Fintech Highlights - 12/21/2021

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Shout-Out

I met Flaist Founder & CEO Krish Gopalan in 2017. And we immediately clicked. He was really nice guy, with the chops to build anything. And he was doing just that - an AI platform that would ultimately go on to power an embedded financial services offering from Flaist - a Techstars company.

Krish was just named to Forbe's "The Next 1000" - and I could not be any happier for him.

Congrats Krish!

Pinned to the Top

Stocktwits, the social platform for investors and traders, raised $30 million in Series B funding last week.

With lockdowns keeping people isolated at home, worrying about their economic futures, many looked to mobile apps and platforms to gain control.

And the investment services space has greatly benefitted

Stocktwits has been around for a number of years, and hasn't had to raise a lot of capital. They have a scaled audience and great user engagement rates - and obviously only looked to outside capital to take advantage of this key moment in their trajectory.

This raise is just another signal that shows the rise of investment apps and the growing interest of consumers in this space.

Read more here ->

The BFD

Rocket Companies CEO Jay Farner wasn't kidding around when he told Yahoo Finance Live in November he was on the hunt for acquisitions to diversify his company and fetch a higher trading multiple for a stock that has been under pressure.

And Farner is looking to fast-growing fintech to help pull both those goals off.

The company said Monday it would acquire personal financial app Truebill for $1.275 billion in cash. Truebill was founded in 2015, and currently has 2.5 million members who use the platform to manage subscriptions and bills as well as budgets. The company says it currently analyzes $50 billion in monthly transaction volume and has saved consumers more than $100 million since its founding.

Why It's the BFD: Farner has begun to diversify Rocket away from solely a mortgage servicer in a bid to create more stable forms of revenues and better target consumer - in a big to trade at "fintech" multiples.

And to achieve that fintech multiple, well, is to acquire a fintech as it's doing with Truebill.

The bottom line: Unfortunately for Rocket, the market has continued to punish its stock as it still sees the company as a mortgage play in front of higher interest rates in 2022. So will this latest foray pay off - we'll see.

P.S. - kudo's to the TrueBill team for an unreal exit and opportunity.

Fintechs

Quo, a Palo Alto-based home mortgage accessibility enablement startup, raised $7.2 million in seed funding. Quo is a relatively new startup with what it claims is a fresh approach to homeownership. Its consumer-oriented app shows users where they are today in terms of their financial position and goes through what mortgage qualification criteria they need to hit in order to secure a home loan. More here ->

Haystacks.ai, a New York-based data aggregation platform for real estate investors, raised $5 million in seed funding. Haystacks.AI layers in numerous sources of unstructured ancillary/alternative data, including sentiment data, on top of primary structured real estate data, to augment investment decisions at scale and identify new opportunities for asset classes such as single-family rentals, where data remains opaque. More here ->

Papaya, a Los Angeles-based mobile bill payment startup, raised $50 million. Papaya's mission is to create the most compassionate way for people to deal with their bills, and they developed advanced computer vision technologythat enables consumers to pay a bill by simply snapping a picture of absolutely any bill (medical, utility bills, parking tickets, etc.) The technology understands the biller and facilitates the payment immediately. More here ->

Mesh Payments, a New York-based corporate payment and spend management software company, raised $50 million. Mesh Payments, which provides a platform for companies to oversee and manage employees’ expenses, and for employees themselves to better track and manage how and where they spend money. More here ->

Silverflow, an Amsterdam-based payment processing startup, raised $17 million in Series A funding. The company has built and API to enable data-based payment processing, as the rails other tech used to actually pass on payment information and make the transactions are more often than not decades old.  More here ->

Taptap Send, a New York-based cross-border financial startup, raised $65 million in Series B funding. There are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of companies playing in the cross-border remittances field, from incumbents like Western Union through myriad tech players, some of which have gone public and some of which remain privately held. Taptap Send believes that its unique place in the market is that it has built not just the easiest, but the most reliable system to initiate, manage and receive those transfers. More here ->

Bureau, an Indian payments fraud detection startup, raised $12 million. The startup plans to double-up its current capabilities in end-to-end customer on-boarding and launch solutions including account takeover prevention, transaction monitoring, solving return-to-origin (RTO), and chargebacks use cases. More here ->

Razorpay, an Indian online payment platform, raised $375 million in Series F funding at a $7 billion valuation. Razorpay accepts, processes for — and disburses money to — small businesses and enterprises. It also operates a neobanking platform, through which it offers credit cards and working capital to businesses. It also offers an international payments gateway that supports over 90 currencies.  More here ->

Re:cap, a German revenue-based financing platform that might have borrowed its name from a fabulous podcast, raised $111.5 million.  The company offers a non-dilutive funding platform in a similar vein to Pipe.com and Capchase, but based in Europe. More here ->

Taxdoo, a German provider of financial tools for e-commerce companies, raised $64 million. The company builds API-based tools to help e-commerce companies with tax compliance and other accounting needs  More here ->

NYDIG, a New York-based bitcoin company, raised $1 billion. The magnitude of the raise reflects NYDIG’s move to become something of a hybrid in terms of Bitcoin infrastructure, straddling both the institutional trading realm and also looking ahead toward consumer uses. More here ->

Figment, a Canadian based blockchain infrastructure and services provider, raised $110 million in Series C funding at a $1.4 billion post-money valuation. Launched in 2018, the Toronto-based firm supports the Web 3.0 ecosystem by making it easy for investors to stake their tokens, earn yield and participate in blockchain governance across more than 50 networks, including Ethereum (still on track to full PoS transition), Cardano, Solana and Polkadot.  More here ->

Insuretechs

Trellis, an embedded insurance startup (offering financial-technology companies software that will let their users compare and purchase auto-insurance policies), has come out of stealth. The company aims to enable fintechs to make their digital experiences more comprehensive by enabling their customers to obtain insurance quotes and compare them apples-to-apples with their current coverage. Trellis’s functionality is available to certain consumers in the U.S. Midwest and South through a partnership with insurance company Branch Financial Inc. More here ->

Herald, a Boston-based commercial insurance API company, raised $8 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Underscore and Afore Capital, Garrett Koehn, Rotem Iram, Charley Ma and others also participating. www.heraldapi.com

From the Stash

Bank of Montreal Eyes US Expansion with $16.3B Acquisition of BNP’s Bank of the West — www.pymnts.com The Bank of Montreal (BMO) has finalized a $16.3 billion acquisition deal for the Bank of the West that would drive BMO’s presence into the U.S.

A More Adventurous American Dream For Home Ownership — news.crunchbase.com For many millennials, the new American dream is one which reflects the world we live in today, global and connected, and who we are: adventurous, open-minded, curious, and independent with short attention spans, writes awning.com CEO and founder Shri Ganeshram.

Reports / Webinars

The Leadership In Insurance Podcast with Anthony Beilin and Benjamin Hay, CEO & COO of Collective Benefits — preview.mailerlite.com In this week's episode, we are lucky enough to be joined by Anthony Beilin and Benjamin Hay, CEO & COO of Collective Benefits.

Sensor Tower’s 2020 Fintech Report: Category Installs Surpass 1.2 Billion Worldwide in Q2 — sensortower.com Take a look inside the state of Fintech apps with Sensor Tower’s latest report.

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