YCombinator (YC) recently wrapped up its three-month winter tech accelerator program, holding its demo day last week. This program, which is one of two the accelerator hosts each year, comprised of 21 fintech companies. The fintech graduates from YC’s winter program can be broken down into six main categories: asset management, banking and exchange, credit and lending, insurance, payments, and other.

The recent batch of YCombinator fintech graduates showcases a variety of trends and innovations in the industry. There are three main themes that pulse throughout this year’s cohorts. First– and not surprisingly– many are leveraging AI to create efficiencies and enhance existing operations. Additionally, several startups are focusing on providing specialized banking solutions tailored to specific needs. This includes offshore banking for international contractors, banking platforms for nonprofits and cross-border businesses, and white-label bonding solutions for insurance agents. Perhaps most notably, there is a strong focus on innovation in the payments space, with multiple startups offering solutions to help businesses go international more easily, providing instant international payments, and facilitating the launch of card programs and financial products in emerging markets.

Check out this year’s YC winter fintech graduates below:

Asset management

Powder leverages AI to help wealth advisors create sales proposals personalized for each prospective client.

Centauri offers an AI-powered data platform for financial analysts.

Double aims to offer a smarter investing account by allowing users to build custom direct index strategies while automating things like tax loss harvesting and dollar cost averaging.

Banking and exchange

Numo is an offshore bank for international contractors.

GoldenBasis leverages AI to automate back-office workflows for brokerages.

Givefront offers a banking platform tailored for nonprofits.

Credit and lending

Corefin provides open-source lending software that allows tech companies to build and launch lending products.

Rove leverages a cash-flow algorithm for underwriting to offer a no-annual-fee travel card that allows average spenders to earn a free trip each year.

Yenmo offers India-based investors access to cash locked up in illiquid investments without having to liquidate their current investments.

Insurance

Healia’s platform allows employers to help their employees find the best health insurance plan by leveraging their spouse’s healthcare plan to lower costs.

Blume Benefits helps health insurance brokers reduce manual data entry by streamlining insurance quoting, renewal, and revenue operations processes.

BondCenter is a white-label, automated bonding solution for insurance agents that allows them to help businesses apply for surety bonds and receive affordable quotes online in minutes.

Payments

xPay offers a payment gateway orchestrator coupled with a managed gateway solution to help businesses in India and Southeast Asia can go international more easily.

Infinity is a banking and payments platform for cross-border businesses in India.

Swift is building instant international payments to replace the archaic correspondent banking infrastructure.

Other

NowHouse’s post-trade processing suite offers brokerage trading ops teams near-instant trade settlement capabilities, helping them to intelligently reconcile trades and corporate actions.

Miden helps facilitate the launch of card programs and various financial products for businesses in Sub-Sahran Africa.

Cleva enables African freelancers and businesses to receive international payments while protecting themselves from currency volatility.

TokenOwl helps active memecoin and crypto traders calculate taxes with greater accuracy and generate AI-powered insights about their portfolio.

Greenboard is leveraging AI to manage financial firms’ compliance programs and back office processes.

GovernGPT is an AI-based database that pre-populates due diligence questionnaires with recent and trusted data.

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Photo by olia danilevich

Every once in a while, I like to highlight a fintech I’ve never heard of. Today’s candidate is TaskPay.

Founded in May of last year, TaskPay is on a mission to build trust into contracts and talent payouts. What does that mean, exactly? TaskPay has built a platform to allow users to create instant, escrow-like milestone contracts for gig workers or to send peer-to-peer payments.

By serving as a middle-man, TaskPay secures funds from the party making the payment, while waiting to release the funds until the recipient has completed the contract requirements. This protects both parties by ensuring that the payer isn’t receiving work and refusing to pay, and also ensuring that the payee isn’t taking the funds without completing their end of the contract.

Taskpay facilitates payments made using cryptocurrency, debit or credit card, PayPal, ACH transfers, or wire transfers. It also helps users without a bank account to withdraw funds onto a prepaid Mastercard or Visa card.

What’s more, Taskpay members can use the platform to find talent. The company’s AI connects users with the right gig worker for the job by analyzing chat data, disputes, ratings, reviews, job timelines, and more.

TaskPay’s emergence aligns with today’s digital-first era, offering a fundamental solution to solve trust issues in contractual agreements and gig worker payments. In the growing gig economy, TaskPay safeguards both parties from potential exploitation or non-compliance. In a world where digital interactions are commonplace, TaskPay is well-positioned to succeed as a player in the evolving fintech arena.

Taskpay is headquartered in Wyoming and was founded by Aaron Andrew and Kerim Eravci.

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I’ve always loved following innovations in the payments space. It is the one fintech sub-sector that touches everyone– regardless of net worth, social standing, or geography. And when it comes to payments, there is plenty of room for disruption, especially in payroll.

In this month’s new startup showcase, I’m taking a closer look into Warp, which was launched earlier this year by Ayush Sharma. At its core, Warp is seeking to help founders run their startups by offering them a way to outsource payroll operations– and the headaches that go along with payments and tax compliance.

