Hey fintech friends,
Fintech didn’t slow down for the holidays– making this a terrific time to take stock of what’s been happening over the past quarter, and what this signals for the ecosystem going into the new year.
For new readers, Signals is the premium subscriber edition of TWIF designed to get you away from the headlines and to explore the larger trendlines. Each quarter, we break down four key questions on fintech activity:
Which concepts are getting funded?
Where are exits, M&A, and SPACs concentrated?
Which firms are raising debt and venture funds for fintech?
Which products were launched over the last quarter?
If you haven’t already, subscribe to future editions here!
Overall activity
Total fintech funding rose 36% from the prior quarter to $12.98 billion in Q4 (a 61% jump Year-over-Year), fueled by over a dozen Series D-Series G megarounds. The number of equity raises was down 14% QoQ (⬇️19% YoY), bringing average deal size up 57% QoQ (⬆️11% YoY).
See the full Q4’25 data here (for paid subscribers only).
Early-stage (Pre-Seed-Series C) funding has tightened after a surge in AI investments since early 2024 has left VCs with far less dry powder to deploy. Investors are also demanding higher revenue thresholds and clearer paths to profitability, with the median revenue of a company raising a Series A now 4x higher than in 2021 according to SVB.
See the full Q4’25 data here (for paid subscribers only).
Despite a challenging year for fintechs in public markets, IPO momentum persisted through Q4, with Tata Capital’s $15.8 billion IPO and Optasia’s $1.4 billion IPO marking the largest public listings in India and South Africa in 2025. Notably, Q4 also saw IPOs from Navan ($6.2B), Pine Labs ($3.3B), Wealthfront ($2.6B), and insurtech Exzeo ($1.9B).
Looking forward, the fintech IPO pipeline remains active: Last quarter Kraken, BitGo, Lendbuzz, Ethos Technologies, Vartis Platforms (parent company of India’s LenDenClub) filed for IPO and Securitize filed for a $1.25B SPAC. Revolut, Airwallex, Consensys, Upgrade, the UK’s SumUp and Saudi Arabia’s Tabby are reportedly also aiming to list in the next 6-18 months.
Which concepts are getting funded? 🤑
See the full Q4’25 data here (for paid subscribers only).
Areas that received the most funding were:
Prediction markets, led by Polymarket’s $2 billion strategic investment from Intercontinental Exchange and Kalshi’s successive $300M Series D & $1 billion Series E raises.
Crypto payments & banking, led by Ripple’s $500M raise, Tempo’s $500M Series A, Erebor’s $350M raise, Pave Bank’s $39M Series A, Deblock’s €30M Series A, Coinflow’s $25M Series A, Kontigo’s $20M Series A, ZAR’s $12.9M Seed, Cybrid’s $10M Series A, Seismic’s $10M Series A, Mesta’s $5.5M Seed, Takenos’ $5M Seed, Zynk’s $5M Seed, 3 World Global’s $5M Seed, Ryder’s $3.2M Seed, Altrya’s €1.5M Pre-Seed, BVNK’s raise, Parfin’s raise, and Zengo Wallet’s raise.
Investment infrastructure, led by Kraken’s $800M raise, FNZ’s $650M PE raise, Nevis’s $35M Series A, Kanastra’s $30M Series B, Bite Investments’s $25M PE raise, Finny’s $17M Series A, Saturn AI’s $15M Series A, Wealthy’s $14.5M Series B, UPTIQ’s $12M raise, IMTC’s $12M Series A, PowerUp Money’s $12M Series A, Yubi’s $8.4M raise, Grasp‘s $7M Series A, Chip’s £6M raise, Focal’s $5M Seed, Asseta AI’s $4.2M Seed, TIFIN’s $3M raise, RealReports’ $1M raise, Ditigec’s raise, and United Fintech’s raise.
See the full Q4’25 data here (for paid subscribers only).
A few concepts received notable funding:
AI-driven workflows & agents across:
Business financial management, with DualEntry, Campfire, Numeric, Light, Maxima, Stuut, Lettuce Financial, Sequence, Safebooks, BHub, Maximor, Cynch AI, Dost, Lunos AI, Prosperr.io, Autograph, and Lette AI raising a combined $407 million to automate ERPs, business accounting, financial planning, RevOps, and payroll.
