Finovate Alums Raise $600 Million in First Quarter of 2014

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Want some context on the torrid pace of fintech financing in the first three months of 2014?

Consider this: a year ago, fourteen Finovate alums raised a total of more than $150 million in the first quarter of 2013.

A year later, we have just nine alums raising more than twice as much in the month of March alone.

March Madness, indeed.
Q1 of 2014 saw 23 Finovate alums walk away with just under $600 million in capital. The biggest haul of the quarter came courtesy of Klarna, which raised more than $125 million. 
But there were plenty of similarly impressive fundraisings, including the $85 million raised by Credit Karma, and the $77 million and $75 million secured by OnDeck and Tradeshift, respectively.
Total raised = More than $592 million
January — $91 million raised by seven companies
February — $139 million raised by seven companies
March — $362 million raised by nine companies

Note: Funding prior to becoming a Finovate alum not included. Questions? Comments? Email us at David@finovate.com or Julie@finovate.com

Finovate Alumni News– April 2, 2014

  • Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Finovate-F-Logo.jpgBottomline Technologies buys Andera for $48 million.
  • Marketing Land takes a look at Narrative Science’s free, Google Analytics app, Quill Engage.
  • Saudi Arabian Bank Albilad to deploy FIS’ card management system and switching platform.
  • TradeKing promotes Kevin Delo to Chief Information Officer.
  • Startups.co.uk interviews Tradeshift CEO, Christian Lanng.
  • Atlanta Business Chronicle looks at Pindrop Security’s growth: doubling its workforce and has quadrupled its workspace.
  • Check Point Software Technologies launches new ZoneAlarm 2015 security product line.
  • Finovate alums raise $600 million in first quarter of 2014.
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.

Bottomline Technologies Buys Andera for $48 Million

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Innovations in customer onboarding may be one of the less glamorous niches in financial technology. But there’s no denying the value of meeting your customers on the channel of their choice.

This is the thinking that helps explain Bottomline Technologies’ purchase of financial software-as-a-service specialist Andera.

In a deal valued at $48 million ($44.5 million in cash and just over 100,000 shares of stock valued at just over $35 per share), Bottomline sees its acquisition as a way of helping its digital banking clients “grow revenues and compete and win” in the words of Norm DeLuca, General Manager of Banking and Financial Services for Bottomline.

Of Andera’s virtues, none is more vivid than its oFlows platform, which the company purchased in 2011. The Best of Show winning technology (FinovateSpring 2010) makes customer onboarding and account opening easier for banks and credit unions whether customers are accessing their financial institution online, in-person, or through a mobile device. Most recently, the company made headlines with a software upgrade enabling mobile photo capture of data on driver’s licenses.
Andera was founded in 2000, and is headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. The company has helped its more than 500 banking and credit union clients process more than 4.5 million online account applications. American Banker called Andera one of its “Top 10 Tech Companies to Watch” in 2012. Charlie Kroll is founder, president, and CEO.

Zopa Lending Reaches £500 Million Milestone

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Two months after reaching a new funding milestone, UK-based peer-to-peer lender Zopa is announcing another: the company has now lent more £500 million ($833 million) since launch in 2005.

“By cutting out the banks and offering returns of 5% … we are rewarding people for being sensible with their money,” Zopa CEO Giles Andrews said.

“Lending the next £500 million shouldn’t take another nine years as we expect to reach £1 billion lent in the next 12 months.”

This latest news from Zopa comes with a insightful set of fresh metrics:
  • Total loans: more than 90,000
  • Total active savers: 52,000
  • Total active borrowers: 70,000
  • Average loan: £5,500 ($9,170)
  • Average lender/saver age: 48
  • Smallest loan: £10 ($17)
  • Largest loan: £1.3 million ($2.2 million)
  • Three-year default rate: 0.17%
  • Total interest paid: £30 million ($50 million)
How are borrowers using their loans from Zopa? In 2013, 40% of all loans went toward auto purchases (£86 million).  Borrowing for home improvement and to pay off existing debt were also popular destination for funds borrowed via Zopa (£39 million and £36 million, respectively, or $65 million and $60 million).
The largest peer-to-peer lender in the United Kingdom, Zopa is based in London and has a staff of more than 50. Recently profiled in The Guardian, the company was voted “Most Trusted Personal Loan Provider” in the Moneywise Customer Awards for four years in a row.

