Author: David Penn

More than $1 Billion Raised by 31 Alums in Q3 2017

More than $1 Billion Raised by 31 Alums in Q3 2017
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings

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*Update: 10/10/2017. Bill.com disclosed today the amount of its September funding at $100 million. This takes our September 2017 funding total to more than $187 million, and puts Bill.com in our “top ten” fundings for the quarter, as well. The total raised for Q3 2017 now stands at $1.13 billion.

In reeling in more than $1 billion in funding over the months of July, August, and September, Finovate alums in the third quarter of 2017 raised more than twice as much in equity capital compared to Q3 2016. This happened with the number of alums funded in both Q3 2015 and Q3 2016 – 31 versus 30 – being virtually the same. In this regard, the third quarter of this year was even more impressive than the $1 billion raised by 40 alums in 2015. For all the concerns over the slow start to funding this year, it appears the world’s fintech investors are more than making up for lost time.

Previous Quarterly Comparisons

  • Q3 2016: $500 million raised by 30 alums
  • Q3 2015: $1 billion raised by 40 alums
  • Q3 2014: $194 million raised by 17 alums

The biggest deals of the third quarter this year were the $250 million raised by Kabbage and the $225 million raised by Klarna. Also impressive were the pair of $100 million fundraisings by Blend and Coinbase, as well as the $70 million investment in Betterment that edges the company that much closer to unicorn status. The top 10 equity investments totaled more than $922 million or more than 89% of the quarter’s total alum funding.

Top 10 Equity Investments (equity only)

  1. Kabbage: $250 million
  2. Klarna: $225 million
  3. Blend: $100 million
  4. Coinbase: $100 million
  5. Betterment: $70 million
  6. Prosper: $50 million
  7. Juvo: $40 million
  8. Personal Capital: $40 million
  9. Stockpile: $30 million
  10. Karmic Labs: $17.2 million

Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q3 2017.

July 2017: More than $374 million raised by 15 alums

August 2017: More than $570 million raised by 10 alums

September 2017: More than $187 million raised by six alums

If you are a Finovate/FinDEVr alum that raised money in the third quarter of 2017, and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at research@finovate.com. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum not included.

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FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Heckyl Technologies

FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Heckyl Technologies
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateAsia 2017, FinovateAsia 2017 Sneak Peek, Heckyl Technologies

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateAsia on November 7 and 8 in Hong Kong. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Heckyl Technologies is in the space of real-time analytics of structured and unstructured data. Its news and sentiment analysis product helps companies through the reduction of the information arbitrage.

Features

  • Aggregation of data from thousands of sources to cover all asset classes: equities, FX, commodities, etc.
  • Deep-dive news and sentiment analytics
  • Real-time actionable intelligence

Why it’s great
A scalable product with a global appeal that performs the real-time analytics of structured and unstructured data.

Presenters

Mukund Mudras, Co-Founder
Mudras has 18+ years of techno-commercial and techno-functional experience. Responsible for overall strategy, sales and marketing, client relationship, and delivery management.
LinkedIn

Anand Vaidya, VP of Sales
Vaidya is an experienced VP of Sales with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry. Vaidya is skilled in sales, business development, capital markets, equity research, and financial modeling.
LinkedIn

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FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Moven Enterprise

FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Moven Enterprise
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateAsia 2017, FinovateAsia 2017 Sneak Peek, Moven

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateAsia on November 7 and 8 in Hong Kong. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Moven is transforming the financial experience. The company does this by bringing value to your customers in real-time and driving positive measurable business outcomes for your bank: a true win-win situation.

Features
At FinovateAsia 2017, Moven Enterprise is very excited to demonstrate the increased capabilities of its recently launched Wishlist functionality, in addition to unveiling an all-new credit feature.

Why it’s great
The Moven platform offers a range of innovative, behavior-based features that help banks improve their customers’ financial experience and develop deeper, more trusted customer relationships.

Presenters

Andrew Clark, VP APAC
Clark has spent over 20 years in financial services in a variety of leadership positions across all financial services domains. He cannot wait to share the latest from Moven at FinovateAsia 2017.
LinkedIn

 

Taylor May Woolsey, Business Development and Marketing
Woolsey is on a mission to make an impact on financial services and to promote financial wellness around the world. Like Andrew, she is excited to share the Moven story at FinovateAsia 2017.
LinkedIn

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FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Bambu

FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Bambu
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bambu, FinovateAsia 2017, FinovateAsia 2017 Sneak Peek

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateAsia on November 7 and 8 in Hong Kong. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Bambu is a B2B robo advisory software firm that offers financial and non-financial companies the ability to integrate and benefit from the shift in digital wealth.

