FinTech news in Private Equity category

Its customers are asset managers looking to offer these alternative investment opportunities to their private wealth clients, who tend to be high-net-worth individuals that meet regulatory accreditation requirements applied to many alternative assets, Advani explained. Advani started Allocations in 2019 as a response to challenges he faced in trying to set up his own investment funds and realizing that none of the tools available to him at the time could help him spin up funds quickly enough to stay competitive in the increasingly fast-paced private markets. Less than three years after its founding, the company, which provides APIs to help private fund managers streamline processes, has crossed $1 billion in assets under administration on its platform, its CEO and founder Kingsley Advani told journalist in an interview. Taking a page from KKR’s book, Advani said Allocations is in the early stages of exploring a blockchain offering as he thinks the technology can help meaningfully streamline fund administration.

Northzone raised half a billion round in Europe, while LatAm VCs raising their biggest funds yet

Janngo Capital is one of the few female-founded, owned and led venture capital and private equity firms that see a clear investment opportunity in addressing Africa’s gender funding gap by making long-term commitments to back female-founded and female-led startups. So far, Janngo Capital has invested in 11 startups across Africa, including Sabi, a growth-stage B2B e-commerce platform with a female CEO and female-led Ivorian online freight marketplace Jexport while other startups, like fintech Expensya have male founders. After stints at Jumia as its former managing director at its Nigerian office and founding CEO of its Ivorian office, Fatoumata Bâ, a veteran of the African tech space, announced that her firm Janngo Capital was raising a €60 million fund (~$63 million) in 2019. The four-year-old venture capital firm doesn’t invest in only female-founded and female-led teams, though.

The Norrsken Foundation runs Norrsken House in Sweden, a hub for impact entrepreneurs, and incubated Norrsken VC, a $130 million impact VC. The companies that will make it to the final 100 (announced this month) will be nominated by several partner organizations, including the Obama Foundation, SoftBank Investment Advisers, World Fund, Katapult, BMW Foundation, Leaps by Bayer, Summa Equity and several others. The Impact 100 will be judged by a panel including Adalberth, as well as Ulrika Modéer, UN Assistant Secretary General; Matt Miller, partner Sequoia; and Carl Manneh, co-founder Mojang. Niklas Adalberth co-founded Klarna in 2005 but left in 2015 and established the Norrsken Foundation in 2016, contributing $20 million to the launch and an additional $62 million in 2017.

Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund (CAIF), a Pan-African fund launched via a partnership between AfricInvest, a multi-asset investment platform in Africa and Cathay Innovation, a European-born but global-focused venture capital firm, has achieved a final close of €110 million.

Pulley is also helping companies weather this economic downturn, and though most of the companies Pulley works with are at an earlier stage and aren’t seeing the kinds of layoffs occurring in later stages, I asked Wu what kinds of questions Pulley was getting from customers.

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.

In matured markets such as South Africa, Adenuga said BII will have an on-the-ground presence and offer its full suite of services ranging from climate finance, funding for financial inclusion, and equity and debt financing.

While Dcode Capital can’t be a substantial financial backer to its portfolio companies based on its small check sizes at the stage it invests at, it hopes to have an outsized impact with its knowledge of getting tech into the government, something most VCs can’t offer.

Pan-African venture capital fund Launch Africa Ventures today is announcing the close of its $36.3 million fund, which it has primarily used to invest in B2B and B2B2C startups across Africa.

The startup also has its eyes on the growing e-commerce market in East Africa, with the long-term goal of growing into a pan-African shipping logistics provider – by tapping the e-commerce market in Africa, which has experienced 18% annual growth since 2014.

The startup is looking to capitalize momentum behind NFT profile pic collections and ENS (.eth) handles to build out a network of NFT-based avatar identity products. Genies, an LA-based digital avatar startup, announced Tuesday that it had raised $150 million in funding from Silver Lake, with participation from others.

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.

It uses integrations to link to different investment platforms for stocks, crypto, and other illiquid assets, though Gonen declined to share how many platforms are partnered with Compound in this manner.