At the root of the problem Warp is trying to solve is the wide variety of tax laws, both across the globe and within the U.S. These laws make it difficult for founders to navigate payroll for their remote workforce, especially when employees are located across multiple U.S. states or international boundaries. Because each region has different tax laws, founders can spend hours navigating poorly designed government websites to ensure they are complying with local laws.

A 2023 Y Combinator alum, Warp currently offers full-service payroll for U.S. employees and files and pays all federal, state, and local taxes. The company also helps startups pay contract workers and generates 1099 end-of-year paperwork. For domestic payouts, Warp automates payroll registrations and monitors for compliance. Companies that need to send payment across international borders can use Warp to pay contractors in more than 150 countries, with tools that generate compliant contract agreements in seconds.

Beyond payments, the New York-based company even does some light lifting when it comes to HR tasks. The company’s technology provides healthcare options with automated payroll deductions, generates offer letters, onboards new employees, approves invoices and reimbursements, and helps startups track PTO and time submissions.

Warp offers three pricing options from $49 per month (plus $20 per person) to $99 per month (plus $35 per person). Among the company’s competitors are Gusto, Rippling, and Deel.

Warp has received a total of $2.7 million in funding. The company received $500k from Y Combinator and $2.2 million from Abstract Ventures, HOF Capital, Shrug Capital, and others.

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Photo by Jan Van Bizar

Seeing is believing, goes the old saying. And as far as The Beans is concerned, seeing is key to savings, as well.

At least that’s the thinking behind Atlanta, Georgia-based fintech, The Beans, which leverages Visual Financial Planning in order to power its eponymous, iOS financial planning app.

“The world is rapidly becoming more visual and traditional financial services are too complicated, or so costly that they become inaccessible,” Melissa Pancoast, CEO and founder of The Beans, said. “The Beans is designed to empower all people to make Visual Financial Plans effortlessly, and our growing community in Atlanta is evidence of the widespread need that we are addressing.”

A former math teacher who later became a researcher at the University of Oxford, Pancoast developed Visual Financial Planning as a way for people to create easy-to-follow financial plans that help them manage both their spending and savings – and avoid the high levels of stress that often accompanies financial planning efforts. Features of the app include the ability to create personalized visual financial plans, automated transaction labelling for expense tracking, and real-time support and alerts to inform users of account balances, Safe to Spend amounts, and more. Pancoast has said that she hopes that those working in what she called “the caring class” of teachers, health care workers, and others – people with jobs that often are especially and consistently stressful – will be first among those who take advantage of The Beans’ solution.

The Beans made fintech headlines in recent days on news that the company, which turns four this year, secured its first seed funding last week. The $2 million investment was led by Percursor Ventures and featured participation from Swing Ventures, Relay Ventures, Oxford Angel Fund, and One Planet. The fundraising added to the $1.4 million in pre-seed capital the company has raised over the course of two previous rounds.

In addition to offering an app, The Beans has hosted free financial wellness workshops for more than 30 schools and organizations in the Atlanta area. And organizations like the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and the United Nations, have worked to bring the benefits of Visual Financial Planning to millions of families around the world.

“I used The Beans’ recommendations on how to divide up my money and was able to bring my Sheltered expenses (rent, utilities, subscriptions, and savings) down to 60% of my income, including some savings for a big trip I have planned this year,” an Atlanta public school teacher Veronica Karwoski said. “I’m less stressed about everyday expenses and I’m making progress toward the life I want to live.”

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Photo by Jessica Lewis from Pexels

Here in the U.S., it’s tax season. And even though the IRS has extended the filing deadline by a few weeks, it’s still a stressful time for both individuals and businesses. In an era of changing benefits, everyone is on the lookout to minimize their tax burden.

Enter MainStreet, a company founded in 2019 that helps qualify tech startups for tax credits that most accountants don’t check for. The California-based company works with startups’ accountants to check for more than 200 potential unclaimed tax credits.

MainStreet works by integrating the startups’ payroll and scanning the data on a monthly basis for potential federal, state, and local tax credits. If MainStreet finds a tax credit, the company will advance 80% of the credit amount to the startup so that they can use the funds right away instead of waiting on their tax refund. The client is responsible for repaying that amount, with no interest incurred, after they receive their credit from the government.

MainStreet does not charge a fee for this monthly service. Instead, the company keeps the remaining 20% of the startups’ tax credit amount. However, MainStreet only receives payment if it successfully finds a refund for the client.

In the event of an audit, MainStreet offers support through the auditing process. And if MainStreet makes an error with the paperwork or credit claim, the client is insured for up to $1 million.

So far, MainStreet has found more than $80 million for over 1,000 startups. The company’s clients include Rally, Newfront Insurance, LedgerX, Pave, and more.

In the long term, MainStreet plans to expand its operations beyond serving tech startups to include small businesses, as well.

MainStreet has received almost $63 million from investors including Gradient Ventures, Sound Ventures, and Signal Fire.

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Photo by Liza Rusalskaya on Unsplash