FinTech news in venture capital category

F3C’s “secret sauce” is that they are all operators and therefore are intimately familiar with the startup journey and what it takes to develop a successful company.

The round included 70 participants, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital and Finality Capital, as well as angel investors like AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant.

Bain Capital, which just closed its second growth Tech Opportunities fund with $2.4 billion, up from the $1.3 billion that the outfit put to work through the first vehicle of its type in 2019.

When Sequoia’s portfolio company Stripe eventually goes public, for example, rather than distribute Stripe’s shares to its investors, Sequoia — assuming it has the blessing of its limited partners —  is more likely to move the prized company’s shares from the many different vehicles that it has used to back Stripe into its Sequoia Capital Fund with the expectation that those shares will continue to rise in value. Indeed, presumably to ensure some stability at its outset, Sequoia banned redemptions from the Sequoia Capital Fund for its first two years, though going forward, if its investors want some liquidity from Sequoia Capital Fund, they will have two chances each year to ask for this via some combination of shares and cash. The number represents two things: the value of the stock that Sequoia has rolled into its permanent fund from its legacy funds — these are shares in now-public companies that Sequoia backed as startups, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Unity, and Snowflake. Almost a year ago to the day, the 50-year-old investing powerhouse Sequoia Capital announced that it had reorganized itself around a singular, permanent structure: The Sequoia Capital Fund.

Passthrough competes directly with firms like Anduin and Plus Subscribe, which offer a suite of investment fund services including customer relationship management systems, investor portals and data storage. According to Flannery, Passthrough has processed billions of dollars in investments for more than 12,000 unique investors and over 250 customers, including $50 million venture firms and $100 billion dollar-plus global asset managers. Our goal is that no matter how investors invest into a venture fund, private equity fund, or any other alternative asset, Passthrough will be the one powering it. Flannery says that the round — which values Passthrough at $50 million — will be put toward product R&D, marketing and scaling Passthrough’s core offering.

Real estate accounts for 40% of CO2 emissions, and yet the venture climate tech venture capital ecosystem only has historically put about 6% of climate VC dollars toward tech for the real estate industry. Never mind that just last month, Fifth Wall closed the largest-ever venture fund focused on real-estate tech startups with $866 million in capital, or that it closed a $500 million fund earlier in 2022 that aims to decarbonize the property industry. To put that in perspective, the U.S. GDP is like $22 trillion to $23 trillion, and we have to decarbonize the real estate industry over the next 20 years, so one way to think about that is that we have to roughly spend one year of U.S. GDP over the next 20 just on decarbonizing our physical assets. How is it that your many real estate investing partners are investing so much capital with you when it’s such a challenging time for real estate, particularly office buildings?

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.

The above makes Nichole Wischoff something of an exception: Her solo venture capital firm Wischoff Ventures closed a second fund of $20 million, a sizable increase from her first $5 million fund. According to a summary of an analysis that Wischoff conducted, family offices now account for more than half of her second fund, compared to about a third of her first fund. Beyond fintech Wischoff’s existing portfolio includes companies such as Coast Pay, Loop, Nuvo, Trustlayer and Vesta – a heavy fintech leaning owing to Wischoff’s background. Backers of this new fund include Peter Thiel, Lee Fixel, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Chen, Bain Capital, Byers Capital, Cendana Capital, Crossover, Insight Partners and others.

However, since the first close of this fund, Ventures Platform, which made a complete exit during Paystack’s sale to Stripe, has upped its game and now cuts Series A checks for its portfolio companies, some of which can directly access follow-on capital (Series B up) from the firm’s limited partners. First, Damilola Teidi, the former director of startup support at incubation hub CcHUB, heads the firm’s Platform and Networks team and Desigan Chinniah, an early engineer at eBay and well-known investor who has backed some African startups, joins the firm as a venture partner. Launch Africa, the VC firm that has backed over 100 startups, closes first fund at $36.3M Byld Ventures, a $15M fund, backs fintechs in Africa He launched an on-demand food delivery platform in the U.K. a decade ago, ran Starta, an advisory firm for upstarts and scale-ups on the continent, worked as a principal at Pan-African fund Novastar Ventures, and most recently, was the chief commercial officer (CCO) at QED-backed TeamApt.

The three-year-old company has been dealing with shrinking market share and layoffs, yet according to a Financial Times piece from earlier this year, its founder was able to take $195 million worth of shares off the table while also retaining nearly 40% of the company and voting control. In a story just tonight about Pipe, journalist’s Mary Ann Azevedo writes that the three-year-old marketplace has only one outside board member who is not a cofounder of the company, and that individual has been a VC for three years. And, Gurley pegs secondary sale transactions (red flag #8) as an obvious danger. Another issue is dual-class shares (red flag #3), which in many cases give entrepreneurs the power to ignore the wishes of investors.

We obtained a letter that Drive sent out to its limited partners tonight that reads: Dear Limited Partner, This week an article was published indicating that our Partner Emeritus Mark Kvamme is launching a new investment fund. Columbus Business First reported that Kvamme, who races cars, is not zipping off to semi-retirement but instead talking with potential backers about a new fund, the Ohio Fund, which will apparently invest in multiple asset classes, including other funds, public stocks, private companies in Ohio, and infrastructure. In fact, in June, the firm — cofounded by veteran VCs Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen — seemed to be riding high, with a couple of apparent wins and news funds that brought Drive’s assets under management to more than $2 billion. According to our sources, part of the split traces to a relationship between Olsen and Yasmine Lacaillade, who was Drive’s COO for nearly seven years before leaving the firm in April to launch her own investment outfit.

Jack Selby, a former PayPal exec the longtime managing director of Thiel Capital said: "I will never voluntarily leave the orbit of Peter Thiel. It’s a pretty amazing seat to have."

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is often associated with trusting blockchain technology to execute services through smart contracts, while centralized finance (CeFi) usually refers to more traditional business models and involves having people manage funds and manually execute services. As the crypto market digests the past few days of chaos, venture capitalists see the moment as a warning, but also an opportunity for the growth of decentralization and maturation of the larger blockchain space. When there are massive crashes and burns, it speaks to what we’ve been seeing over the past decade: It the Wild West out there, Samantha Lewis, principal at Mercury, said to journalist.

The study also showed that startups founded and co-founded by women received less than half the average investments made into companies led by men, even though the female led startups generated 10% more revenue over time. Privilège Ventures’ LPs are mainly high net-worth individuals and family offices, the firm says, and the fund aims to write 15-20 early-stage checks, with initial investments in the $250,000 range. The firm says that its investment thesis is based on the statistical evidence that women perform better than men in leadership roles. The CHF 20 million (just over $20 million) fund is earmarked for women-led early-stage startups across Europe.

Redstone and EnjoyVenture have combined forces to create Human Impact Capital (HIC), Germany first dedicated scial impact VC fund. I spoke with the fund’s manager, Lucas Paul, to find out what drove the creation of the fund and its investment thesis. The fund aims to invest in digital business models that tackle society’s biggest challenges, typically investing between €500,000 and €1.5 million. Among others, the Bank für Sozialwirtschaft, Germany’s leading bank for the social sector, committed substantially to HIC, fund reps told me.

It a tough market for venture capital, but Square Peg Capital is plowing ahead with its focus on Australia (where it is based), Southeast Asia and Israel. Square Peg has a growing footprint in Southeast Asia, where partners Tushar Roy and Piruze Sabuncu are based. Part of Square Peg’s new capital will be used for its core venture fund, which invests in seed to Series B startups. Some of Square Peg’s investments so far from Southeast Asian include LottieFiles, Doctor Anywhere and FinAccel.

Ada Ventures also launched Ada’s Angels in October 2020, where five individuals from the Ada Scout network with direct experience in under-represented communities were given £50,000 to make five investments of £10,000. The investors in Ada Venture Fund II include a cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank through its Enterprise Capital Funds programme, Plexo Capital, University of Edinburgh and a raft of entrepreneurs and investors including Taavet+Sten and the Supercell co-founders. It feels like an eon has passed since the launch in 2019 of Ada Ventures, a European VC that decided to invest in normally under-represented groups and sectors, like women or POC founders, as well as tech which improves society. This has meant that Ada’s Fund I claims to be the most diverse portfolio in Europe, with approximately 55% female founders and 30% ethnic minority founders.

The insurtech market has been through a rough time this past year, so we reached out to eight active investors in the space to get a read on what been cooking as the markets aggressively recalibrated what an insurtech startup is worth. When insurtech company Metromile went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in February last year, it was valued at over $1 billion. The bulk of the buyers, however, would likely be companies involved in insurance themselves — either insurtech companies acquiring some of their peers or legacy players. As the markets turned early this year, insurtech left most generalist investors’ playbooks almost as fast as Metromile and its peers’ plummeting valuations.

Scale is still investing from its seventh fund, and partner Alex Niehenke told journalist that the plan is to deploy capital from the new fund starting in early 2023. The timing of the new fund is about right for the firm, which has raised a new fund every two years since 2016, according to O’Driscoll. O’Driscoll explained that limited partners were on board with the new fund, though they wanted to make sure that Scale wasn’t raising a larger fund than it could deploy successfully. As such, the firm wanted to raise its fund sooner rather than later so if there were entrepreneurs pitching the firm in the fourth quarter, the fund was closed and ready.

Two years before Youcef Oudjidane co-founded Sudanese fintech Bloom after failing to find startups tackling currency depreciation in Africa to invest in, he was the managing partner and head of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) at Class 5 Global, a San Francisco-based venture fund with a keen interest in emerging markets. The early-stage fund — which has made four investments: Ceviant, Apata, Thepeer and Anchor — consists of four venture partners, mainly founders that Oudjidane has backed: Ahmed Sabbah (Telda CEO), Prince Boampong (Dash CEO), Shekinah Adewumi (Apata CEO) and Kieran Gibbs, a professional soccer player. Oudjidane believes Africa is at the intersection of opportunity, that is, the next billion people to come online — and judging by its current portfolio of pre-seed stage startups, fintech is what intrigues his fund. Investing in startups building financial infrastructure is one of Byld Ventures’ principal themes, in addition to startups reversing Africa’s brain drain and repeat founders.

The division is backed by Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group and the blockchain protocol NEAR (from which OWC previously spun out), Jeff Lavoie, head of investments at OWC Ventures, said to journalist. Open Web Collective, a blockchain and web3 accelerator, has launched a new division called OWC Ventures to invest in early-stage crypto startups, the team exclusively told journalist. Aside from investing in developers, OWC Ventures will also deploy capital in other sectors like DeFi, SocialFi and gaming, Lavoie said. NEAR protocol’s focus has been on improving developer language, documentation, the technology and other things they’ve created, Lavoie said.

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.

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%.

AC Ventures (ACV), a venture firm focused on early-stage startups in Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia, has reached the first close of its fifth investment fund (Fund V). Li said global investors are drawn to Southeast Asia as it continues to show evidence of being a maturing market, with the successful IPOs of unicorns like GoTo and Bukalapak, an increase in later-stage capital and more secondary exits. Li said that ACV typically invests in 10 to 12 companies per year across its funds, and that continues despite the global slowdown in venture capital investing. ACV’s efforts to help founders include several key appointments who will work closely with startups — Lauren Blasco as head of ESG, Leighton Cosseboom as head of PR and communications, and Alan Hellawell as a senior adviser and venture partner.

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

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

Michael Mignano has joined the consumer practice of the sprawling venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, after previously co-founding the podcasting platform Anchor and then leading Spotify talk audio business after the streaming giant acquired Anchor in 2019 for more than $150 million. Former New York Times reporter Lydia Polgreen, who was helping to run the podcast studio Gimlet, which Spotify bought for a reported $230 million in February 2019, meanwhile left the company in April to rejoin the Times. Interestingly, Mignano joins a firm that did not invest in Anchor, though he says in a new Medium post that he first met Lightspeed when he was out fundraising for his then-nascent startup. It’s a matter of money, largely, says Mignano, writing that podcast revenues are expected to exceed $2 billion this year, while YouTube generated nearly $29 billion in video ad revenue last year alone.

In a previous interview Dixon said he wanted to increase the number of founders who identify as women and/or an underrepresented person of color in the portfolio to above 50%; with this fund, 46% of investments have a founder who identifies as a woman, 53% of investments have a founder who identifies as Black and all investments have a founder who identifies as an underrepresented person of color. The fund signals a change in how Kapor Capital does business: Beyond being the first that is led by the two newly announced managing partners, Fund 3 is the first investment vehicle funded by outside investors (not just the co-founders). The fintech and edtech investor then became one of the first and youngest African-American partners at any Silicon Valley venture capital firm, including Kapor Capital, the firm says. Onovakpuri, meanwhile, founded Kapor’s Capital Fellows program and has worked at firms including Village Capital and Fresco Capital.

It probably won’t stay that way for long, though, as multiple other firms have started cropping up to target early-stage opportunities in many of the sectors Countdown operates in, including Dcode Capital (defense and hard tech), Stellar Ventures (space) and Shield Capital (defense). In a time when most VCs are acting more cautiously and placing focus on companies with a quick path to profitability, Countdown Capital is instead going all in on hard-to-build, capital-intensive bets. Malik said for this fund the firm is really interested in tapping into macro trends, including supply chain issues, bringing manufacturing back to American soil and new innovations related to defense machinery and weaponry. Malik said that apart from deploying pre-seed capital, the firm will be focused on helping its portfolio companies hire talent.

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.

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.

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.

This new fund will continue the firm’s strategy of investing in early-stage companies across four categories that tap into the firm’s family office roots — and now LP network — including insurance, fintech, health tech and e-commerce, an area Davis said the firm is particularly excited about. Micha Breakstone, the founder of heath tech company NeuraLight, said that Davis invested in NeuraLight’s seed round and helped them structure the round after one of the investors had backed out. Kli set out to raise four months ago in what analysts have predicted would be a particularly tough time to go to market, but good timing is part of the firm’s DNA — founder Gniwisch sold and repurchased Ice.com before both the dot-com bubble burst and before the financial crisis in 2008. Kli, launched by dot-com darling Ice.com founder Shmuel Gniwisch, had been cutting checks for two years when Davis arrived, and its casual investing strategy was starting to produce wins.

