FinTech news in Startups category

Rex Salisbury and Lee Hower and others on hiring in FinTech industry

Some major ZK-rollup blockchains that exist today include Polygon, zkSync and StarkWare’s StarkNet platform, which all aim to increase scalability and security for developers off-chain through higher speeds and lower fees before combining and submitting them to Ethereum. Its SDK wants to help Rust (and eventually C++) developers to use ZK technology across any blockchain without having to be experts in cryptography, both the co-founders said. A rollup is a blockchain that gets security from another blockchain, so it’s a way to add functionality to an existing chain without sacrificing security, Evans said. The capital will be used to build its SDK and hire protocol engineers and researchers with expertise in blockchains and their frameworks, Özer said.

Hypernative, a crypto security-focused startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding as it emerges from stealth, co-founder and CEO Gal Sagie exclusively told journalist. The fourth quarter in 2022 saw the most, with $1.62 billion in total losses across 55 incidents, accounting for almost half of the total losses in the year, the report showed. Its ideal client base ranges from asset managers, hedge funds, traders and market makers interacting with crypto to blockchains and protocols, he added. Even though crypto markets may be down, there’s still billions of dollars invested in the space, which makes it a target for attacks by those looking to make (and take) money quickly.

Spatial Labs company made a splash in the industry last year by selling clothes designed by Sandu called Gen One Hardwear, which were embedded with a microchip called LNQ (pronounced link) that provided consumers with the item’s provenance and ownership history, seen, naturally, on the blockchain. Per Crunchbase data, only 1% of all VC funds were allocated to Black founders last year; out of the $21.5 billion raised by web3 startups globally last year, $60 million of that went to U.S.-based Black web3 founders, one of whom was Sandu. Spatial Labs, a web3 infrastructure and hardware company, announced today the closing of a $10 million seed round led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Marcy Venture Partners, the firm co-founded by Jay-Z. Iddris Sandu founded Spatial Labs in 2021, seeking to create products and shopping experiences using augmented reality.

Deal Box has taken strategic institutional funds from family offices and high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, Carter shared. Deal Box, a capital markets advisory and token offering packaging platform, has launched its venture arm with plans to invest $125 million in startups using web3 technology, the company shared Wednesday. There has also been interest from institutional investors, other family offices and sovereign wealth funds, Carter added. The firm has closed initial strategic investments in three startups — Total Network Services, Rypplzz and Forward-Edge AI — as part of its web3 investment thesis.

Multiple due diligence mashups, hot M&A and more FinTech news in the first two weeks of 2023. Major banks are on the acquisition roll.

Some marketplaces aren’t very social, like OpenSea or Magic Eden, and collectible platforms like Sorare and NBA Top Shot aren’t social media-focused, Sideman said. Revel’s marketplace allows users to create NFTs for their followers, friends or community and also allows people to own editions of the media they like and follow, Sideman said. The capital will be used to expand Revel’s web3 interoperability, generative and collaborative AI functionality, and social features, Sideman said. Instagram is known as a social media platform while Robinhood is known as an investing and trading platform.

The company’s latest cash injection comes less than a year after Shield raised a $15 million Series A, and the company said that it has grown its sales by 280% year-on-year. And it against that backdrop that Tel Aviv– and New York–based communication compliance platform Shield wants to address the issues that most banks and investment firms face, including record management, electronic discovery, supervision and surveillance. In addition, Shield opened an R&D facility in Lisbon this year, Weitzman said, adding that the company chose Portugal because it is becoming a major European tech hub. In addition, the SEC is now probing private equity firms on their employees’ use of messaging apps for work purposes, including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, as many of these apps have functions that support messages that disappear automatically, representing potential violations of SEC rules.

Crowdz, which secured $10 million in capital co-led by Citi and Dutch growth equity firm Global Cleantech Capital, said this year it expanded from providing invoice-based financing to SaaS-focused SMEs to also providing them with recurring revenue access to upfront capital they need without having to dilute their equity. With that buy — its first — Pipe created a new media and entertainment division called Pipe Entertainment with the aim of giving independent distributors the opportunity to trade their revenue streams in the same way a SaaS company could. The three co-founders of alternative financing startup Pipe are stepping down from their roles as executives of the company in one of the most dramatic management shake-ups seen in the fintech startup world in some time. Since its founding, the startup says that 22,000 companies have signed up for Pipe and $7 billion of ARR (annual recurring revenue) has been connected to the platform.

New York-based venture platform Modus has launched Modus Africa, a venture capital fund for AI and blockchain startups across sub-Saharan Africa, journalist has learned. The firm is currently closing three investments in startups using AI and blockchain across insurtech, fintech and health tech, said the general partners who control the fund’s thesis, direction and investment strategy while leveraging Modus’s 50+ team to carry out due diligence and portfolio management. Though it has household names such as Tunisia’s InstaDeep, Kenya’s Sama, and South Africa’s DataProphet — and several web3 startups claiming to build on the blockchain — Africa’s AI and blockchain sectors are still relatively nascent. The thinking behind adopting this strategy can be traced to Vianney Mathonnet and Andre Jr. Ayotte, the general partners of Modus’s Africa-focused fund.

Digital payments are gaining momentum in Latin America, and startups like Mexico-based mattilda are putting their spin on streamlining financial and administrative processes for private schools while also offering credit backed by future school fees. Here’s where mattilda comes in: the company provides a SaaS tool that enables parents to get a personalized payment link via email or WhatsApp and can then make tuition payments in a number of ways, including debit cards, credit cards, bank transfers and flexible credit lines, in seconds. So far, mattilda is working with 17 schools accounting for some 9,000 students, which Agote said will become 24 schools and close to 14,000 students as of November 1. In Latin America, many of the payments are month to month, and if payment is not made, the school is the one to spend time contacting parents to collect that payment.

Unlike other funds aimed at expanding a product’s ecosystem like the Alexa Fund at Amazon or the Slack Fund, Capital 49 is not operated off Airwallex’s balance sheet, instead tapping a number of Airwallex’s investors as LPs but using Airwallex’s knowledge of the market to guide it. Airwallex, as we’ve written before, made a splash when it was first founded by doing the right thing at the right time: it did the tough work of integrating with lots of banks and building complex financial services and then made them easy to use (leaning on APIs) so that companies doing business across country boundaries could set up banking and money moving services quickly, initially out of Asia Pacific and eventually globally. Airwallex, the Hong Kong/Australia startup that provides cross-border banking and other financial services for businesses, has raised $100 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its business operationally, geographically and with new products in areas like credit and expense management — and for M&A. He and others on the team could see what was coming around the corner earlier in the year, he added, and although Airwallex still had significant money in the bank — $600 million out of the total $900 million raised as of the end of September, when Zhang and I spoke — the startup chose to raise more, just in case.

With Stash’s new crypto offering, customers won’t be able to store their own crypto in a wallet but will be able to buy and sell the assets 24/7, much like on an app like Coinbase, though chief investment officer Doug Feldman told journalist that a crypto wallet launch is not necessarily out of the question in the future. The startup sees itself as different from competitors because of its focus on cultivating customers who are long-term investors rather than encouraging more frequent, riskier trading for short-term profits, Ed Robinson, Stash co-founder and president, told journalist in an exclusive interview. Having a small amount of crypto exposure, he added, will help Stash customers capture some of the asset class’s potential upside in the long term. Feldman said that even for the most risk-tolerant investor on Stash, the maximum exposure to crypto the platform recommends is 6% of an investor’s overall portfolio.

For example, it wants to help startups with all aspects of compensation matters within their organization — going beyond salaries to also advise on compensation reviews, employee communication and pay analytics. The company is emerging from stealth today, announcing a $6 million seed round raised earlier this year led by Inspired Capital and including participation from Floodgate, SV Angel as well as founders and C-level executives of Rippling, Wealthfront, Pilot.com, Thumbtack, Public.com and others. Comprehensive’s target customers are startups, a world Lee is familiar with, having started two of his own, as well as launching Layoffs. For Roger Lee, the issue came up repeatedly when he co-founded 401(k) provider Human Interest, which achieved unicorn status in August of 2021 and today has nearly 700 employees.

On September 28, LinkedIn released its Top Startups list, which is its self-described annual ranking of 50 emerging U.S. companies “gaining attention and recruiting top talent.” The professional networking site takes into consideration a variety of criteria based on its own data when coming up with the list: employment growth, engagement with the company and its employees, job interest and ability to attract talent from companies.

HSBC Asset Management, the investment arm of Britain HSBC Group, has led a seed round of $4 million in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup Bizbaz, the two said Friday. The startup is exploring to deploy its solutions within parts of HSBC in Asia and Europe, Hakobyan said, adding that it would continue to have the autonomy and the ability to bring in other partners as well as customers including new banks and insurance companies. The startup also aims to upgrade its Web presence, recruit more data and software developers as well as data and behavioral analysts and spend some resources on product development, Hakobyan told journalist. The development team at Bizbaz mainly works from the Middle East, while its data team is in India and its sales, business development and product teams operate from Southeast Asia.

They include helping city governments provide food stamps to users (which are deposited as a sum on Satispay to be used for food purchases); and a surge of use during COVID when people wanted to pay for items remotely or even in person without even tapping phones or taking out cards, using just Satispay’s app on their devices to complete purchases. The ever-expanding group also includes companies like Dwolla in the U.S. (which Dalmasso says is probably the most similar to Satispay in terms of how it operates); peer-to-peer payment efforts like PayPal’s Venmo and Square’s Cash App; buy-now, pay-later services; and the plethora of blockchain-based efforts to build out new currencies and means of buying and selling; and much more. Today, a startup out of Italy called Satispay — which operates an independent payment network that bypasses big banks and credit companies and promises lower transactions fees plus other benefits like better budget control to its users — is picking up a massive round of funding on the back of strong demand for its services. One of these is that users essentially deposit money into a Satispay account from their existing bank accounts to spend over a period of time, much like a pre-pay account, which helps them control what they spend monthly.

To bridge the gap, Uganda-based fintech Numida has opted to focus its digital lending business on small enterprises as part of its strategy for driving financial inclusion in emerging markets. Spurred by an increase in demand for its services, Numida is currently eyeing growth opportunities beyond Uganda, saying that it has a proven business model that can be adopted across the continent to unlock the potential of MSMEs. The growth plans come against the backdrop of a $12.3 million pre-Series A equity-debt funding round led by Serena Ventures with participation from Breega, 4Di Capital, Launch Africa, Soma Capital and Y Combinator, VCs that are all making their first investment in Uganda. Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) across Africa make up the bulk — over 90% — of businesses in the continent but are still marginalized in accessing credit from formal institutions because of the nature of their operations; for instance, many often lack the kind of collateral that is acceptable by banks.

Joining them in the round were Kevin Johnson, former CEO of Ebates at Rakuten, f7 Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Hyper, Susa Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, Exits Capital, Knight Capital; Ancestry CEO Deborah Liu; Firstbase CEO Chris Herd; and XMTP co-founder and president Shane Mac. Enter Checkmate, a company they started 18 months ago that aims to compete against online deal aggregators, like Honey, Capital One Shopping and Vetted, to provide a shopping tool that gathers all the online discount codes, gift cards and personalized deals from your inbox and automatically applies them at checkout. The new funding is Checkmate total funding to date, and Dixon and Garton-Smith say the company will deploy the funds into product development, customer growth and additional brand partnerships. The more coupon codes we can find for online shopping the better, but Harry Dixon, Rory Garton-Smith and Elliot Rampono thought something was missing: the ability to house all of the various savings we receive in one place.

While Indonesia isn’t the most crypto active in the region — total crypto value received was less than half of Thailand’s from July 2021 to June 2022, according to Chainalysis — the country is thought to hold huge potential for web3 adoption, thanks to a young and sizable (270 million) population as well as a vibrant Web 2.0 industry. As such, SerMorpheus recently closed a $2.5 million seed round to create a user-friendly platform for businesses to create NFTs; end users, on the other hand, can buy and trade digital assets on the platform with the local currency rupiah. The platform is still manually onboarding businesses and brands — so far 25 of them, including Indonesia Comic-Con — but the next step is to make SerMorpheus as automated as creating a Facebook page. Its seed round was led by Intudo Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Febe Ventures, AlphaLab Capital, BRI Ventures and Caballeros Capital.

He will continue developing the company’s technology, including automating the process of acquiring merchants on Shopify and accelerating the operational efficiencies running these online stores through OpenStore, even going so far as to reduce the acquisition offer from the current 24 hours down to an hour, the company said. The early success of the company may lie in the makeup of its founders: OpenStore is led by some heavy hitters, including Founders Fund general partner Keith Rabois and Jack Abraham, Atomic founder and managing partner, who started the company along with Matt Lanter and Jeremy Wood. In addition, while funding to aggregators has slowed to a comparative trickle — $9 billion of funding went into aggregators by September 2021, compared with $2 billion over the same period in 2022, per the Financial Times — the Miami-based company is among the recipients of some of those recent investment dollars. The company said this is a 25% increase in the company’s valuation from its previous round of $75 million in funding announced in November 2021.

Ledgy’s platform today covers tools for finance, HR, legal and VC teams as well as employees themselves, and is used both to provide a snapshot of the state of a company’s equity at a given moment, and to help employees and companies manage what they may choose to do with that over time. While a number of companies like Carta, and more recently AngelList and Pulley (respectively valued at $6.8 billion, $4 billion, and up to $300 million for the younger Pulley) continue to make waves in the U.S. market, Ledgy has spotted an opportunity to build for scenarios where companies want to provide international employees with equity and need to balance the differences in regulations and culture when doing so. Ledgy, a startup out of Zurich that builds cap table management software specifically for companies and their employees working across multiple countries, has raised $22 million, a Series B that it is using for hiring, further product development and to bring on more users. We are starting to see a lot more European startups opting to remain in Europe to raise funding and scale rather than transplant to the U.S. as they would have been expected to do in the past, and with that the issue of equity awards for those companies’ employees is only growing.

It’s why Julaya launched its services in the west African country and has since expanded into Senegal, where mobile market penetration is around 80% as well as other countries in the UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union) region, which also have prevalent mobile money usage. Proceeds from this financing round will assist the fintech in further expansion plans across Francophone West Africa as it plans to open offices in Benin, Togo and Burkina Faso, hire talent and boost product development including the launch of a credit product targeting 200,000 SMEs in the UEMOA region. EQ2 Ventures, Kibo Ventures, angel syndicates Unpopular Ventures and Jedar Capital, existing investors Orange Ventures, Saviu, 50 Partners and Ivorian business angel Mohamed Diabi and professional football player Édouard Mendy also invested in the round. The company, which facilitates B2B payments for businesses in Francophone West Africa, mainly via mobile money channels, has raised a total of $7 million in the financing round.

Allocations just got valued at $150M to help private equity funds lure smaller investors Payall lands $10M in a16z-led seed round to help banks facilitate more cross-border payments Lease-to-own fintech startup Kafene raises $18M to battle BNPL Southeast Asian fintech Fazz raises $100M Series C to serve businesses of all sizes Nigerian financial management app for merchants Kippa bags $8.4M in new funding Composer raises $6M for automated investing platform Redfin CEO, DoorDash co-founder invest in new startup, Far Homes, which is building a portal for Mexico real estate German software firm Candis raises $16M to expand AP automation Splitit drives installments-as-a-service growth with a $10.5M funding PortX launched as new entity by ModusBox and secures $10M in new funding Adyen announced on September 15 that it has become the first fintech to partner with Cash App (Block) to offer Cash App Pay, a mobile payment method, to its U.S. customers. In 2020, digital bank Varo became the first-ever all-digital nationally chartered U.S. consumer bank — meaning it received approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become an actual bank, as opposed to partnering with one as most digital banks do.

The beauty of having Stanford students within this network was that our Stanford students pulled the other students into the networks that the Stanford students are so fortunate to have. What’s really wonderful about it is that we did have Stanford students, but we had students from University of Texas, with other students from Yale and Penn and WashU, so it it actually spanned multiple different universities . . . and we’re really excited to try to expand to as many universities as possible. And in fact, in the relationships that I have with my students, I will tell certain students who I know really well, ‘You have these incredible skill sets that are so unique and not found in many people that you should go to a large company; you will have so much impact there.’ Now, co-founding partner Ann Miura-Ko and Tyler Whittle, a senior associate with the firm, have developed a new program to help student teams similarly develop an understanding of what big ideas look like — and why most concepts are not big ideas.

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.

Kenya’s MotiSure rides on micro-payments to drive personal mobility insurance growth International startups shrug off US insurtech meltdown Why 2022 insurtech investment could surprise you Driven by a viable business model, the startup, which also has operations in Uganda and Nigeria, has entered its growth phase and is eyeing more partnerships in a bid to drive mass market insurance adoption in Africa. Through API integration Turaco’s partners like PayGo companies (M-KOPA), ride-hailing platforms (SafeBoda), fintechs and micro-finance institutions are able to bundle insurance with their core products or services. Through its B2B2C model, Turaco has created an expansive distribution channel that is enabling it to tap into a large pool of potential customers in its markets, providing insurance to a group that has never consumed it before.

Tech-talent marketplace MVP Match has raised €5 million ($5 million) seed funding from Stage 2 Capital to double down its strategy for pairing companies with talent from across the globe. Wense, who founded the startup in 2020 together with Philipp Petrescu, added that MVP Match acts as an Employer of Record, which enables it to manage the whole recruiting process including the establishment of local office spaces and talent onboarding. MVP Match said it uses product and technology executives like CTOs and experienced domain experts to vet talent before recommending them to companies. The plan to grow its reach follows the launch of a new hub in Egypt that MVP Match will use to tap talent in Africa — with the aim of creating more networks in the region.

Ratio gives SaaS companies capital upfront so they can offer customers more flexible payment options. Co-founder and CEO Ashish Srimal founded Ratio in 2021 with CTO Mason Blake, and they have been heads down ever since working on the company’s concept, which is to help SaaS and technology companies tap into the $1.5 trillion subscription market for recurring revenue.

The team’s goal is to tap the blockchain to build a music creation suite that bakes in an open source ethos, allowing producers to sample a wide variety of songs and sounds while the platform ensures that credit always flows back to original creators appropriately. Arpeggi Labs, a new crypto startup focused on using blockchains to make music creation more collaborative, has scored $5.1 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz crypto arm alongside a host of artists including names like Steve Aoki, 3LAU and Wyclef Jean. To make this dream happen, Arpeggi is aiming to go beyond developing a protocol and build an entire in-browser digital audio workstation that allows producers to mix blockchain-minted beats while integrating with the wider arena of Web 2.0 and web3 music platforms. While the company hasn’t landed on whether they’re looking to issue a token for the platform down the road, the founders say they are mainly focused on enticing music professionals who haven’t already aligned themselves with the web3 mantra but are excited about the idea of the industry doubling down on open source.

Meet Prediko, a new startup that sits at the intersection of e-commerce, fintech and software as a service. Prediko has built an online dashboard that lets you review your inventory position as well as plan and order more products. Customers connect Prediko with their Shopify store directly — the startup is building integrations with other e-commerce platforms. After that, they can generate inventory reports to see fast-moving products, slow-selling items and the current retail value of the inventory.

Crypto exchange and marketplace Reku has been riding the wave with what it says are the lowest fees on the market, and a platform that is aimed at both newcomers and experienced traders. Its founders say that Reku’s five years of operation mean that they know how to scale and endure fluctuations in the market, including the pandemic and this year’s recession. It is compliant with Indonesia’s commodities future trading agency (BAPPEBTI) and emphasizes user safety by offering only well-established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, the startup, founded in 2017, announced it has raised $11 million in Series A funding, led by AC Ventures (ACV) with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Skystar Capital.

He notes that by using Kojo, supervisors spend about 38% less time on materials management, back-office staff save approximately 75% of time processing purchase orders and customers save around 3 to 5% on materials. Earlier this year, the startup rebranded to Kojo and expanded from serving just one construction trade — electrical — to eight, including mechanical, concrete, drywall, roofing, flooring, site preparation and self-perform general contractors. In other words, it provides software to help contractors get the best price for the materials they use in construction projects so they save a lot more money, move faster and have less waste. Kojo claims it can help contractors save as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials annually due to far less waste, while also cutting down their order process time by 50%.

Essentially, Kafene’s model is based on the premise that at the point-of-sale, the prime consumer will probably go with BNPL, while the subprime consumer doesn’t have the credit score to do so and would typically do lease-to-own as their alternative financing mechanism.

This week in FinTech, banks vs FinTechs and billion dollar acquisitions

London-based regulatory technology (regtech) startup SteelEye has raised $21 million in a Series B round of funding. Founded in 2017, SteelEye works with banks, hedge funds, brokers, asset managers and more, to help them comply with strict regulatory procedures and requirements in their respective industries. SteelEye essentially brings compliance to the cloud via a SaaS \[…\]

The fintech, recently selected to participate in the Mastercard Start Path Global program for seed, Series A and later-stage startups, also wants to introduce new products to enhance its existing consumer banking, agency banking and merchant payment solutions and expand into African countries that fintechs from Nigeria rarely move to: Angola and Liberia. According to Berry, NowNow wants to set itself apart from the competition with the development of NFC-enabled tech that will allow tap-in functionality within its ecosystem of products, where users can use virtual or physical cards against an NFC-enabled phone or POS and tap from wallet to wallet using two phones. NowNow claims to have built an end-to-end ecosystem of financial products catering to agents, individual consumers and small businesses. When CEO Sahir Berry and his co-founder Mahesh Nair founded NowNow in 2016, they wanted to provide solutions to financial inclusion and job creation, two of the most significant pain points they thought were facing Nigeria and the rest of the continent.

Last batch, YC’s India founders appeared concentrated mostly within the financial services sector, around 30% when you consider that out of 36 Indian startups, 11 were in the fintech world. Out of the 21 startups YC backed in India this cohort, about 40%, or 8 startups, are in the fintech category. Despite a bit of a slowdown in fintech funding for private companies this year compared to the ultra-hot 2021 market, the sector remains much hotter than it was in years past, accounting for nearly 21% of total venture deals as of Q2 2022. YC’s startups are no exception – only time will tell if their approach of focusing in on international companies operating in niche markets will pay off or if consolidation in the sector has already gone too far for new upstarts to see breakout success.

Seedstars Africa Ventures, the pan-African early-stage fund for startups, has appointed Bruce Nsereko-Lule as its new general partner, to help it deploy more capital and provide the much-needed technical support for founders across the continent. At Seedstars Africa Ventures, Nsereko-Lule plans to continue backing founders in the continent at even a greater scale, as he is convinced that there are many great startups in Africa that are struggling to get funding. Nsereko-Lule told journalist that his focus at the fund will be helping it make great investments in the continent and provide initial and follow-on funding to cushion startups, and help them build and scale businesses. Prior to joining the fund, Nsereko-Lule was previously the founding investment principal of Chandaria Capital, a Kenya-based VC fund founded in 2017 to serve as the investment vehicle of the Chandaria Industries.

What started as a gaming guild offering play-to-earn scholarships to over 1,000 gamers to earn (up to $1,000 monthly, according to the platform’s pitch to users) from free-to-play Web 2.0 games and crypto games like Axie Infinity and Pegaxy has grown to a 100,000-member-strong community across an ecosystem including 2,000+ gamers, 10,000 Telegram and 20,000 Discord members. This February, Africa and emerging market-focused Nestcoin raised a pre-seed round to build, operate and invest in its web3 applications, including crypto content platform Breach Club and gaming guild Metaverse Magna (MVM). MVM, incubated in partnership with a multistrategy blockchain investment fund, Old Fashion Research (OFR), welcomed participation from investors including South Korean video game developer Wemade, Japan-based blockchain-focused venture capital firm Gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC), HashKey, Tess Ventures, LD Capital, Taureon, AFF, Polygon Studios, Casper Johansen (Spartan) and IndiGG. At the same time, in the interview, Bademosi stated that the gaming DAO platform was working on launching 10 Web 2.0 games (mostly hypercasual games across different genres), including Candy Blast — its version of Candy Crush — Wordler, Kong Clumb and Electron Dash.

Cantos just closed its third fund to invest in science-forward companies at the pre-seed and seed stages to ‘improve billions of lives and saving the planet.’ Cantos 3 is focusing on pre-seed and seed-stage investments in deeply technical climate, TechBio, aerospace and next-gen computing startups. — building real shit in the real world is probably more impactful than software in many cases, but venture capital was basically scared away from it. Rountree took a deeper look at the sector, and where others saw risk, he saw opportunity.

CEO Yishai Cohen and CTO Amit Assaraf started Landa in 2020 in an effort to make real estate ownership more inclusive. Users can start investing with just $5, and buy and sell shares as well as see real-time updates on their properties from the Landa app.

Topi essentially brings together the various components that a seller might need to offer hardware subscriptions, including insurance, logistics, and refinancing providers, so that merchants can easily build rentals into their existing online channels using Topi’s APIs. Pallua previously worked as a strategy and business development manager at Apple in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she led a team tasked with exploring the feasibility of hardware subscriptions — Apple has yet to launch such a service, but reports continue to surface that the Cupertino company is still looking to bolster its recurring revenue via such subscriptions. Hardware as a service At its most basic level, Topi is selling a hardware-as-a-service business model, allowing merchants to rent out their equipment such as smartphones, printers, PC monitors, coffee machines, robotic arms, or whatever industry-specific machinery in which they specialize. At the time, Topi was somewhat vague in terms of what its actual product would be, but the company today announced its first product in partnership with German electronics retailer Gravis, and unveiled a fresh $45 million in equity and debt financing.

Beyond co-founding Initialized, which raised a $700 million fund (its sixth) last year and has more than $1 billion in known assets under management, Tan was also co-founder of YC-backed blog platform Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter in 2012. Initialized Capital founder Garry Tan will become president and CEO of Y Combinator next year, the two organizations announced today. Initialized Capital’s other co-founder, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, left the firm in 2020 to start his own early-stage operation, 776. Months after the departure, Tan said that Ohanian isn’t leaving the firm altogether but is instead stepping into a board partner role at Initialized.

Thus, users in Nigeria and Kenya can receive foreign payments from more than 88 countries using USD, GBP and EUR bank accounts created on the platform, convert them into their local currencies (naira and shilling) and withdraw directly to their mobile money or local bank account. With its Grey Business product, the one-year-old fintech intends to tap into the market and provide a cheaper option to send and receive local currencies within the continent, particularly for micro and small businesses. In the latest development, Grey, a fintech in this category that provides virtual international bank accounts to African freelancers and remote workers, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding. COO Aghedo said the company privately launched a business-focused product, Grey Business, to complement this consumer-facing growth and extend its product beyond remittances and person-to-person payments.

This year, Argyle announced a $55 million Series B funding round and the launch of a self-service tool so that consumers can access their employment records with ease. Argyle, which wants to help companies and institutions get access to employment records, has laid off a number of employees across all departments, journalist has learned from sources. CEO and co-founder Shmulik Fishman said he wanted to disrupt the process in which institutions buy records from third parties and instead bring user consent into the mix. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the workforce reduction to journalist, saying that it let go of 6.5% of the team, or 20 people.

India financial crime-fighting agency conducted searches at multiple premises of the Bengaluru-headquartered CoinSwitch Kuber on Thursday, alleging the crypto exchange startup violated forex laws, four people familiar with the matter told journalist. The government agency has performed over half a dozen probes into tech firms this year, including Chinese smartphone vendors Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi and seized more than $1 billion of capital that it said firms had evaded in fraudulent tax computations. The Enforcement Directorate searched the office facilities and residences of some executives and also questioned many, including chief executive Ashish Singhal, two people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private and sensitive. The agency believes that the Indian startup acquired shares of over $200 million in violation of local forex laws, a person familiar with the matter said.

Chidambaram, a member of Parliament for Sivaganga in the Lok Sabha, wrote an open letter to the country’s fraud regulator, requesting they open an investigation into the finances of Byju’s, which as he pointed out has yet to secure $250 million capital from its most recent funding round unveiled in March and has fired hundreds of employees and is in parallel looking to acquire an American firm at a valuation of over $2 billion. The startup — backed by scores of high-profile investors including Blackrock, Tiger Global, UBS, Prosus Ventures, Sequoia India and Lightspeed Venture Partners — said in early July that it will file the results within 10 days. India Ministry of Corporate Affairs has asked Byju’s to explain why it hasn’t filed its audited financials for the year ending March 2021, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. Edtech giant Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup with a valuation of $22 billion, has missed the deadline to file its audited results by 17 months.

To that end, the company has raised $30 million in a Series D1 round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins to help it in its efforts to enhance its product to better serve people looking for short-term rental options. The San Francisco company historically has connected renters to landlords for long-term leases, with short-term rentals only being a very small portion of its business. Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, notes that the venture firm has invested in each of Zumper’s funding rounds since its 2012 inception, starting with a $1 million seed round that year announced two weeks after launching into a public beta at SF Disrupt. With a push into short-term rental offerings, is Zumper encroaching on Airbnb’s territory?

Digital mortgage lender Better.com has conducted its fourth round of layoffs since December 1, 2021.

His good timing only cemented the legend of Robertson, who just passed away at age 90 of cardiac complications, according to his spokesman, but who, until he was 67, led Tiger Management, one of the best-known funds in the 70-year-old hedge fund industry. (In addition to Robertson’s own family foundation and Tiger Foundation, a nonprofit that says it has provided more than $250 million in grants to organizations working to break the cycle of poverty in New York City, Robertson in 2017 signed the Giving Pledge, which asks participants to give at least half of their wealth away.) One of those appreciative protégés is Coatue founder Philippe Laffont, who spent three years working for Robertson before striking out on his own in 1999 with a reported $45 million and who, unlike Robertson, had a penchant for tech companies. Another of Robertson’s famous mentees is Chase Coleman, who worked as an investment analyst at Tiger Management for nearly four years before the hedge fund wound down.

The startup eponymous blockchain, which is currently in testnet, aims to be EVM-compatible and use proof-of-stake and proof-of-quorum consensus mechanisms to reduce the cost of running the network and rely on three types of nodes — validator, archival and standby — in its network, it said in the investor deck. Shetty is raising $20 million to $30 million in a seed financing round for his blockchain startup Shardeum, sources said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private. Indian crypto exchange WazirX‘s co-founder Nischal Shetty is in advanced stages of talks to raise a maiden funding round for his new venture, sources familiar with the matter told journalist. Shardeum is employing a technique called sharding that partitions the network into shards, resulting in more transactions being processed, verified and validated in parallel, the startup explained in an investor deck, reviewed by journalist.

Mural, a crypto firm focused on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) infrastructure, has raised $5.6 million in seed funding, the company co-founders Sinclair Toffa and Kevin Alvarez-Fung exclusively told journalist. The company is rolling out a beta for its fintech-focused platform to help brands deploy DAO treasury funds ranging from $50 to $100 million in size, Alvarez-Fung shared. The funds will be used to bring on new talent and work with brands globally that want to create and use DAOs, Alvarez-Fung said. Toffa and Alvarez-Fung said one of the biggest disconnects they saw in the DAO space was between treasuries and communities.

With Dutchie POS and Dutchie Pay, the cannabis tech company is now offering cannabis operators one of the most comprehensive platforms to manage dispensaries. Called Dutchie POS, this comes just weeks after the company announced a new payment platform, Dutchie Pay. Dutchie today is announcing a new cannabis point of sale platform, including a dual-screen terminal for dispensaries. Zach Lipson spoke to journalist ahead of the Dutchie POS launch, saying this solution is built to accommodate dispensaries of all sizes.

The corporate spend startup launched its bill pay feature in October of 2021, building upon its corporate card business and accounting software product. If the business pays back the money within 30 days and did not use their card, Ramp won’t actually make any money off it using the bill pay feature.

LatAm FinTechs prevail in the new rounds, while larger FinTech companies go after M&A via SPACs, according to NASDAQ

We sat down with General Partners Angela Strange and Anish Acharya to learn more about why the pair believes that the fact that more people are working globally spells huge opportunity for fintech companies. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Notably, both firms are also investors in Bolt, Breslow said when asked, though he suggests that if there’s a tie-in to Bolt, it’s that running Bolt for eight years is what led him to alternative thinking about wellness. Bolt employees are also reportedly frustrated that Breslow sold $10 million worth of shares to investors during that Series E round back in January, when Bolt’s board had not allowed them to sell their own holdings. While Breslow found some support for his perspective online, he was also criticized for the comments — including by powerful investors — and one week later, he stepped down as the CEO of Bolt and became its executive chairman. But it was hard to believe Breslow’s attention-grabbing tweets — which kept coming — weren’t rattling Bolt’s investors to some degree.

Launchpad Capital led Rocketplace seed round, which also included participation from TTV, Accomplice, Menlo Ventures and Soma Capital. But Beryl maintains that the startup’s biggest differentiator lies in the fund distribution model. Meanwhile, points out CEO Louis Beryl, customers will need appropriate disclosures and compliance, especially as regulation increases in the industry. Beryl was also a partner at both a16z and Y Combinator, and also founded Solid Energy Systems, which went public via a SPAC merger on the NYSE earlier this year.

Funding Circle co-founder Samir Desai has unveiled a new U.K. fintech startup called Super Payments, a venture he founded back in February but which very little was known about until now. Reports emerged a few months back that Desai had raised around $30 million for this new company, and today this has been confirmed. Super \[…\]

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.

Digit, founded by Kamesh Goyal, an ex-KPMG executive with more than three-decades of experience in the insurance industry, says it has simplified the process of buying insurance, allowing users the ability to self-inspect, claim submissions and process service requests from their smartphones. The startup, which also counts Fairfax Group, Indian cricketer Virat Kohli and TVS Capital among its backers and has raised over $540 million from them, says its motor insurance coverage generated $413 million in gross written premium in the financial year that ended in March. The five-year-old startup, which sells auto, health and travel insurance, is part of a group of firms that is attempting to expand the number of individuals in India that buy insurance coverage. The Indian startup, whose valuation jumped to $3.5 billion in a Sequoia India-led financing round last year, said in a filing to the local regulator Tuesday that it plans to raise up to $157.5 million through issue of new shares while existing shareholders plan to sell about 109.45 million shares.

Its SaaS-based platform offers two services: an equity management service for startups, which includes cap table management, stock option management, investor reporting, investor consents, shareholder and board meetings, and a fund management platform for investors, which provides fund info, investment and returns management, portfolio management, LP commitment and returns management, LP reporting and fund activity analytics. Choi, the company’s CEO, said in an interview with journalist that in their capacity as investors, the three noticed that in Korea and many other Asian countries, startups were still relying on Excel when managing their cap tables, stock options, stakeholder and other related information. QuotaBook will use the latest funding — which brings its total raised to approximately $20 million — to digitize the equity/fund management process, providing a common standard for security-related data, and making it possible to safely host shareholder and board meetings online. QuotaBook, a Seoul-based equity management platform, has raised $11 million in funding led by Elefund, with participation from Access Ventures, Hana Securities and South Korean fintech company Viva Republica.

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.

Left Lane led Arc’s Series A financing, which also included participation from NFX, Y Combinator, Bain Capital Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Torch Capital and Atalaya, as well as founders from Wayflyer, Plaid, Column, Chargebee, Vouch and Jeeves.

Tiffanie Stanard launched the company in 2017 with a focus on the supply chain, creating a product that provided establishments with the tools and data to choose, compare, and form relationships with product suppliers and vendors. She spent six years as a payroll and vendor manager before starting her own company.

Matthews, CEO, was an investment banker and management consultant before co-founding Essmart, a social enterprise company in India, and then moving over to a leadership position at fintech retirement advisory firm ForUsAll.

Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based Truework integrates with payroll providers including Gusto, Zenefits and BambooHR, and enables mortgage providers and lenders (e.g. automotive, personal loans, and student financing) to verify and approve borrowers quickly within their own applications using Truework APIs. Truework, a company that builds technology for mortgage and consumer-centric lenders to instantly verify the income and employment of borrowers, has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding led by G Squared. Aside from lead backer G Squared, Truework’s Series C round included investments from Sequoia Capital, Activant Capital, Khosla Ventures, Indeed, Human Capital and Four Rivers Group. On the flip-side, mortgage demand recently hit a 20-year low after the highs of 2020, but Truework co-founder and CEO Ryan Sandler reckons that the need for automated verifications is only going in an upward direction.

The Austin-based firm recently secured $145 million in its own debt and equity financing to help B2B SaaS founders grow their businesses without diluting ownership.

Singapore-based cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com has acquired two startups in South Korea — payment service provider PnLink and virtual asset provider OK-BIT — for an undisclosed amount, Crypto.com said. South Korea is an important market for Crypto.com in terms of blockchain technology advancement and high-level crypto interests, said Crypto.com’s South Korea general manager Patrick Yoon. Crypto.com had received several approvals to offer crypto exchange products and services, including in-principle approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and provisional approval of its virtual asset license from the Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority in June, as well as regulatory approval from the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission in July. The company also said Monday it has secured registrations under South Korea electronic financial transaction act and as a virtual asset service provider.

A founder of Tag accused the other co-founder of forging documents to the central bank; upon discovery of the fraudulent act the bank suspended the startup, a letter to investors in June said. The central bank did not outline (PDF) which regulatory rules Tag had violated, but set a deadline of August 19 for the refund. The startup has been accused of forging documents to the central bank, according to an investor letter obtained by journalist. The regulatory action follows a months-long probe into Tag, which offers banking and financial services to users in Pakistan.

Prior to helping co-found Geopagos, Núñez Castro spent over 14 years as VP and general manager of Amex´s GNS, LatAm division, where he managed the card business operation in Latin America, including penetration into new markets.

Andreessen Horowitz recent hire of former Jordan Park Group Chief Investment Officer Michel Del Buono suggests the venture capital firm is getting into startup founder wealth management. Alongside ditching a centralized HQ, a16z announced new offices in Miami Beach, New York and Santa Monica in addition to its existing Menlo Park and San Francisco posts. The outfit, more commonly known as a16z, confirmed Del Buono’s hire as CIO to oversee those types of services for founders, as first reported by Bloomberg. That move was notable in that the storied venture firm was founded in 2009 in Menlo Park and has historically been associated with the Bay Area.

Managing partner, co-founder and president Gary Acosta is co-founder and CEO of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, as well as the founder of several mortgage, real estate and technology companies.

Users aren’t under a legal obligation to repay ZayZoon and ZayZoon won’t take action to collect payments, but nonpaying users will be limited from accessing the service in the future. ZayZoon’s platform allows small- and medium-sized businesses to implement what’s known as an earned wage access (EWA) program.

Bluecopa, an Indian startup building a finance operations automation platform for high-volume companies, has raised $2.3 million to expand its offering in the global market.

Mudafy, a tech-enabled real estate broker operating in Latin America, has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding led by San Francisco-based Founders Fund.

It’s not only the digital platforms that want to sell insurance products, but also to help existing players be more efficient in their distribution of products, allowing them to play a role in increasing the insurance penetration level.

A new web3-focused production hub, Trustless Media, has launched out of stealth mode as it aims to build an NFT community-owned media company. Trustless Media plans to grow its community beyond the initial 1,000 NFT community members by expanding the network.

His community building had accidentally led him into the world of venture, as Salisbury ultimately became a founding member of a16z’s fintech practice alongside general partners Anish Acharya and Angela Strong before becoming a partner in 2019.

When Kristy Kim started TomoCredit in early 2019, she was on a mission to help international students more easily obtain credit.

While Glyman did not reveal hard revenue figures, he did point out that the company had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue before its third birthday in March.

In addition to the patent for the ENIAC, Arkive has also acquired Seduction (1985), a vintage print by Lynn Hershman Leeson, which, like the ENIAC patent, will be a part of Arkive’s traveling exhibition in late 2022.

Bloom’s seed round is the largest in Sudan, a country whose tech ecosystem can be termed passive and only recently welcomed foreign investment when Fawry backed fintech and e-commerce player Alsoug after 30 years of international sanctions on the country.

On a high level, it’s no surprise that funding flowing into fintech startups was down both globally and in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2022. And it wasn’t only funding. Everything was down. New unicorn births, M&As, IPOs.

BAI Capital, GIC and GGV Capital co-led the equity portion of the deal, which also included participation from other existing and new investors.

To power the expansion, which will see Lightyear land in 19 new markets including the Baltics and much of Western Europe, London-based Lightyear has also raised $25 million in a series A round of funding led by U.S. venture capital firm Lightspeed, with participation from other notable backers including Virgin Group,

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 Japanese fintech startup said today it has raised a $20 million (2 billion JPY) Series A funding round led by Globis Capital Partners with participation from Z Venture Capital, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, and DBJ Capital.

On the employee side, Kadmos serves up a mobile app replete with e-wallet that holds workers’ salaries in U.S. dollars or euros, while also allowing them to send money home instantly, with predictable set fees.

So if you include that company’s layoffs — which amounted to some 3,000 in the first quarter of 2022 — the fintech numbers inch up even higher and fintech becomes the category that saw the most layoffs by percentage — 15.4% — in the first half of 2022.

Ranger will launch in the fall, and offer home insurance, auto insurance and a home warranty policy that it is underwriting itself as an MGA — in other words, the startup won’t be carrying the risk itself, but partnering with a carrier for its own policies. Ranger is today announcing the close of a $5.25 million seed round led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, with participation from Alex Rodriguez, Firstminute Capital, Slow Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Raven1 Ventures and, of course, Montauk Ventures. Garrison spent 15 years in the insurance business (at AIG) and saw how neglected agents are at legacy insurance companies. Rather than spend a ton on marketing, Ranger is focused on giving agents (who are boots on the ground in the communities they serve) tools to respond more quickly to customers, generate better leads, maximize cross-sell to other products and personalize client services.

Co-founder and CTO Henry Bradlow had previously written algorithms to power rocket ships at SpaceX, so the trio —Calvano, Francisco Enriquez and Bradlow — was determined to find a way for artificial intelligence to streamline the construction back office.

Apparently when ABG became a Bolt customer in October 2020, reported Insider, Bolt entered a deal to award the group stock warrants, which give the holder the right to buy shares at a specified price before a specified date — under certain conditions.

After building mobile technology for fintechs and payment companies for the past 20 years, Lori Shao, CEO of Finli, started the mobile-first payment management company nearly 3 years ago when she noticed that she was around technology all day but still using a checkbook to manage household services, like landscaping and after-school programs.

In product terms, Peakflo is a collection of services, per Chauhan, including accounts receivable (money in), accounts payable (money out), a payment layer and an integration layer, linking the service to accounting software and some enterprise resource planning.

In April 2022, American Express and Pymnts.com published a survey that found that about two-thirds of firms that have automated accounts receivable processes report benefiting from improved days sales outstanding (a measure of the average number of days that it takes for a company to collect payment after a sale has been made), while about half said that they achieved lower delinquency rates.

Cash App last week launched Round Ups, allowing customers to invest their spare change into a stock of their choice or bitcoin every time they use their Cash Card. Even that new figure represented both a dramatic decline from Klarna’s mid-2021 valuation of more than $45 billion and the $30 billion figure it was reported to be targeting earlier this year, as our own Alex Wilhelm noted here.

Swedish buy now, pay later giant Klarna is reportedly close to inking a new round of funding that would slash its valuation to $6.5 billion – about 7x of what the company was valued in June of 2021.

CEO Lindsay McLean started the Santa Monica, California-based company in 2015 with attorney and real estate broker Jennifer Stein, after her own home-selling experience. Enter HomeLister, a digital brokerage and real estate site that gives homeowners a way to list and sell their properties online, with support.

Today, Conversion Capital is announcing that it has raised $122 million for its third fund — more than six times the size of its previous fund — to back early-stage fintech and infrastructure startups.

At the time of that last raise, Hughes told journalist that Amount’s clients included financial institutions collectively managing nearly $2 trillion in U.S. assets and servicing more than 50 million U.S. customers.

We found that fintech startups raised $1.5 billion from June 16 to June 23 across 39 deals — compared to $1.4 billion raised across 53 deals the week prior and $1.2 billion across 59 deals 2 weeks prior.

In addition, the latest funding will enable SleekFlow to enhance its product development with fintech and data analytics functions, one-click checkouts via social media platforms, and easy in-chat payment integrations for online to offline (O2O) and e-commerce brands’ seamless workflow.

While they provide digital wallets to help facilitate money transfers, there’s a lack of mobile wallet interoperability outside their ecosystem; in essence, moving money from one fintech wallet to another fintech or non-fintech wallet (in the case of an embedded finance play) is hard.

Those three executives are: Jillian White, general manager of Better’s affiliate businesses known as Better+, which consists of its title/settlement, insurance and home inspection departments; Megan Bellingham, who was senior vice president of sales and operations and John Moffatt, who served as vice president of sales.

Brex decision to stop serving SMB customers surprised many in the startup and fintech community. Businesses affected, he said, are mostly brick & mortar businesses such as bakeries, restaurants and small design agencies — many of whom would argue are being impacted by rising inflation and a challenging macro environment the most.

He has declined to reveal hard revenue figures, but previously told journalist Brex was still focused on growth and not yet profitable. Three months after announcing it would make a big push into software and enterprise, fintech giant Brex is apparently abandoning the very segment it started out to serve – small and medium-to-sized businesses.

Pazcare, a Bangalore-based employee benefits and insurtech platform, announced today it has raised $8.2 million led by Jafco Asia, bringing its valuation to $48 million. Pazcare currently offers health, term and accident insurance and outpatient health benefits. Malik told journalist the new funding will be used to expand Pazcare’s offerings and double its team size. Pazcare’s last round of funding was a $3.5 million seed round raised in October 2021.

In January 2020, HomeLight launched its flagship financial products, HomeLight Trade-In and HomeLight Cash Offer. As for the decision to acquire Accept, Uher said it was based in part on the fact that more companies have recently popped up in the proptech space with the goal to help homebuyers and sellers with various aspects of the buying and selling process and that HomeLight wanted to be even more competitive.

Many of us take prescription medication with little to no understanding of just how long it takes — or how much it costs — to get that drug to market. Conducting clinical trials of a given medication usually takes years and lots of money.

The Toronto-based company has been a leader in the realm of democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and peer-to-peer money transfers. And now it appears that Wealthsimple is an example of another company that experienced a boom during the early days of the pandemic and is now seeing a slowdown in business. It will scale back its efforts in areas such as peer-to-peer payments, tax and merchant services.

Christina Ross, Cube’s CEO and co-founder, told us she came up with the idea for the startup after working in CFO or head of finance roles at Eyeview, Criteo and Rent the Runway. And while Ross declined to reveal hard revenue figures, she said that ARR has grown five times — or 400% — in the past year, as the company has added new customers such as Acorns,

Flip has helped over 10 million people in Indonesia as of May this year, up from more than 7 million users in December 2021, to access financial transactions, including online interbank transfers to more than 100 domestic banks, e-wallet top-ups, and international remittances, enabling users to send money from Indonesia to over 45 countries and enterprise payment transfer products.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of Work Bank, plans to make an equity investment of up to €25 million ($26.43) into the Partech Africa Fund II (PAF II) by the Paris-based VC firm Partech.

Orman said she pushed back on a number of product roadmap suggestion from her other two co-founders, including making it look less like Mint, a personal finance platform adorned with graphs and data and more like a wallet that can inspire people to save.

Branch, according to co-founder and CEO Steve Lekas, is the only insurance company that he is aware of that can bind insurance through an API, and the only one that can bundle auto and home insurance in a single transaction.

Ecuadorian payments infrastructure company Kushki has raised $100 million in an extension to its Series B round, more than doubling its valuation to $1.5 billion. Put simply, Kushki aims to help make it easier, cheaper and more secure for businesses across LatAm to send and receive/process digital payments.

The startup, which provides multiple products for the cross-border commerce space in Africa, raised this new financing from a group of international investors co-led by American Express (AMEX) Ventures, the strategic investment group of American Express

Sanlo, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that offers small to medium-sized game and app companies access to tools to manage their finances and capital to fuel their growth, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Konvoy.

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.

As it seeks potential investments, 1Sharpe is focusing on three categories: financial transactions and access to capital; real estate human capital; and data and intelligence. The new firm will invest in 30 to 40 early-stage companies in the real estate technology world, with check sizes ranging from $500,000 to $2 million.

The startup, which targets motorcycle taxi (boda boda) operators, their passengers and users of other forms of public transport (hereafter commuters), is building a business around daily micro-payments for personal accident covers, with some premiums going as low as $0.1. Macharia’s interest in the sector began in 2018 when he launched a pay-per-use micro insurance product for motor vehicles — which was informed by data and patterns he had observed when he operated an automobile repair shop. The personal accident coverage for motorcycle taxi operators, which requires premiums of $0.1 day ($3 a month) includes medical expenses up to $6,000 annually, and payment for loss of income due to hospitalization following an accident, disability or death. Macharia said their approach was informed by studies showing that boda boda riders desired insurance products that went beyond asset coverage.

As part of the product capabilities around workflow, Zaparde said that Zip provides a no-code interface for building approval workflows within the product and has specifically focused its workflow capabilities on solving the intake-to-procure problem.

Nowports, an automated digital freight forwarder in Latin America, has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round which values the company at $1.1 billion.

Sources say the down round comes as MainStreet also pursues a recapitalization, in which older investors are selling their stakes at a discounted valuation with new ones entering at friendlier terms. Thus, MainStreet’s new said value could be a sign of investors needing cash, and yet another data point of tech startups experiencing valuation haircuts.

Belong, a startup that aims to address both these issues while giving renters a way to save toward home ownership, has just raised $50 million in equity and secured $30 million in debt to expand its offerings and markets it serves.

When Pedro Conrade started Brazilian digital bank Neon in 2016, he was a 23-year-old business school student who was frustrated with the service and costs associated with traditional banking in his country.

The investment marks SpotOn third raise in the past year alone and Dragoneer’s sixth time investing in the company over a three-year period. For context, SpotOn’s Series E raise at a $3.15 billion valuation was about 5x of its $625 million valuation at the time of its Series C round. It comes on the heels of a year in which the company says it saw 100% year-over-year ARR growth.

By partnering with existing financial services platforms such as Acorns, Truebill and Albert, Trellis aims to help businesses that have an audience that are already engaged, and that they are having financial conversations with, help bring insurance into the conversation.

Beyond those new offerings, in what is perhaps the most surprising new news to come out of the company today, Plaid said it is also hoping to turn new users into active customers through account funding, which will give people a way to pay, or be paid, for goods and services.

Since attracting a large enough base, QuestBook has been exploring ways to help developers secure funds to build their projects. Even as more than 34,000 new developers committed code for a web3 project in 2021, it’s still a tiny fraction of the global software engineers base, according to a recent report by Electric Capital.

In other words, Unit touts that companies using its technology in a variety of industries — such as freelance or creator economy and personal financial management, for example — can build financial products directly into their software.

A trio of PayPal Ventures alumni has raised $158 million for Infinity Ventures, a new early-stage venture firm dedicated to investing in fintech startups globally. Infinity’s inaugural fund has not been previously announced until today, but to date, Infinity has backed 11 companies in the U.S., Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

The round brings the company’s valuation to $842 million, nearly doubling the $447 million it was valued at after its Series C. Egyptian fintech Paymob, which enables merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store, raised $50 million in Series B funding. The rise of digital payments has changed the nature of how people do business with each other; and open banking — a movement in banking where incumbents are finally adopting newer technology such as APIs to open their systems to modern integrations — is leading to a wave of new payment methods, all of which are hoping to become as standard as cash or paying with cards. Last week, a company called Paddle, which has built a large business out of providing the billing backend for those SaaS products, announced a large funding round of $200 million as it gears up for its own next stage of growth.

Specifically, an S-4 filing by Aurora states: The Better Founder and CEO, in his personal capacity, has agreed to enter into a side letter with SoftBank, pursuant to which he may be liable for realized losses or receive payments in certain circumstances from SoftBank in connection with the Post-Closing Convertible Notes, which could divert the resources and attention of the Better Founder and CEO from our business and have a negative impact on his personal financial situation.

Altro (Perch) announced today it has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round led by Pendulum, with participation from Marcy Ventures, as well as Citi Ventures, Black Capital Fund, Concrete Rose Fund and individual investors such as Dick Parsons and Deborah Quazzo.

By offering invoice and recurring revenue financing, Crowdz says it wants to help SMEs have a greater shot at success by opening up access to capital. The company’s latest financing is part of an ongoing $200 million investment from Citi into technology creating social impact, and was led by its Spread Products Investment Technologies (SPRINT) team, the strategic investing arm of the bank’s Global Spread Products division.

Over the past year, Habi says it has worked on building out its services and proprietary database, so that it can offer customers a full stack of services including iBuyer, brokerage, financial services and a marketplace. With this latest raise, Habi says it has become the second unicorn in Colombia and only LatAm unicorn with a female founder and CEO.

When people download the Arianee app and add the digital passport to their smartphone, brands get a new channel to reach their customers. Arianee has raised a $21 million Series A round (€20 million) in a round led by Tiger Global

Stripe’s launch of its new Financial Connections product. The product launch in and of itself was newsworthy, yes. But what elevated it in the world of newsworthiness was that it sparked some controversy, as it is pretty much exactly what Plaid, a one-time partner of Stripe’s, does

That first fund proved so successful — it ranked in the top 5% of its vintage, according to data from Cambridge Associates — that Jalanbo managed to attract one of the largest investment firms in the world as an LP for his second fund — Tiger Global.

Consumers purchase Weather Guarantee protection when booking travel reservations and ticketed attractions online and if a weather event, such as rain, is forecasted to occur during the covered experience, Sensible automatically sends a reimbursement. The new capital will allow Sensible to grow its deep pool of top engineering and scientific talent, accelerate the development of its proprietary climate data and risk analytics platform and expand its Weather Guarantee offering into international markets.

In an interview with journalist, Neo co-founder and CEO Andrew Chau shared that he and co-founders Jeff Adamson, Chris Simair and Kris Read started Neo to challenge the Big Five banks that own some 90% of the country’s market share.

Those updates to Stripe’s ACH Debit product were a hint of the news today considering that it was launched with the ability to instantly verify bank accounts, a feature that is competitive with Plaid’s Auth product.

He estimates that only 55% can get a life insurance product with a traditional insurance company. The company wants to make it easier to access life insurance products in Europe.

Tactic's software, Jaskiw said, helps companies automatically categorize transactions and apply accounting logic such as calculating $USD gain/loss and taxable events. Tactic, she said, has partnered with accounting firms to help interpret accounting guidelines for DeFi-specific activities such as staking, NFT minting and airdrops.

Truist — one of the nation largest financial institutions — has acquired Long Game, a 12-person fintech startup that has raised over $20 million in venture capital, executives told journalist exclusively.

But in this case, that may actually be serving as a tailwind for Point and companies like it, although Lim emphasizes that Point is not out to replace refinancings, for example. Point then values the home — often with an in-home appraisal — and updates the final offer.

In early April, Bolt announced plans to acquire crypto startup Wyre for $1.5 billion, a staggering amount for any company, but especially one in a space as mired with controversy as this one. After a week of making headlines, one-click checkout startup Bolt has issued a public response to questions about how it faring in the competitive space.

Bharat Founders Fund and a number of entrepreneurs, including Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal, DeFi Pulse founder Scott Lewis, AngelList India head Utsav Somani, The Graph’s Pranav Maheshwari, and Treebo founder Rahul Chaudhary also participated in the round. It offers developers the ability to make their own NFTs interact with data feeds of their choice, which could be a web3 platform such as Chainlink or a Web 2.0 outlet like Weather.com.

Sumutasu, a Tokyo-based proptech startup that offers a direct online real estate purchase service, has secured $8.2 million in equity and $1.6 million in debt.

Rozic teamed up with Paola Sanchez and Tomislav Biscan to build a new payments network for cash-based economies in order to enable money to flow as easily as information does. Bogota-based payments infrastructure startup Minka has secured $24 million in a funding round co-led by Tiger Global Management and Kaszek.

A lot of B2B payments tech is built on top of B2C tech, such as Stripe, that was engineered to handle consumer card transactions, according to de Souza. As such, according to de Souza, a company accounting department can waste time manually searching for payments, and then even more time trying to reconcile individual invoices.

Seattle-based Copper offers features such as personalized debit cards, access to 50,000 ATMs and support for digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Fiat Ventures General Partner Alex Harris, who was head of growth at digital bank Chime in its early days, is joining Copper’s board as part of the financing.

In addition to payment methods, Arrow also integrates shipping information and affiliated loyalty programs, so customers see everything on a single checkout page. Arrow can be integrated into shopping platforms like WooCommerce or Magneto or through APIs that let merchants replace their existing storefronts with Arrow.

Skyflow, which sells data privacy tools for corporate customers, this morning announced a partnership with Plaid, a unicorn that helps pass fintech data between parties through an API. So, data privacy matters quite a lot to Plaid, and Skyflow was willing to cook up a special variation of its standard product recipe just for the fintech API company’s customers. Sharma also stressed that due to the technology that underpins Skyflow — polymorphic data encryption — users of his company data storage system can still run workflows and analysis on their information without decrypting it. I’d hazard that Plaid views data privacy in the fintech space as a key plank undergirding its future; if consumers lose faith that using fintech apps and services is secure, their interest in connecting with said products could decline.

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.

Convoy, a digital freight network that connects shippers with carriers, has raised $260 million in fresh funding to scale up initiatives that will push the trucking tech industry into new ground.

Much of Lyric core team regrouped and decided to focus on building out what is today Wheelhouse, as the remote work environment precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic led to more people seeking longer-term rentals.

Tokio Marine, a Tokyo-headquartered insurance corporation, said Tuesday it has launched its $42 million corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, dubbed Tokio Marine Future Fund, to invest in early-stage startups around the world.

BlockApps has raised $41 million in a new funding round to continue its expansion into the enterprise blockchain space, the company president and CEO Kieren James-Lubin.

With 12 million users and nearly $200 million in annual recurring revenue, expense software provider Emburse has built much of its business in the enterprise. Historically, it has competed with legacy players like Concur and Expensify and ERP players. But now Emburse is making a big push into the SMB space and going head-to-head with \[…\]

Today, decacorn Brex revealed that it is making a big push into financial software with the release of a new spend management product called Brex Empower. Brex is one of a number of companies in the corporate spend management space that has grown increasingly crowded — and competitive — in recent years.

Today, said Sathyanesan, Winden offers digital entrepreneurs features such as free ACH, wire and check payments and the ability to manage transactions, payments and expenses in one place. In August 2021, Winden was born as a neobank that offers deposit banking, spend management and other financial products for digital entrepreneurs.

Using EvolutionIQ, Vykruta claims that a claims adjuster, who may have hundreds of cases active at a time, can better understand short-term disability, long-term disability, workers comp and property and casualty claims.

Diane Yu, CTO of Better.com, is transitioning from her position as chief technology officer to an advisory role a day after the digital mortgage lender announced a voluntary separation program to certain employees, according to an internal memo obtained by journalist.

Notably, dozens of angel investors also put money in Truora’s latest financing round. Truora, a Colombian user authentication startup, has raised $15 million in Series A funding co-led by two Silicon Valley-based venture firms.

Merritt Hummer, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said she doesn’t view Fidel API as a competitor to expense management players, but rather an enabler of them. Fidel API says it has tripled its growth metrics and quadrupled its card base year-over-year since launching in 2018, according to CEO and co-founder Dev Subrata.

Affirm is giving job offers to the ‘vast majority’ of Fast engineers Fast posted a paltry six-figure revenue total in 2021, despite raising a $102 million Series B led by Stripe.

One of Gotrade’s key markets is Indonesia, where Gotrade has launched Gotrade Indonesia. Gotrade Indonesia says it is the first platform in Indonesia to offer this kind of market access for U.S. stocks, meaning that its users don’t have to go through a foreign stockbroker or trade CFDs locally while accumulating substantial fees.

Demonstrating that there a robust market for contract management solutions, LinkSquares, a company developing intelligent software that helps brands maintain and ink new contracts, today announced that it raised $100 million in Series C financing led by G Squared.

Another relatively new company delivering data analytics to retailers is Black Crow AI, which today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Imaginary Ventures.

Bijan Moallemi, Joe Garafalo and Brian Campbell started San Diego-based Mosaic in 2019 after meeting at Palantir Technologies, where they worked on building out that company finance organization as the company grew to 2,500 people and over $750 million in revenue. Mosaic, which aims to change the way CFOs of high-growth companies operate, has raised $25 million in a Series B round of funding led by Founders Fund.

The latest round marks the third time that a16z has put money in Cross River Bank, with the first time being in the company’s first institutional round that closed in October of 2016 — a $28 million financing which ended up closing at $30 million as others added to it.

Put even more simply, January strives to be a tech-enabled collections agency service that collects the debt on behalf of creditors in a civilized way. Their other alternatives are to outsource collections to third-party agencies or sell their accounts to entities known as debt buyers, who then place the accounts with agencies and attorneys. Brewer Lane Ventures led the company’s latest financing, which brings January’s total raised to $16 million.

Quick thoughts: This is another area that YC clearly sees as beginning to show promise, with past YC companies that include CrowdForce (which raised $3.6 million in funding last month) and Kudi (it raised $55 million last summer at a $500 million valuation). Blocknom Website: https://blocknom.com Founded: 2021 Location: Jakarta, Indonesia Team size: 6 Promises include: Providing an alternative payment infrastructure without the need for a payment card or consumer app so that customers can pay businesses from their phones without internet access. Among them is Mina Shahid, co-founder and CEO, who says he is a two-time founder and previously worked with co-founder Ben Best at another lending company in Ghana that failed.

Embedded finance product for SMEs Churpy is also set to roll out a working capital financing product targeting small to medium enterprises supplying to the enterprise customers signed up to the startup’s SaaS product. The startup is connected with some of the largest banks in the region — including Citibank, Sidian, Stanbic and NCBA — through its API.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and NFX co-led Latitud’s $11.5 million seed funding round, which also included participation from Endeavor, Canary, FJ Labs, Ganas Ventures and unicorn founders.

The company operates with an asset light model, Rubin said, in that it doesn’t need cash to buy homes and rather uses money from when people are rolling in their equity from their homes. He was drawn to Flock’s ability to allow any landlord to roll their properties into the portfolio it has created, while still providing the former landlord with the same income stream with no immediate tax consequences A startup called Flock Homes wants to give landlords a similar ability to own shares of a portfolio that is made up of multiple properties and it just raised a $26 million Series A funding round toward that effort.

Kwik, a Nigeria and French-based startup that provides logistics services to B2B merchants, from social vendors to e-commerce platforms, has raised $2 million in Series A funding. Since launching in Lagos in 2019 and extending its presence to Abuja, the company has onboarded more than 100,000 merchants who use Kwik’s site and mobile apps to run the logistical, commercial and financial needs of their businesses.

Simetrik recently began offering a payment methods orchestrator, which it says allows payment services companies to be able to connect directly to different payment methods. In other words, ​​says co-founder and COO Santiago Gomez, the company’s software automates reconciliation for financial teams that have a high number of transactions and reports.

Less than seven months after closing on a $57 million Series B, fast-growing fintech Jeeves has raised $180 million in a Series C round that values the company at $2.1 billion. For example, Jeeves says that since its Series B was announced in September, it has seen its revenue climb by 900% and doubled its client base to more than 3,000 companies.

Rafael Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Wealth, which emerged from stealth today, believes his company is taking a more unique approach by appealing to employers that want to offer more value-added benefits. Estate planning startup Wealth is going after a $180 billion U.S. market.

Earlier this month, Ramp also announced a partnership with Amazon for Business, in which customers can connect their Amazon Business account to Ramp and then anytime an employee uses one of its cards to make a purchase, Ramp automatically pulls the receipt. Notably, Ramp is college friends Glyman and Atiyeh’s second venture in the spend management industry following the sale of online price tracker Paribus to Capital One in 2016.

But Jack Kudale, the founder and CEO, tells me that it’s projecting its policy holder base to grow three-fold in the next 12 months, to 35,000-40,000 customers (which would imply something around 17,000-20,000 businesses currently), and that its premium run rate (the insurance industry’s revenue run rate equivalent) has grown 40x this year, to $200 million, in what is still a very nascent market, with less than 10% of small businesses in the country currently taking out cyber insurance policies.

But starting today, Stilt said, any fintech or digital bank that wants to offer credit building tools, revolving lines of credit or personal loans to its customers could do so using its API-powered product.

Last year, when the company planned to go public via a SPAC, it had projected revenue of $126 million for the year, according to its deck, as analyzed by our own Alex Wilhelm. Savings and investing app Acorns has raised $300 million in a Series F funding round that values the company at nearly $2 billion.

Branch, which aims to power faster payments to contract workers with its technology, has raised $75 million in a Series C funding round that has closed just six months after it announced its last financing round.

At that time, New York-based Selfbook was valued at $125 million — so it has essentially seen a 2.4x increase in valuation from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022 and a 38x increase after it raised a $2 million seed round in April of 2021. Hotel payment software provider Selfbook has completed a $15 million extension of its Series A financing that values the company at $300 million.

Toyosaki, who also headed up marketing at Bitcoin.com, told journalist in an interview that many of the strategies available to crypto derivatives traders today are fairly risky, a motivating factor behind why she founded Cega, which she says is the first-ever DeFi exotic derivatives protocol. Now, Cega, a new protocol founded by former UBS derivatives trader Arisa Toyosaki, is setting out to create a new category within DeFi — exotic derivatives.

And today the startup is emerging from stealth with $10.8 million in pre-seed and seed financing from Contour Venture Partners, Infinity Ventures (from the team that led PayPal Ventures), B Capital, Portage Ventures, Amex Ventures and other prominent venture funds and fintech angels, it tells journalist exclusively.

Online mortgage lender Better.com is poised to lay off roughly 50% of its staff of about 8,000 this week, sources familiar with internal happenings at the company told journalist on Monday.

CEO and co-founder Matias Recchia said this allows the business owners to free up capital to expand their business while staying in the same location. The company said the majority of real estate investment trusts (REITS) focus on deals above $10 million, but properties valued at less than that price account for one-third of the U.S. commercial real estate value.

The Salt Lake City, Utah-based company’s API-delivered product, which focuses on payroll data, powers 70 banks, credit unions and fintech companies such as Coinbase, Dave and Propel. Atomic, a provider of payroll APIs, has raised $40 million in Series B funding just five months after announcing its Series A financing.

In addition to allowing patients to finance their bills, Susu proposes a collective financing solution where family members living locally or in the diaspora can also help patients finance their monthly subscription fees via care bundles. Susu offers care packages or bundles to patients suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension and pregnant women who require careful management to ensure their conditions are monitored and get the preventative advice to live the best way with their conditions. While insurtech incumbents and upstarts such as CarePay and Reliance Health try to make insurance readily available for the rest of the market via partnerships with companies or by enabling weekly to monthly subscription charges, users are still required most times to pay out of pocket. Care bundles are basically medical calendars composed of doctor consultations, nurse visits, medical advice sent by SMS and a combination of other medical activities for patients.

In the works is Zeller Financial Services, which will include credit and debit cards and expense management tools, as well as enhanced analytics through Zeller’s dashboard. Zeller’s product roadmap includes new omni-channel commerce capabilities, like the ability to accept online payments through integrations with website and e-commerce platforms.

Existing backers Accel (which led its Series A) and Point Nine Capital (which led its seed round) also participated, along with Abstract Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap, Daedalus, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Optimism co-founder and CEO Jinglan Wang, Eric Ries, founder of Long-Term Stock Exchange and Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software.

Riogrande plans to have about 30 brands under its umbrella.

Last week, the board terminated the position of Madhuri Grover, following which she tweeted damaging information about the startup’s other co-founders and questioned the integrity of Rajnish Kumar, a board member of BharatPe and who previously served as the chairman of the State Bank of India.

Volopay, founded by Shaji and the startup’s chief technology officer Rajesh Raikwar, wants to disrupt traditional business banking and offer companies a control center for all their financial management needs without the hassle and limitation of a traditional bank.

Leasy, a startup that offers automobile financing to ride-hailing drivers in Latin America via a subscription model, has secured $2 million in equity and $15 million in debt.

The startup also offers renters credit reporting options, so they can have their on-time rent payment reported to the credit bureaus to help boost their credit scores. Piñata wants to reward renters for making on-time payments by giving them in-app currency — dubbed Piñata Cash.

The challenges her father faced as a business owner in the construction industry always stayed in the back of her mind, so when Lin got the entrepreneurial itch, it was a natural move to help start a company that helped trade contractors better control their finances.

Promise works with utilities and government agencies to provide flexibility in payments for people who can’t cover their whole water or electricity bill at once.

Finary also believes that building a new private bank also means that the most active customers should be able to own a stake in the startup. The company is also working on additional features, such as a family mode, a better way to track RSUs (or BSPCE in France) and the ability to separate personal wealth from professional wealth.

Multiple players have emerged with various solutions — from software to corporate cards — to help businesses of all types and sizes better manage their expenses and save money and time while doing it.

By purchasing Purely Capital, Pipe has now created a new media and entertainment division on its platform, giving independent distributors the opportunity to trade their revenue streams in the same way a SaaS company could.

Clearco co-founder Andrew D’Souza tells journalist that he has stepped back from his role as chief executive at the fintech company.

During an interview in December last year, Mbaabu told journalist that RejaReja expects its merchants to grow to 1 million by the end of this year as it works toward digitizing the estimated 100 million small traders across sub-Saharan Africa.

The latest events at the company involve the resignations of four more top executives, including Clayton Carol, the company VP of finance; Christian Wallace, head of real estate; Paul Tyger, general manager of purchase; and Stephen Rosen, head of sales.

If companies are operating primarily in crypto, Deel says, they don’t have to worry about paying any of the exchange fees to convert it into, say USD, before they pay their employees.

To that end, and like the aforementioned spend management companies, Coast has created a commercial charge card designed for the businesses that operate vehicle fleets, such as trucking companies, plumbers, HVAC businesses or last-mile delivery companies.

If you run an organization that mostly receives and sends crypto assets and if you want to pay people in cryptocurrencies, chances are you could use something like Multis.

Specifically, in addition to guaranteeing rent, Nomad has a financial product embedded in its core offering that allows property owners to tap into their future rental income by requesting up to six months of rent advance.

Genesis, which has built a low-code/no-code application platform specifically for the financial markets, announced today it has landed a $200 million investment led by Tiger Global Management.

Contact Financial Holding, Egypt non-bank consumer finance provider, has invested $9 million in the country’s e-commerce super-app Wasla, setting the stage for the rollout of new online shopping capabilities, products and regional expansion.

Mundi, a financial services platform for cross-border trade, announced today it has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures.

Early-stage fintech-focused venture firm Better Tomorrow Ventures has raised $225 million for its second fund — triple the amount it raised for its debut fund that closed in September of 2020. Founded by Sheel Mohnot and Jake Gibson in November of 2019, San Francisco-based Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) has allocated $150 million to invest in startups at the pre-seed and seed stages.

On its LinkedIn page, the company said: Today, we made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our company based on the impacts of the changing real estate market. Limited housing inventory has also created a challenging real estate market for home buyers; driving up prices and making homeownership less and less accessible.

The payment option can be integrated in the payment terminals, or merchants can generate a payment link and share it with customers. Alma has a payment option that lets you buy something and pay 15 or 30 days later. No late fees.

Today, Neo.Tax is announcing that it has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Infinity Ventures with participation from Google Ventures, Acrew Capital and Fin Venture Capita.

Yele Oyekola, a former product lead at Carbon, started Duplo based on his experience as an economic policy officer for the UN in Africa, where touring different countries opened his eyes to how people and businesses were heavily reliant on cash.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and coinciding recent changes to federal lease accounting standards combined have forced companies to have more ownership over their real estate, noted Occupier co-founder Matt Giffune. The New York-based startup has developed lease management software for commercial real estate tenants and brokers. The company original focus was on offices as an asset class but has expanded over time to include any business that has a real estate strategy –– from healthcare clinics to retailers to warehouses. The COVID-19 pandemic has created all sorts of real estate issues for companies as it forced so many employees to work from home, leaving empty space all over the globe.

As for where the donations go to ostensibly grow, Daffy currently provides its customers access to nine funds but Nash said to expect many more to appear on the platform over time.