Finovate Alumni News — March 31, 2014

  • Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Finovate-F-Logo.jpgThreatMetrix CTO Andreas Baumhof discusses the need for new authentication strategies for retailers.
  • NBC Chicago interviews Larry Baker, co-founder of Bolstr, on the basics of crowdfunding.
  • Trustly named to 2014 Red Herring Top 100 Europe award.
  • The Real Money Story reviews Jemstep.
  • Top Image Systems and Konica Minolta Spain partner to market eFLOW Invoice and Digital Mailroom business automation projects.
  • Upstart Business Journal looks at how developments from payment startup PayNearMe match up against big players.
  • A look at Xero’s new integration with Square.
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.

Updated: ThreatMetrix Raises $20 Million in Funding

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We’re still waiting to hear word from the company, but according to an SEC filing uncovered by Venture Beat, anti-cyberfraud specialist ThreatMetrix just raised $20 million in new funding. 

This rivals the company’s last round from two springs ago in 2012, and takes ThreatMetrix’s total capital to more than $56 million.

In an interview with CIO magazine, ThreatMetrix CEO Reed Taussig discussed how his company uses Big Data and context-based authentication to help companies move beyond VPNs, hardware tokens, and one-time passwords. Instead, ThreatMetrix technologies analyze data ranging from information about employee devices to “transactional or application context.” 

This network of data is key to ThreatMetrix’s effectiveness. Said Taussig, 
“Rather than deriving decision data from a single enterprise, ThreatMetrix customers share anonymous data globally. This increases the perspective, quality, and value of the data while driving down the cost of the  enterprise.”
2014 has been a good year for ThreatMetrix. The company won most Innovative Anti-Malware Appliances Solution and Best Product Network Access Control Solution at the 2014 Cyber Defense magazine awards. ThreatMetrix took home bronze in the 2014 Global Excellence Awards in the Most Innovative Company of the Year (Security) competition.
Founded in 2005, ThreatMetrix is headquartered in San Jose, California, and has offices in New York City, Hong Kong, Sydney, and The Netherlands.
ThreatMetrix is one of Finovate’s oldest alums, demoing their technology as part of FinovateStartup in 2009.
Update: In a piece published today at The Paypers, we get some additional information – and some interesting metrics – about ThreatMetrix.
  • The funding came as part of a Series E round
  • The round was led by Adams Street Partners
  • ThreatMetrix analyzes more than 500 million transactions daily
  • ThreatMetrix’s technology secures more than 160 million active user accounts, covering 2,500 customers, and 10,000 websites.

Finovate Alumni News– March 28, 2014

  • Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Finovate-F-Logo.jpgMambu wins Cloud Computing Innovation of the Year awards at 2014 FStech Awards.
  • eToro launches new version of OpenBook.
  • Nostrum Group ranked 9th in GP Bullhound’s Northern Tech 50.
  • Global Payments to offer MasterCard’s MasterPass digital payments solution.
  • New partnership means V&D customers will be able to pay via Klarna.
  • Innotribe interviews Kantox’s CEO, Philippe Gelis.
  • The Financial News features BehavioSec.
  • BBVA and Google sponsor developer competition for SME business apps geared toward Spanish, Latin American markets.
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.

FinovateSpring 2014 Sneak Peek: Part 2

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This year’s return to California for FinovateSpring will feature both new and old faces, as innovative startups make their fintech debuts and established veterans continue to remind us all that they’ve still “got it.”

Maybe your interests in FinovateSpring lie in something specific like security or mobile payments. Or maybe you are just looking forward to taking in all that this year’s crop of FinovateSpring presenters has to offer. 

Whatever your fintech appetite, we think you’ll find our Sneak Peek series a helpful way to get to know the entrepreneurs that will be taking the stage next month in April.

So today we introduce you to another set of six companies: Interactions, Kreditech, Market Prophit, Personal Capital, Yseop, and ZenPayroll. And if you missed the first installment of our FinvoateSpring 2014 Sneak Peek series, click here.

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Interactions Corporation is the only truly conversational, self-service solution to move more activity to self-service and free up agents for higher order tasks.
Features:
  • Delivers a fully unstructured, open-ended conversation between businesses and their customers
  • Understands with an unrivaled 95% accuracy in both speech and text
  • Deploys in 12 to 18 weeks
Why it’s great: We put customers first by engaging them in a free form dialogue, allowing them to solve problems quicker, and with less effort.
Phil Gray
Responsible for leading business development. Phil is a successful startup executive with extensive experience in natural language understanding and contact center technologies. 
Dan Fox, Marketing Manager

Kreditech uses Big Data and complex machine-learning algorithms to enable faster, better, and more sustainable credit decisions.
Features:
  • Developing self-learning, self-calibrating Big Data scoring
  • Building the “Amazon for consumer lending”: 24/7, always and everywhere available lending platform
  • Innovative FinTech products
Why it’s great: Based on Big Data scoring, Kreditech is building a centralized and global online lending service for innovative consumer finance products.
Sebastian Diemer, Co-Founder and CEO
Started building one of the most innovative global Big Data technology companies in 2012. Today, Kreditech is innovation leader in Big Data scoring.
Alexander Graubner, Founder and CTO
Combines cloud-based big data infrastructure and machine learning to build the world’s consumer scoring technology.