Fraud & compliance, with Feedzai, Resistant AI, Chargeflow, Zania, Brico, Aiprise, Kobalt Labs, Condukt, Verisoul, Curvestone AI, Adclear, Ciphero, Falkin, and Vigilant AI.ai altogether raising $211.1 million to power AI-driven fraud monitoring, risk management, KYC/KYB, dispute resolution, and licensing.
Insurance, with Federato, Liberate, Modern Life, and Barker raising $173.5 million to help firms price, offer, and manage insurance policies.
Investment & wealth, with Range, Numerai, AIR, and BIASafe AI in total raising $96.5 million to modernize portfolio analysis and financial advisory.
Credit origination, with Tidalwave, Karus, Creditflow AI, Kaaj AI, and Zest AI raising $34.1 million to streamline loan underwriting, servicing, and portfolio management.
Cross-border payments, with Deel raising a $300M Series E to expand global payroll and Routefusion, Remitee, Skydo, and Hawala raising a total of $59.7M to enable international remittances & B2B transfers.
Employee benefits, with Human Interest, Benepass, 401GO, and Ben raising $200.5 million to modernize retirement & benefits plans.
Where are exits, M&A, and SPACs concentrated? 📈
Areas that saw the highest M&A activity were:
Payments infrastructure continues to consolidate as increasingly fragmented rails, growing fraud losses, and compressing fees push payment providers to expand horizontally (adding new payment methods) and vertically (integrated financial suites, value-add features…). In Q4, Global PaymentspurchasedWorldpay from GTCR and FIS for $22.7 billion to form one of the largest merchant acquirers globally; MollieacquiredGoCardless for €1.1 billion to deliver a unified pan-European payment stack; Stripebought B2B billing platform Metronome for $1 billion; Modern Treasuryacquired stablecoin paytech Beam for $40M, and Worldline divested its North American subsidiaries to Shift4, its CoreOrchestration platform to Incore Invest, and its electronic data management unit to SIX.
In consumer financing, Rocket Companies’ $14.2B acquisition of Mr. Cooper united the US’s largest mortgage originator and servicer under one roof; Barclays‘ acquired personal lending platform Best Egg for $800M, and Monzoacquired mortgage broker Habito.
Investment infrastructure followed suit with Goldman Sachs’ $2B acquisition of Innovator, a defined-outcome ETF issuer, S&P Global’s $1.8B acquisition of private markets data provider With Intelligence, and SS&C’s $1B acquisition of investment funds network Calastone.
Nearly half (49%) of fintech M&A is now being led by venture-backed companies, according to SVB.
See the full Q4’25 data here (for paid subscribers only).
Which firms are raising debt and venture funds for fintech? 💰
Venture firms raised a total of $4.5 billion in funding for fintech-focused strategies, including:
Viola Credit raised a $2 billion alternative debt fund for fintech-powered lenders globally.
Nexus Venture Partners closed a $700M fund to back fintech, AI, enterprise software, and consumer startups in India.
Expedition Growth Capital raised a €323M Fund III to back bootstrapped, high-growth software companies across Europe.
GFTN Capital and SBI launched a $200M global fintech fund, targeting growth-stage companies in AI, tokenization, digital assets and cybersecurity.
Better Tomorrow Ventures raised a $140M third fund, planning to invest in 30 to 35 companies, with check sizes ranging from $500,000 to $3.5 million.
CMT Digital closed a $136M fourth venture fund to back founders building infrastructure and apps driving the next phase of crypto adoption.
Notion Capital raised $130M for a third growth fund to back fintech and software companies at the venture and growth stages across Europe.
Which products were launched over the last quarter? 🚀
1️⃣ Agentic payments are (almost) here
Nearly half of US consumers (47%) now use AI to browse products online, driving AI-driven traffic to retail sites to surge over 4,700% in 2025.
