FinTech news in startup category
Stripping out all that marketing jargon, Mosaic provides dashboards, modeling and data visualization tools geared toward financial planning use cases, allowing users to quickly share insights with stakeholders.
Perhaps persuaded by Slash’s 20,000-person-strong customer base, NEA, Menlo Ventures, Connect Ventures, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Global Founders Capital and angel investors poured $19 million into Slash’s Series A and seed rounds.
Our action products bring together a company’s data and provide APIs to give developers and business stakeholders in a company the ability to build more sophistication in their payment stack to address issues such as churn, risk, and cost
Highbeam, a startup that provides banking features, credit and cash flow insights to e-commerce customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in debt from TriplePoint as it looks to expand the reach of its digital product portfolio.
Passthrough competes directly with firms like Anduin and Plus Subscribe, which offer a suite of investment fund services including customer relationship management systems, investor portals and data storage. According to Flannery, Passthrough has processed billions of dollars in investments for more than 12,000 unique investors and over 250 customers, including $50 million venture firms and $100 billion dollar-plus global asset managers. Our goal is that no matter how investors invest into a venture fund, private equity fund, or any other alternative asset, Passthrough will be the one powering it. Flannery says that the round — which values Passthrough at $50 million — will be put toward product R&D, marketing and scaling Passthrough’s core offering.
Tapping into identity verification data from credit bureaus (e.g. Equifax) and wireless carriers (e.g. T-Mobile) and combining it with real-time data from financial institutions’ core banking systems, Method can collate a person’s liabilities across more than 60,000 institutions in the U.S. and kick off tasks such as balance transfers, payoffs, bill pay and more. While the startup competes with big names like Plaid, MX, Spinwheel and Dwolla, Shah sees Method holding its own, particularly as the platform rolls out new features in the next few months including real-time credit card transactions, instant balance transfers and enhanced live data points for liabilities. Method, a startup that aims to make it easier for fintech developers to embed repayment, balance transfers and bill pay automation into their apps, today announced that it closed a $16 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator (Method a Y Combinator graduate), Abstract Ventures, SV Angel and others. Shah points out that there’s no standard, technically easy way to access all of a person’s financial liabilities — their student loans, credit cards, mortgages and so on — and push money to those liabilities.
The startup has raised capital in a pre-product financing round from Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, SV Angel, SALT Fund, P2P, Third King Venture Capital and Motivate Venture Capital. Now, he has raised $5 million for his own startup, Architect, which aims to make trading infrastructure for large crypto investors. A startup like this could meet current market demand from big players for more unified and accessible platforms to connect their crypto services, instead of having a handful of tabs and servers open. The startup is launching pre-product, so its flagship service will have to be seamless and provide an easier user experience to trump other crypto services out there.
It seems like a lot of moolah in a volatile market, even coming as it does from two separate a16z funds: the firm’s $600 million debut games vehicle and its $4.5 billion crypto fund, both of which were announced last May. The latter remains privately held, but after scrapping plans to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, it managed to snag $350 million in funding in 2021 from Netmarble, Kabam, and affiliates of funds managed by Fortress Investment Group, which suggests it’s doing just fine. The pair previously co-founded the once-hot social media platform MySpace (which originally sold to MySpace for $580 million in 2005) and the mobile game studio Jam City. (Indeed, Jam City, which claims to have 30 million monthly active users, announced this morning that a third cofounder, Josh Yguado, is now running the show after serving as the company’s COO and president previously.)
With the funds from the recently-closed Series A, Shoykhet says that Link will launch account verification, which will verify bank accounts and ownership information to bring merchants in compliance with Nacha’s new account validation rule. Link customers pay by bank transfer, sending funds directly from their bank to a merchant’s business account. Recently, Discover dove into the accounts-to-accounts space, partnering with payments fintech Buy It Mobility so that its partner merchants can accept card-free payments, Link claims to be one of the first companies in the U.S. to enable customers to make online payments using their bank accounts.
One of the most common attacks Yakoa sees is people making copies of NFTs and claiming them as their own work, Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of the startup, said. The funding round was led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital, and Brevan Howard Digital with participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB, as well as angel investors. Yakoa provides tools and an indexer that detects copies or infringement probabilities on original NFTs, ranging from direct forgery to partial or stylistic forgery, which will then notify platforms, brands or creators of these fraudulent activities. Yakoa, an NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to build tools to fight intellectual property fraud in web3, the company exclusively told journalist.
Banyan, a platform for product purchase data that allows customers such as banks, fintechs, hotels and merchants to automate expense management and more, today announced that it raised $43 million in a Series A funding round — $28 million in equity and $15 million in debt — led by Fin Capital with participation from M13, FIS Impact Ventures and TTV Capital.
Ntropy, a company offering an API that enriches transaction data for financial services businesses, today announced that it raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Lakestar with participation from QED Investors and January Investors.
Facing the headwinds, rather than pull out of BNPL altogether, investors appear to be shifting bets to what they perceive as a safer subcategory of BNPL: business-to-business (B2B) BNPL. The beneficiaries are startups like OatFi, which today emerged from stealth with $8 million in new equity and $50 million in debt for its platform that provides working capital infrastructure for B2B payments platforms.