Market Prophit empowers every investor with real-time intelligence into what’s moving the market by quantifying global, financial-related conversations in social media.
Features:
  • Real-time sentiment and buzz in stock-related social media chatter
  • Identify the “mavens” in the “crowd” with our quantitative blogger ranking system
  • Track stocks and bloggers you care about
Why it’s great: Klout + Morningstar for social media financial influencers
Igor Gonta, CEO
Extensive experience on Wall Street in sales and trading, and brings that to the intersection of Big Data and finance.

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Personal Capital’s One Click Investment Proposals enables our advisors to efficiently analyze prospective clients’ finances and deliver investment recommendations tailored to their unique needs.
Features:
  • Advisors generate 90% of a client’s portfolio with one click
  • Clients see their complete & up-to-date household financial data and a comparison of their existing portfolio to an optimal one
Why it’s great: We’re making it digital – while keeping it personal.
Bill Harris, CEO
Has spent his career dragging the financial industry into the 21st century. He’s developed financial technology for 25 years – including as CEO at Intuit and PayPal.
Jim Del Favero, CPO
Has spent his career designing and building consumer financial software. Before Personal Capital he was head product manager for Quicken at Intuit.

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Yseop is natural language generation software based on artificial intelligence that boosts sales productivity and turns each financial advisor into an expert without additional training.
Features:
  • Yseop automates the sales process from lead generation to the writing of pre-to-meeting reports, customer follow-up and personalized marketing communications — automatically.
Why it’s great:
Yseop turns data into text, leads into clients, and salespeople into experts. Double your sales force productivity overnight with the power of artificial intelligence.
Elizabeth Farabee
Has a background in inbound and direct marketing. She is passionate about Yseop’s personalized marketing potential in both the B2C and B2B markets.
Matt Rauscher
Is a consultant at Y
seop. He lived nine years in the United States, and graduated with a Master’s Degree in Finance.

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ZenPayroll is modern, delightful payroll. Our mission is to make payroll as simple and intuitive as possible using the principles of modern software.
Features:
  • Makes payroll as simple and intuitive as possible
  • Helps business owners build stronger teams
  • Empowers employees by enabling them to be equal stakeholders
Why it’s great: Payroll should be about people, not payments. ZenPayroll is unearthing the human side of compensation currently buried under layers of complexity and government bureaucracy.
Joshua Reeves, CEO and Co-Founder
Believes in the power of software to solve complex problems, and founded ZenPayroll to deliver delightful, modern payroll to businesses everywhere.

Stay tuned for the next edition of our Sneak Peek series coming next week.

Realty Mogul Raises $9 Million in Round Led By Canaan Partners

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CEO and co-founder of Realty Mogul, Jilliene Helman, said that her goal was to “bring the $11 trillion commercial real estate market into the 21st century.”

Thanks to Canaan Partners, the real estate crowdfunding startup now has $9 million more to help make that happen.

Calling her innovation “democratization of deal flow”, Helman’s company saw growth of more than 400% in the six months since July, and now has more than 6,000 accredited investors using Realty Mogul’s platform. And this deal with Canaan Partners arguably helps put Realty Mogul in the same conversation with other crowdfunders that have attracted venture capital interest such as CircleUp.
Total capital raised by Realty Mogul now stands at approximately $10 million.
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Hrarch Simonian, a principal at Canaan Partners who also sits on the Realty Mogul board of directors, compared what Realty Mogul is doing for real estate investing to what another Finovate alum is doing for retail lending. “Realty Mogul will be the next disruption in a massive asset class just like Lending Club has been for the consumer credit market,” he said.
In addition to recently celebrating the first anniversary of its launch, Realty Mogul announced just a few days ago that crowdfunders using the platform had invested in more than $100 million worth of real estate. In a note to investors, CEO Helman noted this and stressed a commitment to technology going forward, saying the company has budgeted more than $2 million toward developing Realty Mogul’s proprietary technology.
Founded in May 2012 and headquartered in Los Angeles, Realty Mogul made its Finovate debut at the spring show in 2013. See a video of the company on stage here.
And for more information about our upcoming FinovateSpring 2014 event, click here.