While there are still a lot of open questions around how AI agents can be trusted to complete purchases on your behalf (who bears liability if an agent buys the wrong thing? Who handles those disputes?), recent pilots give us a pretty clear idea of what the agentic payments flow will look like– and the players defining each layer of the stack…
1. 🤖AI shopping agents- AI companies are jostling to become users' go-to shopping interface by hosting the full purchasing journey– from product discovery to checkout– in-chat. In Q4, Perplexity launched Instant Buy and OpenAI released Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. Perplexity also called Amazon out for gatekeeping its merchants’ catalogs, hinting at possible tension between AI platforms and closed-end online marketplaces.
2. 🔎Product discovery- Merchant gateways & processors, on the other hand, do want to make customers' catalogs discoverable to AI agents through agentic "storefronts", like Shopify Catalog and PayPal Store Sync. Klarna also recently unveiled its Agentic Product Protocol, a universal standard for AI agents to communicate with merchant-facing systems.
3. 🛒Commerce protocols- Two open protocols launched in September to set standards for how agents, merchants, and platforms communicate– each with a slightly different (but somewhat overlapping?) focus:
OpenAI & Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is a merchant-focused standard defining cart management, checkout flows, and payment delegation for in-chat (human-present) transactions.
Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is a rail-agnostic governance standard for permissioning and authenticating AI agents to make payments on behalf of users (both human-present and human-not-present).
5. 💸Settlement- Agentic payments have two paths here:
Traditional fiat rails: Initially, credit/debit card rails will be best-adapted for agentic commerce given their pre-existing scale, fraud monitoring, and liability frameworks. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) and Mastercard’s Agent Pay pilots are enabling early adoption through network-native directories for agent authorizations.
Stablecoins: Coinbase‘s x402 Protocol standardizes how facilitators (like the Coinbase Developer Platform, or CDP) validate agents and settle transactions directly between stablecoin wallets.
It’ll be especially interesting to see how settlement for agentic payments will be split between fiat vs. stablecoin rails. Card rails are built on established technological and liability frameworks, but stables can bring new speed and liquidity to these transactions.
Which brings us to…
2️⃣ Stablecoin diffusion
Stablecoin transaction volumes nearly doubled to $11.1T in 2025, with cross-border B2B, P2P, and card payments driving the highest growth. Regulations like the GENIUS Act & MiCA opened the doors for major developments in Q4 across:
Cross-border transfers- SWIFT unveiled plans for a shared cross-border blockchain ledger; Western Unionreleased its USDPT stable; Flutterwavelaunched pan-African stablecoin payments, and Zepz announced its stablecoin-funded Sendwave Wallet.
Despite these unlocks, real-world payments still only account for ~1% of all stablecoin volumes, and stables make up less than 1% of money moved globally.
Source: Artemis Analytics
Everyone wants to be a stablecoin issuer…
Stablecoins have massive room to grow, and banks and fintechs are now scrambling to capture their slice of the market by launching their own stables, potentially expanding tomorrow’s ecosystem beyond the Tether (USDT)/Circle (USDC) duopoly.
New infrastructure like Bridge (Stripe)’s Open Issuance platform, Coinbase Custom Stablecoins, and MoonPay+M0’s enterprise stablecoin services are giving companies the tools to program their own coins and, in the process, earn yield on the reserves. Last quarter, Phantom Cash, Klarna’s KlarnaUSD, and Slash’s USDSL all launched on Open Issuance.
… and stablecoin issuers want to be banks
A number of crypto platforms (Ripple, Circle, BitGo, Paxos, Erebor, Telcoin…) are looking to get or expand their bank licenses under the GENIUS Act, which could grant them access to deposits, direct control over reserve economics, and allow them to better compete with banks’ payment infrastructure.
If stablecoin platforms start drawing deposits away from banks, financial institutions face pressure to offer higher deposit rates to retain funding or reduce credit availability for borrowers– either way, significantly eating into their net interest margins.
Some banks, like Bank of America, are considering stemming deposit outflows by issuing their own stables. JP Morgan and SoFi are taking a slightly different approach by releasing tokenized deposits, which would allow them to retain high-quality liquid assets on their balance sheet, conserving their regulatory capital positions and retaining lendable deposits.
In any event, more players now have incentives to launch their own stables, and the proliferation of stablecoins is already driving up competition to attract deposits with higher rewards and faster money movement than has ever been possible with fiat.