CRED partnered with LiquiLoans last year to launch CRED Mint, a service that allows CRED customers to lend to one another at an interest rate of up to 9% annually. CRED, backed by Tiger Global, Sequoia India, Alpha Wave Ventures and Dragoneer and valued at $6.4 billion, also engaged with Amazon-backed Smallcase earlier this year, initially to explore an investment and later for a majority acquisition, journalist reported earlier. CRED plans to invest about $10 million in its lending partner LiquiLoans as the Indian fintech startup broadens its ownership in financial services, journalist has learned and confirmed. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup investment in Mumbai-headquartered LiquiLoans increases the lender’s valuation to close to $200 million, the firms said in a statement.
To that end, Denim provides financial products, operations tools and automated workflows for freight brokers — the middlemen between shippers and carriers. CEO and co-founder Bharath Krishnamoorthy tells journalist that the new cash, a combination of equity ($26 million) and debt ($100 million), will be put toward scaling the business and providing Denim customers with working capital. Why Convoy’s Dan Lewis expects digital freight to go mainstream within the year Denim competes with other fintech firms in the space, including TriumphPay, HaulPay and OTR Capital. But he did volunteer that Denim has connected more than 7,000 freight brokers, shippers and carriers since its launch three years ago.
In a previous interview Dixon said he wanted to increase the number of founders who identify as women and/or an underrepresented person of color in the portfolio to above 50%; with this fund, 46% of investments have a founder who identifies as a woman, 53% of investments have a founder who identifies as Black and all investments have a founder who identifies as an underrepresented person of color. The fund signals a change in how Kapor Capital does business: Beyond being the first that is led by the two newly announced managing partners, Fund 3 is the first investment vehicle funded by outside investors (not just the co-founders). The fintech and edtech investor then became one of the first and youngest African-American partners at any Silicon Valley venture capital firm, including Kapor Capital, the firm says. Onovakpuri, meanwhile, founded Kapor’s Capital Fellows program and has worked at firms including Village Capital and Fresco Capital.
HR workers can use the platform to open employer and tax accounts automatically — Mosey shows the requirements in each location across payroll, registration and taxes.
Kontempo, a startup offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) and interest-free installment plans to business-to-business (B2B) customers, today announced that it raised a $30 million seed round in a mix of equity ($6.5 million) and debt ($25 million).
Sanchez argues that Savana has an advantage in its experience building digital systems for banks and financial institutions. One fintech that competes almost directly with Savana is London-based 10x Future Technologies, which helps larger, established banks build both next-generation services and tools to help their older services work more efficiently.
Kompliant’s platform allows customers — mostly acquirer processors, banks and sales organizations — to build credit risk programs by leveraging services such as auditing, application processing and verification, and business monitoring.
Narmi offers products including digital account opening, business digital account opening, consumer digital banking, business digital banking, and an administrator console. While New York, New York-based Narmi isn’t a bank, it provides mobile, online, and digital account banking to regional and community financial institutions.
In response to the allegations and reports, Kuruvilla then said that Bolt has seen a 131% year over year increase in shopper accounts and a 192% year over year increase in total active merchant accounts. One-click checkout startup Bolt has laid off at least 100 employees, and counting, across go-to-market, sales and recruiting roles.
The round brings Fashinza’s total raised to $135 million, which Gupta says is being used to refine the company’s supply chain technology and expand into new markets, including raw materials procurement. In an endorsement of Fashinza’s approach to supply chain management, the company today announced that it raised $100 million in Series B funding ($60 million in equity and $40 million in debt).
Deel is an example of a company that was in the right place at the right time, aided by what appears to be strong execution. Remote hiring company Deel has raised $50 million at a $12 billion valuation, according to an Axios report.
Robinhood to let users lend out their shares in its attempt to diversify revenue On Deck cuts 25% of staff, scales back accelerator On Deck, a tech company that connects founders, laid off about 72 people this week, which amounts to about 25% of staff Over the past week, we’ve witnessed an alarming amount of layoffs across the startup ecosystem, from buzzy, big names like Cameo, On Deck and Robinhood, to B2B platforms like Workrise and Thrasio. Amazon aggregator Thrasio begins layoffs, names new CEO Thrasio’s business model is to buy up and consolidate third-party Amazon sellers, but apparently, that strategy is rife with ups and downs.
On Deck, a tech company that connects founders to each other, capital and advice, has laid off 25% off its staff, per sources familiar with the company. On Deck, not to be confused with small business lender OnDeck, is a company that provides capital and network support for emerging fund managers and founders.
Acknowledging that credit card issuing and loyalty programs are certainly not new, Duncan claims that Concerto’s approach is unique in that it applies technologies including machine learning to measure and predict risk.
A developer-focused bank Column emerges from stealth today to — if Hockey’s pronouncements are to be believed — turn the fintech industry on its head. By contrast, Column, a nationally chartered bank with a direct connection to the Fed, has an in-house ledger and data model to power various fintech services.
When asked about its B2B business, Kyash carved out its white-labeled card issuing platform to infcurion last year and is focused purely on direct channel business, Takatori said in an interview with journalist. Founded by Takatori, who previously worked in the banking and consulting industry, Kyash offers a mobile banking app that enables consumers to make online and offline payments, remittances, and ATM withdrawal services. Takatori said Kyash currently focuses on the Japanese retail market.
The mass layoffs at digital mortgage lender Better.com have reportedly started, according to employees and other sources at the company, and affected workers are finding out by seeing a severance check in their Workday account — the company payroll app.