Fundraises

Monarch reignites consumer fintech (TWIF 5/24)

Hello Fintech Friends,

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by our friends at Persona.

📈 It was great to see the news from our friends at Gilgamesh Ventures, who raised a new $20 million fintech fund this week. Miguel and Andrew are two of the most knowledgeable VCs on Latin American fintech. We're frequent co-investors and collaborators with them in companies like Tesote, Modern Life, and Divibank, and hosted our joint Mexico City Fintech Meetup earlier this year.

💸 I was also happy to see Monarch Money's* $75 million fundraise announcement. When I met founder Val Agostino 4+ years ago, I was highly skeptical – even as a Mint user – that consumers would ever pay for a personal financial management tool. It felt like a commoditized product that wouldn't be difficult to insert in other mobile or bank experiences. I'm glad that Val convinced me otherwise, because they've proven that a great user experience really is a differentiator – and a moat – when it comes to building a defensible consumer product. I'm a paying Monarch user now, and would be even if I didn't know the team, because the UI is so intuitive to me.

🍻 We’re counting down to Stablecon and can’t wait to welcome everyone to the Official Happy Hour, proudly powered by these incredible companies driving innovation in the stablecoin space: AiPrise, Airtm, BRLA, Caliza, Conduit, Confirmo, Trace Finance, and Utila.

🤔 Lastly, it's great to see JP Morgan issue a public request for ideas to help combat fraud and scams in financial services:

(hat tip to Alex Johnson for spotting this!)

Please find another week of fintech financing events below.

(👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know. Find me at @nikmilanovic, @twifintech, and @ndm)

💡

Sponsored Content

Manual Know Your Business (KYB) processes slow down onboarding and open the door to fraud. Download Persona’s latest guide to learn how to modernize your KYB and KYC workflows to onboard users faster, stay compliant, and build trust.

Download the guide today.

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.

📊 Stat of the Week

💸 Venture Financing

Airwallex closed a $300 million Series F that valued the cross-border payments platform at $6.2 billion and said it would use the cash to deepen global expansion and product development.
World sold $135 million worth of WLD tokens to fund additional Orb deployments and scale its human-verification network.
Monarch Money*, a personal financial management platform, raised $75 million at an $850 million valuation.
Slash secured $41 million in a Series B at a $370 million valuation to broaden its “vertical banking” services beyond sneaker resellers to other niche sectors.
Aufinity landed $26 million in Series C funding to speed its European payments-orchestration rollout in the automotive sector.
Clair collected $23.2 million in Series B funding to scale its embedded earned-wage-access offering, citing 29,000 business locations on the platform.
FanBasis grabbed $20 million in Series A capital to expand its all-in-one payments and fulfillment stack for digital creators.
Catena Labs emerged from stealth with an $18 million seed round to build a regulated “AI-native” financial institution for autonomous agents.
Filed raised $17.2 million across pre-seed and seed rounds to automate the full tax-return lifecycle for accounting firms with AI.
OpenFX surfaced with $23 million to create a stablecoin-based FX network that settles most cross-border trades within an hour.
Affiniti pulled in $17 million in Series A funding to roll out co-branded credit-card programs for SMB trade associations.
Sylndr secured $15.7 million in fresh equity to extend its used-car marketplace in Egypt into financing, servicing and dealer tools.
Thndr raised $15.7 million to fuel its retail-investment platform’s expansion into the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Lendflow obtained $15 million in growth capital to enhance its AI-driven embedded-credit infrastructure for fintechs and SaaS platforms.
True Markets raised $11 million in Series A and launched a mobile-first DeFi trading app on Solana focused on stablecoin pairs.
Seeds locked in $10 million Series A funding to scale its personalized-investment platform for RIAs and unveiled a rebrand.
CrediLinq raised $8.5 million in Series A financing that included Citi as a new investor to accelerate its AI-powered embedded-credit push into the US, UK and Australia.
Button Finance raised $5 million in Series A to expand its AI-powered home-equity-lending platform.
Pay-i came out of stealth with a $4.9 million seed round to quantify the business value of generative-AI projects.
Ontik (UK) collected $3.7 million in seed funding and others to automate B2B trade-credit workflows for wholesalers.
Avenia (formerly BRLA) closed a seed round of R$12 million (≈ $2.4 million) to grow its Brazilian real–pegged stablecoin and cross-border-payments business across LATAM.
GoDutch (Netherlands) secured a €1.2 million (≈ $1.3 million) pre-seed round from neobank founders and early users to build a smart SME business account.
Veleta Capital received an undisclosed strategic investment to anchor its second real-estate credit fund, VF2.
Plasma, a blockchain for stablecoin payments, raised an undisclosed strategic round from Founders Fund.