Fintech Highlights - 2/7/2023
PayPal lays off staff. Decent shutters. Moov raises a round. Here's what we're watching this week 👇
Pinned to the Top
There appears to be no end in sight for layoffs in the fintech space.
PayPal was the latest large company to announce layoffs — with about 2,000 full-time employees, or 7% of its workforce, affected.
On January 30, the payments giant publicly shared a letter that president and CEO Dan Schulman had sent to employees in which he noted the cuts would take place over the coming weeks “with some organizations impacted more than others.” Schulman added:
“Over the past year, we made significant progress in strengthening and reshaping our company to address the challenging macro-economic environment…While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do. We must continue to change as our world, our customers, and our competitive landscape evolve.”
The BFD
Austin-based insurtech Decent is “shutting down all of its operations to just a core team,” which was confirmed in a blog post published by Nick Soman, the company’s founder and CEO.
Why this is the BFD: Many well funded fintech and insuretechs rely on selling into traditional business partners to sustain their viability. In this case - Decent had a deal go south - putting the entire company at risk.
What happened? The company offers payroll, health insurance and other services to small business. And had raised $43 million in funding from investors such as Foundation Capital, QED Investors and Maverick Ventures. In his blog post, Soman said the company wound down its health insurance product in anticipation of signing on a partner, who recently backed out in what the founder called “a massive and unexpected setback.”
The big picture: It’s apparent that even well-funded companies are not immune to the challenging macroenvironment. You can have a great product, founding team etc. But growth comes with distribution - and some wonderful companies will continue to be challenged to find viability in competitive spaces.
M&A
Apollo Global Management is among those in talks to buy a stake in Credit Suisse Group’s revamped investment bank, per the WSJ. More here →
MetLife Investment Management agreed to buy Raven Capital Management, a New York-based alternative investment firm with $2.1b of AUM. More here →
Stone Point Capital invested in Dallas-based commercial real estate firm Lincoln Property Co. Commercial. More here →
Hut 8 Mining (TSX: HUT), a Canadian crypto miner, agreed to merge with US Bitcoin Corp., a Miami, Fla.-based rival that raised over $50m from firms like Cypher Metaverse, Accomplice VC, Highfield Capital and Archetype. More here →
LevelField is slated to acquire Burling Bank, an FDIC-insured chartered bank. With the acquisition, Houston-based LevelField Financial will become the first FDIC-insured bank to offer traditional banking and Bitcoin services. More here →
Embedded Fintech
Moov, a Cedar Falls, Iowa-based embedded payments processing startup, raised $45m in Series B funding. Commerce Ventures led, and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Visa, and Sorenson Ventures. The company was founded in 2017, offering “ an open source library and community to help developers learn how to build and integrate payments into their products.” More here →
Fintech
Treasury Prime, an SF-based banking-as-a-service startup, raised $40m in Series C funding. The company started out by building software tooling that helps banks automate and accelerate routine tasks. Over time, it has expanded its offering and today says it “gives businesses of all sizes a way to integrate with banks so they can offer new services, lower the cost of deposits and ultimately generate more revenue.” More here →
TrueBiz, a know-your-client (KYC) startup for fintechs, raised $2.4m in seed funding. The startup wants to reinvent how fintechs review the risks of the businesses they onboard, so as to avoid such fraud cases, and pushback. The company participated in YC’s Summer 2022 batch More here →
Car IQ, an SF-based vehicle payments startup, raised $15m in Series B extension funding. Car IQ has created a payment solution developed for vehicles and fleets that enables vehicles to transact securely and autonomously with payment networks, banks and merchants. More here →
New Zealand-founded accounting fintech Hnry has raised A$35 million in a Series B as it looks to go global. The raise means Hnry, founded in 2017 by James and Claire Fuller, as an all-in-one digital accountancy service for contractors, freelancers, tradies and other self-employed people, has now raised $53 million. More here →
Zopa, the British neobank, raised £75m. The company provides consumers with lending services, credit cards and savings accounts and has ~ 850,000 customers. More here →
Uniify, a Danish provider of no-code onboarding software for financial companies, raised €3m. Uniify offers a one-stop platform that “makes it fast, easy and secure for financial companies to collect data on their customers.” More here →
MNT-Halan, an Egyptian lending and payments fintech, raised $200m. MNT-Halan provides small- and micro-business lending, payments, consumer finance and e-commerce, the company said. It has more than 5 million customers in Egypt, of which 3.5 million are financial clients and 2 million are borrowers. About 1.3 million of the customers are active monthly. More here →
Lulalend, a South African digital lender focused on underserved SMEs, raised $35m in Series B funding. More here →
InvestTech
Spark Advisors, a retirement benefits navigation software startup, raised $15m in Series A funding, per Axios Pro. American Family Ventures led, and was joined by Primary Ventures, Torch Capital and Vine Ventures. More here →
Conquest Planning, a Canadian provider of financial planning software, raised C$24m in Series A funding. Fidelity International Strategic Ventures led, and was joined by Portage, BNY Mellon and RBC. www.conquestplanning.com
Passthrough, a web-based fund automation workflow tool for investors, has raised $10M. The company facilitates investor onboarding for private funds, specifically aspects like subscription document processing, identity verification and anti-money laundering compliance. More here →
Crypto / Blockchain / Web 3
Archimedes, a DeFi lending and borrowing marketplace, raised $7.3m. More here →
Cenoa, a blockchain-based wallet, raised $7m in seed funding. Cenoa is “a borderless superwallet that improves access to dollar-based products.” Cenoa aims “to serve the billions of people hit by inflation in emerging markets.” More here →
Insuretech
BOXX Insurance, the Toronto headquartered insurtech that combines cyber insurance and security, announced a US$14.4 million Series B funding round, bringing the total amount raised from investors to US$24.5 million in the last 16 months. The latest investment was led by global giant, Zurich Insurance Company Ltd (Zurich). More here →
Guardz, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based cybersecurity company building a safer digital world for small businesses, has launched from stealth with $10m in seed funding. More here →
Betterview, an InsurTech that provides property risk intelligence, has closed a round of funding. More here →
Baobab, a Berlin-based cyber insurance startup, raised €3m from Augmentum. More here →
Proptech
Freemodel, a Burlingame, Calif.-based home renovation tech company, raised $19.5m in Series A funding. The company “helps buyers maximize the profits on their homes, because it is likely the biggest asset they’ll ever own.” More here →
Site 20/20, a Canadian provider of smart-flagging tech for construction, raised $10m from Deep Field Asset Management. More here →
From the Stash
Amazon, Stripe expand payments partnership - Amazon has selected fintech Stripe to assist with payment processing across its numerous businesses. The partnership is an expansion of a 2017 deal and will see Stripe help with volume across Amazon Prime, Audible, and Amazon Pay as well as other businesses of the e-commerce giant. More here →
By The Numbers: 46% of banking customers rely more on digital tools - Americans are leaning on the use of digital banking and its associated tools to help feel financially resilient amid economic uncertainty. Digital adoption has continued to grow, and the 46% of Americans who consider themselves financial experts rely more on digital tools now than they did in 2021, according to KeyBank’s “2023 Financial Mobility Survey. More here →
Tesla, Insurers Take Different Paths to Deal With Expensive Repairs - Tesla Inc's electric vehicles are expensive to repair - so much so that the automaker and insurers are addressing the issue in sharply different ways. More here →
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