Fintech Highlights - 4/12/2022
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Pinned to the Top
Bloomberg reported that Apple is launching an initiative code-named “Breakout” to bring more financial services capabilities—like payment processing, risk and fraud analysis, credit checks, and customer service—in-house. According to the article:
“The push would turn the company into a bigger force in financial services, building on a lineup that includes a credit card, peer-to-peer payments, the Wallet app and a mechanism for merchants to accept credit cards from an iPhone. Apple is also working on its own subscription service for hardware and a buy now, pay later feature for Apple Pay transactions.”
Well, that helps explain why Apple acquired Credit Kudos, a UK-based open banking company that helps lending streamline and improve their loan underwriting efforts.
But why the broader push to bring financial capabilities like payment processing and customer service functions in-house?
See the answer (and full article) via Cornerstone's Ron Shevlin - here ->
The BFD
Banks and government have a role to play in developing the digital infrastructure and regulatory framework for cryptocurrency or other digital money solutions, financial leaders said Tuesday at the Axios What’s Next Summit.
Why it matters: Washington and Wall Street are grappling with whether and how to enable or restrict fintech products that exist in a nebulous space outside the traditional financial system, writes Nathan Bomey of Axios Closer.
- “There’s a need for plumbing for this to succeed,” Ian Mair, head of U.S. public policy for Blockchain.com, said in a breakout session moderated by Axios reporters Kia Kokalitcheva and Lucinda Shen.
- “Who buys a house without plumbing? We want regulation. This industry is not going to succeed without regulation.”
The big picture: Traditional banks haven't embraced crypto with open arms.
- “Technology is great, but it doesn’t always lend itself to solutions that are needed in specific communities,” said John Lewis, president of The Harbor Bank of Maryland.
- “We recognize that there is a future for it,” Bank of America commercial market executive Liz Shore said, but there’s “a large concern” that crypto is currently lacking significant regulation.
Fintechs
Creative Juice, an Austin, Texas-based creator economy banking startup that we recently reported on (seed round - has raised an additional $15m in a Series A funding round led by Acrew Capital. More here ->
Ghost Financial, a comprehensive financing and business services platform to support ghost kitchen and restaurant ventures, raised a $2.5M Seed Round. Ghost Financial initially does two things: provide “the first cash-back credit card for food and beverage inventory” and then use data and technology to underwrite restaurant expansion loans and credit limits for the card. More here ->
Fidel API, a New York-based financial infrastructure platform, raised $65m in Series B funding. Fidel API enables developers to create programmable experiences that enhance the value of using and accepting payment cards. Its platform provides identity, data, and payments products that allow developers to capture consent permissions and securely connect payment cards to a service or application. More here ->
Kaleidoscope, a Minneapolis-based philanthropy fintech focused on education, raised $10m in Series A funding. Kaleidoscope connects sponsoring organizations, donors and applicants and has handed over $370 million in scholarships and grants in the last two years. The company launched more than 6,500 programs and marked its millionth user in 2021. More here ->
RapidAPI, the startup that has built a platform that helps businesses find and integrate third-party APIs, as well as manage their own usage of their own internal APIs, has picked up another big round of funding of $150 million — underscoring both its growth and that of the so-called API economy, where digital services that are often complicated to build and run from the ground up are being built once and turned into extensible units by way of APIs that in turn help power functionality wherever those APIs get integrated. More here ->
Coda Payments, a Singapore-based online payment processor, is raising new funding at around a $2.5B valuation. Founded in 2011, Coda provides online payment solutions to digital content providers in more than 30 markets. More here ->
EnKash, an Indian spend management startup, raised $20m in Series B funding. Hemant Vishnoi, Co-founder of EnKash also said that the company intends to further expand its offerings with the infusion of fresh capital and lead the space with innovative offerings around banking-as-a-service, scaling up its ‘plug and play’ cards issuance stack and plans to expand its geographical presence on the international front. More here ->
Gaviti, an Israeli invoice management and collection SaaS, raised $9M in Series A funding. Companies use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to track all aspects of company finances. Gaviti’s platform ingests data from the most popular ERP platform to help automate the various tasks involved with identifying late payments and automating the collection process. Gaviti helped enterprises collect $6.2 billion in receivables in 2021. More here ->
Cross-border payments platform dLocal is one of the most notable Latin American startups in recent history — the company became Uruguay’s first unicorn in 2020 and went public on the Nasdaq in 2021. DLocal’s founders had first launched AstroPay, another digital payments platform that now has over five million users.
Now, dLocal and AstroPay co-founder Sergio Fogel has teamed up with AstroPay’s former head of product, Gonzalo Strauss, to launch another fintech out of Montevideo, Uruguay, called Datanomik. Datanomik’s goal is to connect financial institutions across LatAm through its B2B open finance API, which gathers a company’s banking information on one platform. More here ->
ImaliPay, a fintech for gig workers in Africa, raised $3M in seed equity and debt funding. ImaliPay’s pilot was based on Furusa’s encounter: a buy now, pay later (BNPL) fuel product, but for two-wheeler gig platforms as the company partnered with a few fuel stations in Ibadan, Nigeria to offer this service to SafeBoda riders. The startup proceeded to create a partner ecosystem structured so that some give it access to new users while others support its ecosystem and marketplace. More here ->
Vested Finance, an app for Indian investors to participate in the U.S. stock market, raised $12M in Series A funding. Vested Finance provides an online investment platform and offers content on the US markets to help customers make informed investment decisions. Some of the other product features include instant account opening, Vests or curated portfolios that comprise stocks and/or ETFs, and localized tax filing reports. More here ->
Crypto
Binance.US—the American franchise of Binance—has raised more than $200 million in a seed round at a pre-money valuation of $4.5B. Although large for a so-called “seed” round, the company says it is its first funding round. More here ->
The Bitcoin Company, a bitcoin rewards, banking, and exchange services platform, raised $2.1M Seed Round. The Bitcoin Company is a super-app for all of their customer's financial needs, unifying the disparate rewards market (which today consists of gift card, affiliate, and card-linked offer rewards) into a single, unified Bitcoin rewards program. The Bitcoin Company intends to consolidate an even larger suite of financial services, integrating Bitcoin financial services alongside traditional banking. More here ->
Coin Metrics, a Boston-based crypto financial intelligence startup, raised $35m in Series C funding. This money will help Coin Metrics, which provides crypto network and market data to financial institutions, fund international expansion and the development of new products, including decentralized finance (DeFi) and other decentralized application metrics. More here ->
Proptech
Playhouse, an SF-based mobile video app for real estate, raised $2.8M in seed funding. The entire premise of Playhouse is that we find it strangely entertaining to peruse home listings. It’s not too outlandish a claim, seeing as “House Hunters” has been on TV since 1999. But beyond becoming another fun feed to scroll, Playhouse wants to cater to a future crop of homeowners. More here ->
Roofstock, a platform for investing in the single-family rental rental market, announced yesterday a Series E raise of $240 million, raising its valuation to $1.94 billion. With approximately 15,000 homes in its current portfolio, Roofstock has completed nearly $5 billion in transaction volume to date, with more than half of that amount taking place in the last year. More here ->
From the Stash
Klarna Launches New Klarna Kosma Division For its Open Banking Platform — techcrunch.com Visa surprised the European fintech industry last year when it announced that it would acquire Tink for €1.8 billion ($2.15 billion at the time of the deal). Klarna now wants to compete directly with Tink with a new business unit that has its own brand — Klarna Kosma. Like Tink, Klarna offers an open banking […]
The Emergence of Embedded PropTech — medium.com Over the past decade, consumers have experienced radical shifts in how financial transactions are completed. From splitting a check at the restaurant to applying for a personal loan, we now expect…
How Going Fast and Furious Can Ruin Your Startup — techcrunch.com A look at Fast's shutdown and Better.com's decline in the wake of mass layoffs.
North American Startup Investment Fell 11% In Q1 In First Quarterly Decline In Nearly 2 Years — news.crunchbase.com Altogether, investors put $82.8 billion into seed through growth-stage technology investments in the first quarter of 2022—down 11 percent from Q4 of 2021; the first quarter-over-quarter decline in nearly two years.
Sid Paquette will now head RBC Ventures and RBCx | BetaKit — betakit.com Sid Paquette is becoming the head of both RBCx and Ventures.
Reports / Webinars
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