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?

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.

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.

The new fund will invest in crypto projects and companies that focus on layer-1 blockchains, web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFTs and gaming, payments, asset management, exchanges, marketplaces and decentralized applications, Pakman said. Seven-year-old CoinFund is launching a $300 million early-stage web3 venture fund, CoinFund Ventures I, which is backed by institutional investors, family offices and crypto-native founders. Pakman thinks the recent drawdown in crypto asset prices generally provides more favorable entry prices for venture capital funds like CoinFund, but the transition from Web 2.0 to web3 is in its early stages. Even in this bearish crypto market, there more evidence of consumer and institutional adoption than previous cycles, Pakman commented.

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.

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.

Spur Capital Partners, an investor in venture capital funds, is out to raise $200 million for its seventh core fund. Over the years, the investor claims it has indirectly backed dozens of high-flying tech and life science firms at the early stage, including hostelier Airbnb and weapons maker Anduril.

Oui Capital, an Africa-focused VC firm based in Lagos and Massachusetts, announced today that it has completed the first closing of its $30 million second fund, Oui Capital Mentors Fund II, as it seeks to strengthen its presence on the continent.

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.

As capital continues to enter the crypto space, Tribe Capital has raised $25 million from outside investors and has launched its incubator program, Tribe Crypto Labs, its CEO Arjun Sethi.

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

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.

The new fund will focus on a handful of areas in the crypto ecosystem, including web3 infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs) tooling, and new business models to collaborate on intellectual property, to name a few.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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

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.

Last week, former Binance executives at Old Fashion Research launched a $100 million venture fund to focus on the metaverse and bringing greater crypto adoption to emerging markets like Latin America and Africa, according to its managing partner, Ling Zhang, who was previously the vice president of M&A and investments at Binance. Venture capital firms continue to deploy and raise capital for crypto markets despite volatility in recent weeks, with Binance Labs closing a $500 million investment fund to focus on web3 and blockchain technology adoption.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The crypto market is showing no signs of slowing down as funds and investors alike continue to deploy massive amounts of capital into the ecosystem. Today’s evidence of the trend: Dragonfly Capital, a crypto-centered investment firm, closed its third venture fund for $650 million, the firm’s managing partner, Haseeb Qureshi, told TechCrunch. The fund was \[…\]

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.

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.

Despite the similarities in branding, Zhang told journalist gumi Cryptos Capital  (gCC) is not a subsidiary or corporate venture capital arm of gumi, though Zhang notably still holds a position as a vice president at gumi in addition to his role as a managing partner at gCC. San Francisco- and Tokyo-headquartered gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC), a venture capital firm that focuses on blockchain startups, said it has launched a new $110 million early-stage fund.

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.

The product is for early-stage startups only, with Mercury offering between 25% to 50% of a startup’s equity round in debt.

Companies within the 776 portfolio include Alt, an alternative asset trading platform; Pipe, a global trading platform that makes recurring revenue streams tradable for their annual value; Axie Infinity, a web3 play-to-earn online gaming universe that witnessed over 200x growth in the last year; and Metafy, a video game education platform providing one-on-one access to champion-level gaming coaches. When launching 776’s first fund, the firm said explicitly that it sought a diverse investor base, of which 50% identified as female and 15% as Black or Indigenous people. Seven Seven Six, better known as 776, announced today that it has closed on $500 million across two vehicles for its second fund. The most recent survey revealed that 51% of 776’s LPs identify as female, 13% as Black or Indigenous people and 10% as Latino/a/e.

Consider that late last summer, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested in an outfit, Yield Guild Games (YGG), that invests in NFTs from blockchain-based games, then loans them out to people who use them and generate revenue as they play. To ensure that their games offer enough liquidity to keep users engaged, game makers have already proven open to working with third-party outfits like YGG and other so-called play-to-earn guilds that similarly buy NFT gaming assets and lease them to players under revenue-sharing arrangements.

On-chain funding is not a magic bullet — it is simply the best framework we currently have to align the funding process closer with the mechanisms the developers find most useful while keeping the process open and equitable.

GoFundMe doesn’t charge a platform fee from fundraisers (aside from standard transaction fees), but when people donate to a campaign, they can add an optional tip that helps keep GoFundMe running. The Public Benefit Corporation employs a team of 200 and will become a subsidiary of GoFundMe, operating as a separate entity under GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan leadership. GoFundMe announced today that it will acquire Classy, a nonprofit fundraising software company. The company said that $5 billion was raised on GoFundMe and Classy combined in 2021.