Features

  • Statistically augmented data ready for every company size
  • Recommends life goals based on similar spending and saving habits
  • Automated financial planning under 30 seconds

Why it’s great
People Like Me is the perfect plug-in solution for users seeking financial guidance based on their current age and situation.

Presenters

Ned Phillips, Founder & CEO
Former managing director and now an entrepreneur, Phillips has been based in Asia for the past 25 years and started his fintech journey in 1999 with E*TRADE as one of their very first brokers.
LinkedIn

 

Aki Ranin, C0-Founder & CEO
A technology industry veteran and former software developer, Ranin is a recognized authority in fintech and an accomplished technology executive with a highly technical background.
LinkedIn

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FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Solus

FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Solus
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateAsia 2017, FinovateAsia 2017 Sneak Peek, Solus

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateAsia on November 7 and 8 in Hong Kong. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Solus is an adaptive, next-generation, multi-factor authentication platform that utilizes biometrics and machine-learning behavioral tools to detect and predict fraudulent behavior.

Features

  • Agile platform allowing biometric and behavioral tools to be incorporated easily and cost-effectively at enterprise and individual level.
  • Futuristic machine-learning capabilities
  • No hardware requirements

Why it’s great
Solus is the only adaptive platform in the market today that allows clients to customize their multi-factor authentication requirements at enterprise and individual levels.

Presenters
Matthew Ainscow, CEO
LinkedIn

 

 

Lee Macdonald, Chief Strategy Officer
LinkedIn

 

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FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Five Degrees

FinovateAsia Sneak Peek: Five Degrees
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateAsia 2017, FinovateAsia 2017 Sneak Peek, Five Degrees

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateAsia on November 7 and 8 in Hong Kong. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Five Degrees is a next generation, digital core banking provider. The company’s product, Matrix, enables banks to provide true digital capabilities to their clients to support them in their daily financial lives.

Features

  • Automates paperless loan onboarding of a business with multiple directors structure
  • Uses advanced analytics for predictive behavior to support the business making the right financial decisions

Why it’s great
Five Degrees brings digitization of banking to the next level with the digital core banking platform Matrix using the fintech ecosystem to provide high levels of automation and predictive behavior.

Presenters

Peter-Jan van de Venn, Chief Commercial Officer
After a career at Atos/KPMG Consulting, van de Venn moved to domestic consulting party ConQuaestor where he has set up a practice that guides banks into the digital era. Since 2011, he has worked for Five Degrees.
LinkedIn

 

Bjorn Holmthorsson, Chief Technology Officer
After graduating from Reykjavik University, Holmthorsson started as a software developer. Afterwards, he became a successful IT director at Landsbanki Luxembourg. In 2011, he co-founded Five Degrees.
LinkedIn

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Best of Show Winner Voleo and Nasdaq to Launch Equity Trading Competition

Best of Show Winner Voleo and Nasdaq to Launch Equity Trading Competition
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Voleo

Less than a month after earning Best of Show honors in its debut at FinovateFall, social investing platform Voleo has teamed up with the NASDAQ to launch its Voleo Equity Trading Competition. The competition begins Monday, October 9th, and winning investors and investing teams will win $10,000 in real cash portfolios.

“The goals of the competition are to improve financial literacy, to break down the knowledge barrier, and of course, to have fun,” Voleo CEO Thomas Beattie wrote, announcing the contest. “The most important part of investing is starting early and contributing regularly – we believe that participating will teach you a little about the markets, and a lot about yourself,” he said.

Left to right: Voleo’s Olivia Lovenmark (Communications), Thomas Beattie (CEO), and Anthony Tsui (VP Technology) at FinovateFall 2017.

Geared toward college students and millennial investors, the equity trading competition enables investor/trader teams of three or more to form or join an investing club on Voleo. Using the company’s SimuTrader platform, the clubs will manage simulated portfolios of $1 million. Participants can be on more than one club (up to a maximum of five) to allow them to try different investment strategies and methods. The competition ends December 8th. In addition to their share of the $10,000 cash prize, the top teams and investors will be hosted by the Nasdaq for a tour of their MarketSite in Times Square.