Finovate Alumni News — March 26, 2014

  • Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Finovate-F-Logo.jpgProfitStars’ Gladiator ranks #36 in MSPmentor’s top 501 managed service providers.
  • Kofax Mobile Capture platform wins “Elegant Implementation” category of Housing-Wire magazine’s HW TECH 100.
  • Online TV host Doug Sleeter interviews Xero CEO, Rod Drury.
  • Jumio wins 2014 METAward in “established” category.
  • miiCard bringing its ID verification technology to eMerchantPay.
  • WTOP News asks: is the credit card with keypad from Dynamics is the “card of the future”?
  • MasterCard selects Anna Yip as head of Hong Kong and Macau.
  • Digital Insight to expand online banking portfolio to include shared access and small business payments. Come see Digital Insight demo at FinovateSpring next month.
  • Kraken, the digital currency exchange platform used by Fidor Bank, raises $5 million.
  • ZipZap pauses UK cash-to-bitcoin transfers through its platform.
  • Boku partners with sunhill technologies to enable direct global carrier billing for sunhill’s services.
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.

Finovate Alumni News — March 25, 2014

  • Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Finovate-F-Logo.jpgEleven Finovate alums win awards at PYMNTS Innovation Project 2014.
  • Bazaarvoice announces partnership with Spredfast.
  • TechCrunch: Wealthfront, OnDeck, Lending Club, Credit Karma, Betterment, and Kapitall “come of age.”
  • CMS Wire reviews Backbase’s customer experience platform.
  • Top Image Systems’ eFLOW to process the digital census of a country in EMEA in a deal worth more than $1 million.
  • Place2Give releases GIVE-API to provide access to its database of charities as well as its payment processing tech.
  • SmartAsset raises $5.2 million in series A funding. Come see their live demo at FinovateSpring next month in San Jose.
  • Netherlands Queen Maxima visits Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) to see its psychometric credit scoring methodology in action.
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.

Eleven Finovate Alums Win Awards at PYMNTS Innovation Project 2014

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The votes are in. The judges have decided. And 11 Finovate alums have earned awards at the 2014 PYMNTS.com Innovation Project, including three gold medals.

Finovate alums won awards in a diverse range of categories, from “B2B Innovation” to “Best Comeback Story.” Areas where alums dominated included “Best Credit Innovation,” where Credit Karma, Lending Club, and Klarna swept the field, as well as “Best Innovation via ACH” and “Best Check Innovation.”

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The Innovation Project is “powered by PYMNTS.com,” a joint venture between BusinessWire and Market Platform Dynamics. The event is in its second year, and was again held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A total of 49 awards were presented. Gold, silver, and bronze in fifteen categories, plus singular Catalyst, Women Driving Innovation in Payments, Lifetime Achievement, and Best in Show awards. 

Also announced were three inductees to the Payments Hall of Fame.
See how the rest of the Finovate family fared below.




Catalyst Award 
  • International e-commerce payments and money transfers
  • Finovate demo video: Europe 2012
Gold
  • Best B2B Innovation
  • Cash flow management solution for business integrating electronic payments, accounting, digital documents, and more
  • Finovate demo video: Spring 2012
  • Best Credit Innovation
  • Aggregates consumer financial data from bank accounts and credit scores to mortgage loans in one location
  • Finovate demo video: Startup 2009
  • Best Check Innovation
  • Enables check payments without having to write paper checks
  • Finovate demo video: Spring 2012
Silver
  • Best Credit Innovation
  • Online, peer-to-peer lender
  • Finovate demo video: Startup 2009
  • Best Cash Innovation
  • Cash transaction network 
  • Finovate demo video: Spring 2013
  • Best New Technology
  • Open-source, distributed payment protocol
  • Finovate demo video: Spring 2013
  • Best Innovation via ACH
  • Best Check Innovation
  • Send money to a Venmo account, bank account or supported debit card for free
  • Finovate demo video (with Braintree): Spring 2013
Bronze
  • Most Innovative Company
  • E-commerce solution mitigates credit and fraud risk for online merchants 
  • Finovate demo video: Spring 2012
  • Most Disruptive Innovation
  • Best Comeback Story
  • Peer-to-peer lending
  • Finovate demo video: Finovate 2007
  • Best Credit Innovation
  • Best Innovation via ACH
  • Solution leverages mobile device camera to enable check deposit, account opening, and bill pay.
  • Finovate demo video: Fall 2013