Hello Fintech Friends,

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Pod People.

🗽We had a fun – and a little exhausting! – New York Fintech Week. Thanks as always to Jon Zanoff and the great Empire Startups team for planning and bringing the good weather.

🙏 On behalf of TWIF, I'd like to say thank you to:

• PingPong Payments, who co-hosted a great panel with us at Rise NYC on international payments.
• MX, who co-hosted our first-ever Fintech Book Club event with speakers from JP Morgan and the NYDFS. Should we do another one?
• Flourish Ventures, who co-organized a great fintech wellness event (with amazing green juice) with Unit, Brico, and Spade on a rooftop Tuesday morning.
• Glade Brook & Wilson Sonsini, who helped us plan a great founders' dinner to kick off the week.
• Method & Cambr for partnering on our official NYFW Kickoff event.
• SVB for hosting a great conversation on Powering the Next Wave of Cards & Payments with us.
• And of course, Rise by Barclays for hosting a special edition of our monthly fintech coffee (the last in their space).

Please find another week of fintech financing events below.

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

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📊 Stat of the Week

For community banks, stable and low-cost funding base underpins banks’ NIM resilience:

💸 Venture Financing

• Altruist reached a nearly $2 billion valuation in its $152 million Series F.
• Alpaca, a developer of APIs for brokerage platforms, raised $52 million in Series C funding.
• Symbiotic, which started as a restaking protocol and is now expanding into "universal staking," raised a $29 million Series A.
• Fundthrough, a Canadian invoice financing company, acquired Ampla* to strengthen its capital access offerings and raised a $25 million Series B.
• Alt, an embedded fintech and alternative payments company, secured $22 million in funding.
• Froda, the Swedish lending company, raised €20 million to fuel its European expansion plans.
• Salsa landed $20 million in Series A funding to make embedded payroll seamless for software providers.
• Theo, a crypto trading platform focused on providing enterprise-grade crypto custody and infrastructure, raised $15.5 million.
• Belvo, a Latin American open finance platform, raised $15 million in funding.
• Lace, an AI-powered revenue generation software startup founded by an ex-Meta engineer, raised $14 million.
• Arch, a Bitcoin infrastructure company, secured $13 million in funding.
• Bitradex, an AI-powered digital asset trading platform, raised £12 million in Series A funding.
• WeMoney, an Australian financial comparison site, received $12 million in Series A funding with Mastercard participating.
• Bloom Credit, a credit reporting API provider, raised $10.5 million in funding.
• Hokodo, a B2B buy now, pay later app, raised €10 million.
• ROH, a cloud-based payments management platform for the hospitality industry, raised $9.2 million in funding.
• Cloud Capital raised $7.7 million to help CFOs control cloud spending.
• SSV Smart Pay, an open banking payments platform, secured £5 million in funding at a £30 million valuation.
• WineFi, a wine investing platform, raised a £1.5 million seed round.

💵 Debt Financing

• Octane, a financing platform for recreational vehicles and outdoor power equipment, closed a $700 million forward flow agreement with New York Life, MetLife Investment Management, and Equitable.
• Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms secured a $100 million credit facility from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
• Main.Set surpassed its first close target of $40 million for its new fintech debt fund.
• LendMN, Mongolia’s first digital lending fintech, raised $20 million in debt financing from Lendable.

💰 Venture Funds

• The UK's Octopus Ventures is set to absorb the Fintech Growth Fund. The FGF was envisaged in the Kalifa Review of the UK's fintech ecosystem, but has struggled to hit its original fundraising target and has yet to formally disclose any investments.

“This isn’t just a podcast— this is our entire content marketing strategy.”

That’s what one CMO told us after a month of working together. Every podcast episode we produce becomes ~15 pieces of high-quality content that builds trust, credibility, and connection in a space where relationships matter.

Pod People turns your conversations into a show people actually want to hear. Strategy, production, editing, distribution—we take care of it all.

It’s the smartest way to scale your editorial calendar and reach the audience segment that matters to you.

Schedule a call.

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