With Voleo, members of each investment club vote via the iOS, Android, or web-based app as to which investment ideas the club will pursue. Each trader and investor has the opportunity to make their case on the platform, while the Definitive Return On Investment Decisions (DROID) score keeps track of decisions and hypothetical positions taken to make it easy to spot the top performing investors – as well as those traders whose good investing calls are being overlooked. In putting the wisdom of the crowd above the inclinations of the individual, the platform does not provide for individual accounts, for example, and instead encourages collaborative investing that keeps trading costs down, provides for better diversification, a more educational experience for new investors, and a more collaborative investing environment for everyone.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Voleo demonstrated its social trading app at FinovateFall 2017, winning Best of Show. A direct-to-consumer fintech, Voleo has hundreds of live users and thousands of users of its SimuTrader system. In August, Voleo announced it had been selected to participate in PlugAndPlay’s Fintech Fall 2017 program.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: DriveWealth, Finastra, Kony, Market EarlyBird, NCR Corporation, Ondot, Pendo Systems, ProfitStars, Student Loan Genius, Top Image Systems, Truphone, Voleo

On Finovate.com

  • Truphone Raises $339 Million to Fuel Global Expansion.
  • Best of Show Winner Voleo and Nasdaq to Launch Equity Trading Competition.

Around the web

  • New York Life launches student loan repayment program; partners with Student Loan Genius.
  • NCR unveils new mPOS solution, Ring Up, designed for U.S. micro businesses.
  • Invstr to offer fractional share trading via partnership with DriveWealth.
  • MarketEarlybird announces availability on cloud-based workflow and collaboration platform, Symphony.
  • Quadient (formerly GMC Software) expands Partner Advantage Program.
  • Top Image Systems eFLOW Remit tops 50 billion transactions.
  • Ondot Systems brings its card control technology to Access Softek mobile banking platform.
  • Pendo launches Pendo Machine Learning Platform (PMLP).
  • ICBA adds CECL Solution from ProfitStars to Preferred Service Provider Program
  • Finastra adds three new CU clients
  • Kony to power next-gen digital platform for NRT and Sightline.
  • Pendo Systems selected by SWIFT as One of 16 Fintechs to Exhibit at SIBOS 2017.
  • 35 Finovate alums named in IDC Financial Insights’ top 100 fintech rankings

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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EVRY Announces Five-Year, $18.7 Million Card Deal with Finland’s Aktia Bank

EVRY Announces Five-Year, $18.7 Million Card Deal with Finland’s Aktia Bank
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: EVRY

Thanks to a new partnership, EVRY will provide Finland’s Aktia Bank with the “entire value chain for card payments,” including virtual debit and credit cards for the bank’s digital, Aktia Wallet. The agreement is valued at $18.7 million (NOK 150 million) and will last for five years.

Christer Jonsson, SVP of Card for EVRY Financial Services referred to the deal as an expansion of the company’s current relationship with the bank. “Digitalization and new market entrants are creating a need for solutions to be even more personalized and customized,” Jonsson said. “We will help with this through our specialist expertise and thus create digital advantage for Aktia.”

The agreement with Aktia Bank calls for EVRY to deliver everything from physical credit and debit cards to services such as card administration, authorization processing, and transaction monitoring. Virtual cards are also an area of focus for the Finland-based bank, which will be among the first customers of EVRY’s new technology for digitizing cards on mobile devices. “We are working hard to offer new solutions that will make it easier for our customers to manage their finances on a day-to-day basis,” Director of Loans and Cards for Aktia Bank, Anton Tulikoura said, “and this collaboration with EVRY will help accelerate developments in this area.”

Delivering credit and debit cards to more than 100 card issuers in 12 countries, EVRY demonstrated its personal finance solution Spendific at FinovateEurope 2015. Founded in 1962 and headquartered in Oslo, Norway, the company processes up to 250 card transactions per second, issues 25 million cards each year, and monitors more than one billion card transactions every year as part of its fraud mitigation efforts.

Last month, EVRY announced a five-year, IT consulting partnership with Statoil, and extended its IT services agreement with the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. In August, Danish IT services firm Bankdata chose EVRY’s Cash Management solutions in a $3.75 million (NOK 30 million), three-year deal. And earlier this year, EVRY reported that it would continue IT infrastructure management for Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, for another two years. Björn Ivroth is EVRY’s CEO.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: DefenseStorm, Diebold, EVRY, Luxoft, OurCrowd, Pindrop Security, Quovo, Sberbank, Temenos, Trulioo, Xero, Zopa

On Finovate.com

  •  Luxoft Acquires UNAFORTIS to Broaden Client Base within Financial Services.
  • EVRY Announces Five-Year, $18.7 Million Deal with Finland’s Aktia Bank.
  • OurCrowd Opens Office in Spain, Lays Down Roots with Strategic Partnership.

