Hello Fintech Friends,
Last week, we released our second installment of the Fintech Nerd Collective. For this edition, we tackled the question, “What are the most under-discussed trends in consumer fintech at the moment?” and added fellow nerds Jon Zanoff, Vaibhav Puranik, John Josi, Matthew Janiga, and Giorgio Giuliani to the conversation.
We also published our last Signals of Q1, breaking down all the fintech product launches in the first quarter of this year.
Please find another week of fintech financings and exits below.
Editor’s Note: If you’re an early-stage startup founder raising equity or debt, I may be able to help - reach out to [email protected].
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💼 Open Role Spotlight
If you missed your chance to get in on the ground floor at Coinbase or Robinhood, you now have a second chance: the team behind stealth startup Domain is hiring across the board.
💸 Venture Financing
Smart, a UK retirement savings platform, raised a £165m Series D.
Voyager Innovations, the developer of Filipino payment app PayMaya, raised $167 million in new funding.
Tomo, a mortgage app for underwriting pre-approvals and faster closing, raised a $70 million seed.
Orum, an interbank payment and transfer technology, raised a $56 million Series B.
FairMoney, a Nigerian neobank and credit provider, raised a $42 million Series B.
Codat, a provider of APIs to connect SMB financial data, raised $40 million.
Zoop, a Brazilian payments app, raised R$170 million ($34 million).
Karat, a corporate card and banking solution for the creator economy (similar to Collective), raised a $26 million Series A.
itsme, an identity app owned by a consortium of Belgian banks, raised €24.7 million.
Slice, an Indian provider of a ‘super card’ for millennials, raised $20 million.
Harness Wealth, a democratized wealth management app, raised a $15 million Series A.
Treinta, a Colombian app for the management of small business finances, raised a $14.3 million seed round.
Monisnap, a French cross-border remittances startup, raised €10 million.
Imburse, a European payments-as-a-service platform, raised €10 million.
Zeepay, a Ghanaian digital remittances platform, raised a $7.9 million Series A.
Mercuryo, a cross-border payments network provider, raised a $7.5 million Series A.
Aliaswire, a credit and payments solution for businesses, raised $6 million.
Daylight, a neobank for the LGBTQ+ community, raised a $5 million seed round.
Caary Capital, a Canadian SMB finance platform, raised a $4.1 million seed round.
Neon, a Swiss neobank, raised ₣5 million in crowdfunding.
Infina, a Vietnamese investing platform, raised a $2 million seed round.
Payhippo, an African small business lender, raised $1 million in pre-seed funding.
Instamojo, an Indian micro-business e-commerce platform, raised an undisclosed amount from Mastercard.
American Express joined the round for purchase warranty startup Extend.
Semafone, a financial services call center security solution, received a majority investment.
Exeter Finance, an auto-lending company, raised an undisclosed amount from an investment group led by Warburg Pincus.
Endowus, a Singaporean wealth tech provider, raised from strategic partners including UBS bank.
☯️ Exits
💻 IPOs
Robinhood filed its S-1 on Thursday, signaling its intent to go forward with an IPO. The investing platform revealed it has 80 million accounts, with $80 billion in assets held, a median user age of 31, and had its first profitable year in 2020, generating $7.4 million in net income (off revenues which were 61% derived from options trading).
📈 SPACs
Corsair Partnering Corp, a SPAC focused on the financial services sector, filed for a $350 million IPO.
🤝 M&A - Fintech
JP Morgan will acquireOpenInvest, a personalized consumer ESG investing platform. This marks the bank’s third fintech acquisition in six months (55ip and Nutmeg being the other two). Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the bank approached OpenInvest as they were raising their Series B.
JP Morgan will also take a 40% stake in Brazilian neobank C6 Bank, a challenger to Nubank in one of the fastest-growing fintech markets.
UK white-label payments provider Rapyd will acquireValitor, an Icelandic payment solutions company, for $100 million.
Global payments provider Wordline will buy an 80% of Axepta Italy, an Italian merchant acquiring arm for banks, for €180 million.
Ecuadoran tax service provider Sovos will acquire digital invoice processing solution Stupendo.
German exchange Deutsche Börse will acquire a majority stake in crypto financial group Crypto Finance AG.
Wells Fargo acquired a stake in chat compliance and security provider Theta Lake.
German banking-as-a-service providers Raisin and Deposit Solutions will merge into a new combined entity.
Scandinavian mobile wallets Vipps, MobilePay and Pivo will merge into a combined mobile wallet provider with 11 million users in Finland, Denmark, and Norway .
🏦 M&A - Bank
Swiss banking group Union Bancaire Privée will buy outBanco Comercial Português’ Swiss private bank.
💲 M&A - Investment Management
🌎 Fintech Around the World
📚 Deeper Reads
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