FinTech news in Y Combinator category

YC refused to admit that today’s layoffs and departure from growth stage is related to the banking crisis, it’s hard not to see the news amid the backdrop of a tech reckoning

Ultimately, Hakimian said, TrueBiz claims it gives financial services providers a way to onboard their business customers faster, and eliminate the churn that can result from verification delays. Its target customers are mid-size financial service providers, such as banks opening new business bank accounts, or payments providers onboarding merchants. Founded by Danny Hakimian  and Max Morlocke, the company recently raised $2.4 million in a seed round led by Flourish Ventures in an effort to reinvent how financial services verify businesses during account opening. Specifically, TrueBiz aims to add color to a business’ background with over 50 data points – such as industry and revenue – from around the web, and then summarize key risk indicators, noted Satya Patel, partner of Homebrew.

Tapping into identity verification data from credit bureaus (e.g. Equifax) and wireless carriers (e.g. T-Mobile) and combining it with real-time data from financial institutions’ core banking systems, Method can collate a person’s liabilities across more than 60,000 institutions in the U.S. and kick off tasks such as balance transfers, payoffs, bill pay and more. While the startup competes with big names like Plaid, MX, Spinwheel and Dwolla, Shah sees Method holding its own, particularly as the platform rolls out new features in the next few months including real-time credit card transactions, instant balance transfers and enhanced live data points for liabilities. Method, a startup that aims to make it easier for fintech developers to embed repayment, balance transfers and bill pay automation into their apps, today announced that it closed a $16 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator (Method a Y Combinator graduate), Abstract Ventures, SV Angel and others. Shah points out that there’s no standard, technically easy way to access all of a person’s financial liabilities — their student loans, credit cards, mortgages and so on — and push money to those liabilities.

Decentro has partnered with scores of industry players including Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, Visa, RuPay, Quickwork, Equifax, Aadhaar and National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) to offer solutions for prepaid payment instruments, no-code workflows, conversational banking via WhatsApp and enable document verification and KYC process. Indian angel investors including CRED founder Kunal Shah, Groww co-founder and CEO Lalit Keshre, Gupshup co-founder and CEO Beerud Sheth and former CBO of BharatPe Pratekk Agarwaal also participated in the funding round. India Decentro, the Y Combinator-backed startup that helps companies enter the fintech market by deploying its APIs, has raised $4.7 million in a Series A round. The Bengaluru-based startup offers banking and payments APIs that allow development of fintech products such as banking, payment cards, neobanking and collections and payout services in a short period of time.

State Bank of Pakistan said in an order that it is revoking Tag’s approval to operate as an electronic money institution, the permission that is required for entities to offer innovative, user-friendly and cost effective low-value digital payments instruments such as wallets, cards and contactless payments. Pakistan central bank on Friday revoked the in-principle and pilot operations approval of Tag to operate as an electronic money institution in a move that poses existential threat to the firm. The regulatory action follows a months-long probe into Tag, which offers banking and financial services such as contactless payment, cards and wallets to users in Pakistan. The central bank has also ordered the startup to close all customers’ wallet accounts and pull its apps from the app stores with immediate effect.

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.

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.

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.

Dubai-based Zywa, a neobank for Gen Z, plans to fuel its growth in the United Arabs Emirates (U.A.E), and to kick-start its expansion to Saudi Arabia and Egypt after raising $3 million seed funding at over $30 million (110 million AED) valuation. The fintech is also adding community-based value-add services like a platform it is building within the app to enable users to apply for internships at Zywa and partner startups, as a strategy for encouraging users to start earning early. They created Zywa as a social banking app and prepaid card to make it possible for the Gen Z (between the age of 11-25 years) to receive money, manage it, and make payments. Zywa also plans to introduce a social element to its app by enabling its users to share photos or videos of their purchases, and to react to their friends’ purchases on different feeds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The firm, led by former Tinder product chief Jeff Morris Jr., has shifted from a more generalist vertical interest toward web3 obsession over the past several months, as early bets in crypto startups like Dapper and Compound Finance have taken off.

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.

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.