Around the web

  • Trulioo launches its Global Business Verification service.
  • Diebold partnership with Transguard to expand service and technology offerings in the UAE.
  • Ethiopia’s Cooperative Bank of Oromia goes live with core banking solution from Temenos.
  • Pindrop Security leverages machine learning and a “customer consortium of shared fraudsters” to introduce Pindrop Protect 4.0.
  • Quovo unveils new account authentication solution, Autoverified Micro-deposits.
  • Xero partners with UK fintech Curve to automate expense management.
  • Zopa searches for new borrowers through Saffron Building Society loan partnership.
  • Sberbank, Russia’s Largest Bank, Announces Payment Solution.
  • DefenseStorm Renews SOC 2 Compliance.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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Swych Seals Series A Funding

Swych Seals Series A Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Swych

Digital gifting platform Swych has closed its Series A round with a “major strategic capital investment” from UAE Exchange Group. The amount of the investment was undisclosed.

“Swych’s global gifting technology and vision fits well with our strategy to foster purpose-based money transfers,” UAE Exchange Group CEO Promoth Manghat said. “As a group, we are always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with organizations that drive innovation, provide differential services and promote digital initiatives,” he added. “In Swych, we see a unique value proposition that checks all these boxes.”

Swych’s platform gives users the ability to send “swychable” digital gifts from their mobile device that are redeemable for electronic gift cards from more than 120 retail partners. Users can also upload their plastic gift cards to the Swych mobile app and checkout using their smartphone to scan the bar code at the register. They can also earn rewards points that can be used to buy “swychable” gift cards. Businesses can use the company’s GiftBot platform or its “Gifting-as-a-Service” APIs to produce their own customized digital gift cards.

UAE Exchange and Swych will work together to develop digital gifting services for international markets, with a U.S.-to-India service under consideration as an initial launch. Swych founder and CEO Deepak Jain underscored the opportunity of leveraging UAE’s international reach, saying it would “greatly accelerate Swych in its mission to become the leader in digital cross-border gifting services globally.” A money transfer, foreign exchange, and payments solutions provider, UAE Exchange has in excess of 200,000 agent locations in more than 160 countries and 15+ million customers worldwide. UAE Exchange was established in 1980 and is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Plano, Texas-based Swych won Best of Show for its demonstration of the Swych Mobile Gifting Platform at FinovateFall 2016. The mobile app is available for free at both the Apple App Store and Google Play.

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Tuition.io Raises $7 Million in Series B

Tuition.io Raises $7 Million in Series B
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Tuition.io

In a round led by Wildcat Venture Partners and featuring participation from current investors Mohr Davidow Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, student loan repayment assistance platform Tuition.io has raised $7 million in new funding. The Series B round brings the company’s total capital to more than $15 million.

“We are committed to expanding our student loan assistance offerings and driving mass adoption until student loan repayment assistance becomes a national and even international employee benefit standard,” Tuition.io CEO Scott Thompson said. Thompson also referred to student loan repayment assistance as a global competitiveness issue for companies “in the increasingly aggressive race to hire and retain top talent.”

Scott Thompson, Tuition.io CEO, discussing the challenge of helping millennials manage student loan debt with Finovate Director of Strategy Lisa Moyle at FinovateFall last week.

“Tuition.io’s value to our partners and their employees is clear,” General Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners Bryan Stolle added. “The company is changing the face of employee benefits while helping address a national crisis that is only slated to get worse,” Stolle said.

In addition to the funding, the company also announced a new office in San Mateo, California, which will be staffed by a pair of new executives: Scott Simmons and Danica Bracy. Simmons will serve as Chief Operating Officer/Chief Financial Officer. Bracy will oversee management of the client portfolio as Senior Director of Partner Success.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Tuition.io demonstrated its technology a year later at FinovateFall 2012. The company was named a preferred provider by global health, wellness, and career consulting leader Mercer in September. This summer, Tuition.io announced that it would administer the new Student Loan Reduction Program for the City of Memphis. CEO Thompson participated in our Finovate Talks interview series during FinovateFall this year, opining on the topic “How Can We Help Millennials Work Through the Student Loan Debt Crisis?”

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