The AI Funding Vacuum

Hello Fintech Friends,

Last week I attended Money2020 Amsterdam. Money2020 has been for a number of years, the premiere global event for fintech and it adjacent industries.

I spent this week walking the halls of the RAI in Amsterdam for Money20/20, and I'll be honest — it felt smaller than previous years. Not “intimate but fewer stands for sure. More breathing room on the floor. Thinner crowds in the aisles. And, dear reader, I regret to report a measurable decline in the quantity of delicious free food (a metric I track with more rigour than most analysts track ARR). The event felt sparser and less chaotic, and not entirely by design.

It doesn't take a genius to work out where the oxygen went. AI is hoovering up capital at a rate that is starting to look less like enthusiasm and more like extraction. Capital inflows to AI obviously are coming from somewhere. I suppose a naïve part of me hoped it was just bringing new spectators to the arena. But no, it seems the Arena is the same size. The participants are the same. They are just interested in something else now. Anthropic alone raised a $65bn Series H this fortnight, pushing it toward a near-trillion-dollar valuation. Crunchbase clocked Q1 2026 global venture at an all-time high of $300bn — with 83% of it landing in the US and the bulk of that in a handful of late-stage mega-rounds. In our own backyard the picture inverts: European fintech funding fell 31% year-on-year in Q1, and deals over $100m halved. Even this week's $1.9bn global fintech tally was a mirage — Ramp, AlphaSense and Perk swallowed three-quarters of it between them. The capital hasn't disappeared. It's just been told it has to wear an AI badge to get past the velvet rope. (Notice how many of this week's "fintech" raises — Gradient Labs, Aveni, Pace, Saris — are really AI agents wearing a fintech lanyard.)

But for all its grandeur diminished, the event probably benefitted from it. A couple of years ago there was a video doing the rounds at M2020 asking people what open banking meant to them. A shocking number of people had never heard of it. That's VC money right there. That's the face of hype and capital poorly deployed. (I also think for once the capital is not being poorly deployed — there is a huge opportunity for AI and probably the single most obvious set of challenges to scale an industry has seen. Whereas in the fintech hype years, it really felt like money chasing a problem.) But whilst quieter, I probably did more business, with more execs, and had to battle through fewer salespeople who didn't know how to sell than ever before. And the less delicious food made space for a trip to McDonald's — and that's always a good thing.

My read is that the posers have simply gone home. When money was free, an event like this filled up with tourists — folks with a burn rate to justify and a per diem to expense. Strip out the easy capital and what's left is the people building things because the building means something to them. The innovation didn't get rarer; it just got easier to see now that it isn't buried under a mountain of swag and noise.

So here's my spicy take to send you off: I'm not actually worried about an AI bubble popping — bubbles pop, we dust ourselves off, we move on. What keeps me up is the crowding out. Every pound vacuumed into the AI trade is a pound not building the unglamorous payments, compliance and infrastructure rails that fintech actually runs on. If and when the AI music slows, we may find we've starved the rest of the ecosystem of the diversity it needed to catch the fall. Hyperfund one thing hard enough, and you don't just overfeed it — you quietly hypofund everything standing next to it.

Continue on below for the week's financing's / product launches / crypto / regulatory news!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

Have feedback for us? Let us know. Find us at @danpatcronin, @mttjon @twifintech, and @ndm

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Financial ops platform Ramp raised a landmark $750m Series F at a $44bn valuation, taking total equity past $3bn.

AI market-intelligence platform AlphaSense raised $350m at a $7.5bn valuation, with Accenture joining as its first strategic channel partner.

AI assurance FinTech Aveni raised £12m to expand its platform for overseeing customer-facing AI, built on UK-trained FinLLM models.

Travel and spend platform Perk (formerly TravelPerk) secured a $300m credit facility ahead of its US launch.

Autonomous banking startup Gradient Labs raised a $26m Series A extension to scale regulated AI agents for lending, disputes and KYB.

Munich RegTech Bayshore raised $8m seed to turn compliance rules into machine-readable code AI agents can execute.

Digital-asset compliance platform Cense raised €6.5m seed to help banks trace funds across wallets, exchanges and the traditional system.

CEE payments platform Paypercut raised €5m seed to expand single-integration merchant payments and fund its Irish EMI licence.

Barcelona proptech Zazume raised €2.5m to consolidate Spain's rental market via portfolio acquisitions.

Insurance-ops company Pace raised $46m Series B to scale agentic automation across claims and servicing.

Benefits-payments platform Forage raised $40m Series B to reach one million families with its SNAP/EBT app.

Bank back-office startup Saris raised $28.8m Series A, claiming up to 70% automation of lending tasks.

GoCardless launched 'Recurring Pay by Bank' on UKPI rails, with routing that falls back to Direct Debit where open banking isn't available.

TrueLayer launched 'Bank on File' recurring Pay by Bank, with Trading 212, IG Group and InvestEngine first live. No card to expire, no number to steal.

Checkout.com launched stablecoin acceptance via Coinbase Payments, letting enterprise merchants take stablecoins alongside cards and local methods.

IFX Payments rolled out ibanq 2.0, a full platform rebuild, alongside leadership changes and a new London HQ.

Bank of America announced a cross-border real-time payments service for corporate and FI clients via Swift and CashPro.

Worldline, ING and Mastercard executed what they call Europe's first end-to-end agentic payment in production.

MoneyGram launched a stablecoin on Stellar, leaning on its 60m customers and retail network to push digital-dollar remittances.

MiCA's transitional window for crypto-asset service providers shuts 1 July 2026 — authorised, or out; no more national grandfathering.

The European Commission's MiCA review consultations run to 31 August, now confirming multi-issuance structures are permitted for all stablecoins.

The FCA is backing an independent open-banking standards body and will consult on a long-term A2A framework by end-2026.

Europe's AMLA keeps alive the question of whether the bloc is moving to single, centralised financial-crime supervision.

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