As proof that web3 is not some passing trend, blockchain infrastructure startup Alchemy announced today that it has closed on a $200 million Series C1 equity round that values the company at $10.2 billion.

While some customers use these accounts, others still exchange currency from their cards or domiciliary bank accounts with limited bank partners supporting foreign exchange transfers in Nigeria.

And Silvr doesn’t necessarily replace VC money, as 35% of Silvr’s clients have raised capital from VC funds. When a company applies to unlock some credit with Silvr, they grant access to various data sources — the corporate bank account.

Like other Southeast Asian investment apps that have attracted venture capital over the past year (a partial list includes Indonesia’s Pluang, which recently raised a $55 million follow-on to its Series B, Bibit, Ajaib, Pintu and Syfe), Infina is focused on first-time Gen Z and millennial investors.

While clients interact with Numeral using a modern application programming interface (API), the startup connects directly to bank servers to upload payment files and interact with outdated information systems.

journalist has learned that Sarah Pierce, who served as executive vice president of customer experience, sales and operations, and Emanuel Santa-Donato, who was senior vice president of capital markets and growth, are no longer with the digital mortgage company.

Users’ investments in digital gold is backed by physical gold of the same amount and they can choose to withdraw that much gold or liquidate their investments at any time, said Misbah Ashraf, co-founder and chief product officer of Jar.

Bold, a technology company working to enable financial access to electronic payments in Colombia, has raised $55 million in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management.

With Pluto, he said, businesses can control spend before it even happens, by creating unlimited virtual and physical cards with spend controls that can be connected to existing business bank accounts and category restrictions.

Lami co-designs products with its underwriting partners, extending unique insurance products to their customers, and through its technological infrastructure, facilitates the distribution of insurance products via a B2B2C approach.

The peer-to-peer open source wireless network called Pollen Mobile will incentivize its users with cryptocurrency to run their own mini cell towers and build out the network coverage in the Bay Area where the service is initially launching

Melonn, a Colombian startup that provides fulfillment and software services to small and medium-sized e-commerce companies in Latin America, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by QED Investors.

The idea for Casava came while VisaCover provided an alternative in the auto insurance market by allowing drivers of Uber, which was one of its partners, to make weekly insurance payments instead of quarterly or yearly payments insurance partners before it operated.

Withco mission is to purchase properties and then rent them back to small business owners with the option to purchase the property at a future date. For Song, withco is also about putting more control in the hands of small business owners, which face more challenges than ever before.

While this is easier for customers, it has created headaches for many software, or SaaS, businesses that are not equipped with billing systems that can easily charge customers on a usage basis. Woody agrees, adding that Metronome can help companies that have built a new product that they want to get out into the market as quickly as possible.

A startup with the easy-to-remember name of The.com aims to modernize website building while also ensuring that web creators get credit for their work. The founders have a background in website development and design, having run their own web development agency in Boulder from 2012 through 2019, before founding The.com. Instead, The.com’s site builder uses community-created components you can drop into your site and share with others. That means they can pick up a navigation element from one The.com creator, a footer from someone else, and other elements like hero images, headers, banners, body elements, and more from different community members.

Today it extending the whole process further by launching real estate-backed NFTs in the United States, working on the technological and legal framework to literally turn real estate properties into NFTs.

His goal is to raise $10 million for the new fund (of which he has so far brought in $4 million), and already it has a diverse group of LPs.

Today, Yu and Yang’s new company, San Francisco-based Vesta, is announcing it has raised $30 million in Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from new investor Zigg Capital.

The data could help Parthean evolve to a platform that can offer consumers financial advice when they need it most, such as budgeting tips after a spend-heavy weekend or investment advice after a big crypto moment.

But in 2021, NALA started testing international money transfers after some users expressed interest in moving money from the U.K. to East African countries (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), thus ushering the Tanzanian fintech into the remittance business.

Founders Fund Partner Matias Van Thienen said his firm had been looking for an investing and savings platform in Latin America that could offer global equities with a high-quality product and a suitable regulatory approach.

For example, one company in the space, Optimal Blue, was purchased by Black Knight for $1.8 billion in 2020 to boost its data and analytics capabilities Carmel believes Polly stands out from others in the industry in that it is helping create a fourth category in the mortgage sector — capital markets.

In his view, CaptivateIQ alleviates these pain points by taking the flexibility of spreadsheets and combining it with the scalability and performance of software technology to configure commissions plans with minimal support.

Syndicate’s suite of smart contracts can walk users through the process of formalizing their club with a legal entity and handling things like setting up a bank account and getting tax forms to ensure stuff stays above-board.

The company also has a tech hub in Spain (Furio’s home country), where about 20% of the company’s tech team is based. It also runs Creditas Store, an e-commerce platform with a payroll-deductible buy now, paylater model and Voltz, a manufacturer of electric motorcycles in Brazil (and after its strategic investment in Voltz Motors, next-generation EV motorcycles and scooters).

What sets Moss apart from its competitors is that it offers credit cards, not debit cards. And if a restaurant doesn’t accept card payments, Moss also handles cash expenses and reimbursements.

Vartana plans to use its equity funding to work on its product roadmap, which involves adding more staff to its current headcount of 17 across engineering, operations and sales.

While Luko isn’t disclosing terms of the deal, the company says it a 100% share deal, which means that Coya investors are now Luko investors.

M2P Fintech, a payments infrastructure startup that has established market dominance in India, has raised $56 million in a new financing round, less than three months after closing its previous funding, as it works to deepen its footprints in several international geographies.

Ancient8, Vietnam blockchain gaming guild, develops a community and software platform to enable everyone to play P2E (play-to-earn) games and build the metaverse while earning rewards.

Vilner says the firm’s name was one he kept hearing over and over, and he and co-founder Danni Friedland were interested in Felicis’ fund for SaaS and software, thinking it would be the right fit. Joining Felicis are existing investors NFX, Eight Roads Ventures and A Capital and a group of strategic angel investors, including Salesforce president and CMO Sarah Franklin, Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, TripActions co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen and Papaya Global co-founder and CEO Eynat Guez. After securing a $15 million Series A in August, Walnut, a company that creates sales and marketing demo experiences, is back to announce its new round of $35 million in Series B financing. Walnut no-code platform enables teams to create customized product demonstrations quickly, be able to integrate them into their sales and marketing processes and then generate insights from the demos. Since the Series A, the company grew a staggering 700% in annual recurring revenue, co-founder and CEO Yoav Vilner told journalist.

Zanifu works with a number of manufacturers and distributors to extend the credit to these small businesses with retailers already sourcing products from the startup’s partners qualifying for the financing.

Since the Philippines’ payment sector is fragmented, customers can pay back their BNPL loans a variety of ways, including digital wallets, bank transfers, direct debit, linking their bank account or over-the-counter payments in physical stores like 7-Eleven.

Tencent could hook Easy Transfer with the right local partner with the necessary license for sending money overseas, said Gao, and Easy Transfer will focus on building a local team and an easy-to-use product like WeRemit.

So far, VCs have been a strong customer acquisition channel for Arc, noted Lombardo, who pointed to the fact that Arc’s largest partnership today is with Y Combinator, which is promoting Arc across its portfolio of thousands of software companies.

Aiming to give merchants more control over this, Seel, which focuses on underwriting e-commerce returns, is leveraging artificial intelligence to build proprietary underwriting software that uses hundreds of signals to predict the probability of return as soon as an order is placed.

Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor.

Web3Auth, a non-custodial key infrastructure solution for web3 apps and wallets, wants to solve these problems by leveraging social accounts and devices that mainstream users already own to enable users to manage their keys intuitively.

Refyne has raised a new financing round, just seven months after securing its previous funding, as the Bengaluru-based startup scales its platform that helps workers access their earned salaries in real time.

As its earlier customers have grown and matured, Brex is now adapting to also serve mid-market to larger businesses which have different financial needs as they grow. In terms of customers, Brex continues to serve startups or e-commerce companies that might be smaller businesses but with higher growth.

KoinWorks was originally created to help SMEs, which are often turned away by traditional financial institutions, get access to working capital. Over the last three years, Indonesian fintechs focused on SMEs have grown to include other neobanks and startups that started out as accounting software but are expanding to include working capital loans and other financial services.

While there are still a lot of SMEs that are not using Qonto in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, Qonto also plans to enter new market in 2023.

Rupifi has raised $25 million in a new financing round as the Indian startup, which currently provides buy now, pay later service to several marketplaces to serve their merchants, looks to expand its business-to-business payments offerings. Buy now, pay later is Rupifi’s marquee offering today, but Jain, who previously worked at American Express and Razorpay, and sold his edtech platform StudyBud in an all-cash deal, said that the startup will be expanding its product offerings in the next few months. Rupifi works with more than two dozen business-to-business marketplaces.

But Bankaya, a Mexico City-based financial services startup, is attributing its early traction on the opposite model — going after target customers in person.

A majority of Petal members had thin or no credit history when they first applied for a Petal card, and more than 40% of new members approved for a Petal card in 2021 were first denied credit by a major bank, the company said.

With 700 employees in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and London, PayFit now wants to diversify its product offering, integrate with more third-party products and improve its customer service.

For example, these included four new payments products — Direct, for account-to-account bank transfers; Disburse for remittances directly from accounts; Pay, a no-code solution for micro-businesses to collect payments; and for enterprise customers, IPG, a platform created for large financial institutions to collect payments on behalf of merchants.

The continent is already a global leader in mobile money adoption, accounting for the bulk of the mobile money transactions made in 2020 — a year that saw the number of mobile money accounts rise by 43%. For instance, M-Pesa, a mobile money service by East Africa’s biggest telco, Safaricom, does not require internet connectivity for its customers to send and receive money, as well as to pay utility bills — the wallet turns subscribers’ phone numbers into a sort of proxy for bank accounts.

The Koko Club products, displayed in designated spaces within the agents’ small shops, will only be sold to registered Koko Club members. Koko Club, its new business line, is selling the products directly to consumers through the dukas (small shops) that currently serve as the company agents for its bio-ethanol cooking fuel and stoves. The shop owners (agents) are using Koko’s PoS system to sign up customers, capturing their biodata, and issuing them with an electronic card that they will use when buying products from any Koko Club shop.

Industry veteran Jitendra Gupta consumer-focused neobank Jupiter has raised about $86 million in a new financing round as the Bangalore-based startup gears up to offer its customers lending and wealth management services. Tiger Global, QED and Sequoia Capital India co-led the two-year-old startup’s Series C round.