and CEO Kyle Maloney.
Despite the rising interest among Asia’s investors, most wealth management firms in the region do not yet offer clients a digital assets proposition — and two-thirds of firms currently have no plans to do so, according to Accenture.
Coinbase announced today that it will extend its hiring freeze and revoke accepted offers from some candidates who haven’t started their roles yet. The third-largest crypto exchange by volume, Coinbase began to slow hiring two weeks ago, but this move is more drastic.
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.
When people have little or no confidence in the financial system, or they don’t know certain financial services that meet their needs exist or they don’t have formal identification documents to seek these services, achieving optimal financial inclusion can prove herculean.
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.
The exchange says it will not receive payment for order flow (PFOF), a method for order fulfillment Robinhood became notorious for that involves the exchange receiving payment from market makers for directing orders their way.
African payments company Interswitch has secured a $110 million joint investment from LeapFrog Investments and Tana Africa Capital to scale its digital payment services across the continent, the two private investment firms said in a statement Wednesday. Alongside existing investors, LeapFrog and Tana plan to work with management to continue to drive Interswitch’s pan-African strategy.
The depegging of UST is forcing LFG to liquidate reserves from both LUNA and bitcoin in order to correct the pegging of UST to $1, Franzen said. If Terraform Labs is selling its bitcoin en masse into a market that’s already selling aggressively, it wouldn’t offer peg support, Jack Melnick, a token researcher at The TIE.
The margins might be thin on any digital payment — one reason why even a company that looks like it’s growing and doing a lot of business might still fail: The numbers need to be huge to work out in its profitable favor — but this is why so many payments companies work on vast scale, and why building in a number of extra valued-added services in hopes of them getting picked up by customers (and customers’ customers), as Stripe is doing here, is smart business, one way that it hopes to sustain itself for the long (and likely public) haul. Stripe has been making a number of acquisitions to bring in extra functionality into its platform to close up some of the gaps — for example almost exactly a year ago it acquired TaxJar to help automatically calculate sales tax and provide related tools to its customers — but it looks like Financial Connections was built in-house, but powered by MX and Finicity (as pointed out by Mary Ann here). Stripe’s selling point for these tools, beyond a more seamless integration with its other products, is that it helps its customers make more transactions. Details like these can in turn be used to help underwrite risk for loans; to track spending patterns and automatically pay bills; and more — in other words, financial data that’s useful or necessary to run financial transactions over other Stripe services like Stripe Connect, ACH payments or Stripe Capital-powered loans. Just yesterday, I wrote about an interesting startup called Kevin (okay, kevin.) that’s building a whole new set of payment rails and APIs for account-to-account payments that link straight into bank accounts, bypassing card rails and legacy account-to-account payment methods that are harder to implement.
Sienna is among several other blockchain startups trying to prevent “front-running”, where transactions on Ethereum can be preempted by someone else simply by them paying a higher transaction fee — just like trumping a trade on the stock market by paying a higher fee to a broker.
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.
Union54 can reach an agreement with participating central banks and issue its own domestic and continental debit card, it can shorten settlement time and integrate more local payments native to the region. Mlambo also added that through his and a few colleagues’ work via the African Renaissance Conference, Union54 has gotten in touch with three central banks keen to explore how settlement agreements would work with a new card scheme.
Since HacWare’s Battlefield appearance in 2020, held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricks said the company paused its seed-round fundraise, reinvested its revenues back into the company and re-focused on its product.
New Era raised $60 million for its first fund, where the limited partner makeup was mostly high-net-worth individuals, family offices and founders of large private equity and hedge funds in the U.S. and large U.S. corporations interested in investing in the Israeli ecosystem. The firm raised $140 million for its second fund, and half of the LPs are U.S. and Israeli institutions.
Island, a Dallas-based startup that built a secure browser for the enterprise, has raised $115 million in a Series B round, valuing the company at $1.3 billion just weeks after emerging from stealth with $100 million in initial funding.
The press release lays out seven major goals of the executive order with added detail: Protect U.S. Consumers, Investors, and Businesses Protect U.S. and Global Financial Stability and Mitigate Systemic Risk Mitigate the Illicit Finance and National Security Risks Posed by the Illicit Use of Digital Assets Promote U.S. Leadership in Technology and Economic Competitiveness to Reinforce U.S. Leadership in the Global Financial System Promote Equitable Access to Safe and Affordable Financial Services Support Technological Advances and Ensure Responsible Development and Use of Digital Assets Explore a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) For those in the crypto sector concerned about aggressive government intervention, the order language seems to signal that the Biden White House is uninterested in sweeping near-term reforms and is instead merely focused on ensuring that agencies are on the same page in researching and observing the national security implications of the crypto industry.
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.
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.
While Crypto.com is the world’s fourth-largest crypto exchange, it has been pushing hard into U.S. markets in recent months, with stunts including viral advertisements featuring actor Matt Damon and a $700 million purchase of the naming rights to the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers Arena.
This noticeable shift of influence toward ultra-high-net-worth individuals and firms among bitcoin and other crypto circles goes against the very ethos that the Bitcoin white paper was based upon when it described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
The firm ballooning valuation, which surged from a $1.5 billion valuation it was given just six months ago by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, is reflective of their own volume growth but also that of other flagship NFT firms including Dapper Labs, which raised at a $7.6 billion valuation last year. The NFT space saw plenty of action in 2021, but OpenSea realizing this valuation will rely on its continued success and its ability to entice newbies into the burgeoning world of crypto collectibles.