FinTech news in richie serna category

As journalist’s Connie Loizos reported at the time, Finix told employees that soon after issuing its check, Sequoia concluded that Finix competes too directly with Stripe, the payments company that represented one of Sequoia’s biggest private holdings and that in turn counted Sequoia as one of its biggest outside investors. Serna believes that Finix’s latest move only drives the two closer toward each other despite the disparity in size (Finix has 130 or so employees and Stripe had just under 7,000 as of last November) and funding (Finix has raised about $133 million in funding and Stripe has raised nearly $9 billion). Block (formally known as Square) is often viewed as a payment processor, is actually built on top of other payments technology and itself works with a number of payment processors to provide direct connection into networks, Serna noted. Serna believes that Finix’s tech stands out because it was built from the ground up, and not built through a number of acquisitions as in the case of some legacy providers.

Finix is not coming out of nowhere. The SaaS startup — which started out in early 2020 by selling its payments tech to other businesses — raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia.