WorkFusion’s $50 Million Round to Fuel Robotic Process Automation

WorkFusion’s $50 Million Round to Fuel Robotic Process Automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) technology is a term that’s becoming more and more common in fintech. And thanks to WorkFusion’s $50 million round announced today, it’s a trend that’s gaining even more footing.

This Series E investment was led by Hawk Equity and Declaration Partners, with contributions from previous investors Georgian Partners, iNovia Capital, and NGP Capital. WorkFusion’s total funding now stands at $118 million.

The company also announced today it has appointed former President Alex Lyashok as CEO. Lyashok will take the reins from Co-founder and former CEO, Max Yankelevich, who will transition to Chief Strategy Officer.

Hawk Equity Founder David Hawkins said that WorkFusion is a “clear leader” in leveraging intelligent automation for workforce efficiency. The company plans to use the $50 million to expand its global operations, which is essential to accommodate growing interest in RPA software. According to Lyashok, “Demand for our products grew 850% in 2017, reaffirming the power of AI to automate common business processes such as customer onboarding in banking, claims processing in insurance, or accounts payable in shared services.”

WorkFusion was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in New York City with offices in eight countries throughout Europe and Asia. At FinovateFall 2014, Yankelevich demoed how banks can leverage the company’s active learning automation technology to create workflow efficiencies. Last year, the company partnered with IBA Group to launch a Smart Application for customer support email processing.

The Analysts are Up & the Pressure is On

The Analysts are Up & the Pressure is On

After the final fintech demo at FinovateSpring next month, the next highlight to take the stage will be a committee of six fintech experts. Each analyst will have seven minutes to make their case for what they see as the hottest trend and opportunity in financial services.

The pressure is on for this group. Here’s who will be in the hot seat at FinovateSpring next month:

Jacob Jegher

Jegher is an experienced fintech executive and digital banking thought leader. He advises clients on emerging technologies and business strategies related to retail, small business, and corporate digital banking. Jegher provides strategic consulting to financial institutions and solution providers on issues ranging from digital strategy to vendor selection. In addition to his client-facing responsibilities, Jacob leads Javelin’s overall strategy, marketing, and product development efforts.

Most recently, Jegher was Vice President of Global Solution Marketing and Head of Analyst Relations at FIS, where he was responsible for marketing strategy efforts across all business units and solutions. He also brings extensive expertise in the banking research and consulting field, having spent over 10 years as a Research Director at Celent.

Tiffani Montez

Montez is a Retail Banking senior analyst at Aite Group covering card issuance for prepaid, credit, and debit cards. She has deep experience in global financial services with more than 20 years of experience in strategic planning, strategic execution, and consumer experience design. Montez has the unique ability to not only build strategies but also provide the strategic guidelines for executing complex strategic plans to deliver results.

Prior to joining Aite Group, Montez held executive-level positions at Wells Fargo, building digital experiences for various product groups such as home lending, personal credit, wealth, brokerage, and retirement, and was a principal analyst at Forrester Research, covering topics such as mobile banking, digital financial management, multichannel banking, and next-generation sales strategies. Most recently, she was the VP of operations at Terafina, helping banks and credit unions transform their customer experience through an omnichannel strategy. Her unique blend of experience as a practitioner, analyst, and vendor solution provider gives her the foundation to be able to provide thought leadership to clients through all lenses of the financial services ecosystem.

Ron Shevlin

Shevlin is the Director of Research at Cornerstone Advisors where he heads up the firm’s strategic research efforts, including the Insight Vault service. Shevlin is the author of the book, Smarter Bank, and is the purveyor of fine snark on his Snarketing blog and the Fintech Snark Tank podcast. Shevlin’s experience includes research and consulting for Aite Group, Forrester Research, and KPMG.

Shane Hubbell

Hubbell is a Vice President at Arbor Advisors and has more than 10 years of experience as an investment banker, business operations manager, and entrepreneur. In his role at Arbor, Hubbell is responsible for driving the firm’s business development efforts to source new clients as well as helping clients execute successful transactions. He has executed over $600 million of M&A and capital raising transactions over his career.

Prior to joining Arbor, Hubbell helped drive the strategic development of Goldman Sachs’ derivative trading systems. Previous to this, he was co-founder and CFO of a biotechnology company that developed a safer device for a cricothyrotomy.

Daniel Latimore

Latimore, CFA, is the Senior Vice President of Celent’s Banking group and is based in the firm’s Boston office. Latimore’s areas of focus include the banking ecosystem, digital and omnichannel banking, and innovation. Underlying each is a keen interest in consumer behavior and technology-enabled strategy. Latimore is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and client gatherings, having addressed audiences ranging from intimate meetings of CEOs and central banks to conference keynotes in more than a dozen countries. He led research groups at Deloitte and IBM, worked in industry Liberty Mutual and Merrill Lynch (where he lived in New York, Tokyo and London), and was a consultant at McKinsey & Co.

Jerry Silva

Jerry Silva is research director for IDC Financial Insights responsible for the global retail banking practice. Jerry’s research focuses on technology trends and customer expectations and behaviors in retail banking worldwide. Jerry draws upon over 25 years experience in the financial services industry to cover a variety of topics, from the back office, to customer channels, to governance in the technology shops at financial institutions. His work for both institutions and vendors gives Jerry a broad perspective in technology strategies.


Join us on May 8 through 11 at the Santa Clara convention center to hear the experts talk about the latest in fintech. Register by April 27 and save.

Micronotes to Scale AI-Enabled Marketing Platform with $3 Million in Funding

Micronotes to Scale AI-Enabled Marketing Platform with $3 Million in Funding

Cloud-based interview marketing company Micronotes has locked in $3 million in funding today, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $8 million. The round was led by TTV Capital, a VC firm focused on early-stage fintech companies. Vestigo Ventures, also an early-stage VC firm with a fintech focus, participated as well.

Micronotes will use the funds to scale its platform by bolstering the support of sales, marketing, and engineering. The Massachusetts-based company focuses on helping banks strengthen customer relationships with a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that leverages machine learning to match customers with banking products and services.

The company offers three main products. The first is Cross-Sell, which helps banks cross-sell products by conducting a mini-interview with customers about their needs without disrupting core banking functions. NPS Module enables banks to individually measure the net promoter score for a large percentage of its user base, instead of just a small sample. And the Predict Module, which scores how relevant every bank product is to each customer, and help banks to anticipate their needs.

“Micronotes’ vision is to interview the world’s customers, all seven billion, starting with banking customers,” said Devon Kinkead, CEO and co-founder of Micronotes. “The team at Vestigo understands our mission and how data and technology can be applied to financial services to create better, stronger and more profitable customer experiences. We look forward to leveraging Vestigo’s strong operational expertise within financial services to rapidly expand into our beachhead market.”

Micronotes was founded in 2008 by serial entrepreneurs and MIT Sloan School alumni, Devon Kinkead and Christian Klacko. Ian Sheridan, co-founder and managing director of Vestigo Ventures, and a member of the Board of Directors for Micronotes, said that the two “represent the rare combination of deep expertise in AI with the ability to achieve superior business outcomes.” At FinovateSpring 2013, the company demoed how Alliance Federal Credit Union leverages its cross-sell capabilities. Last fall, Micronotes released free downloadable propensity scores to help banks access predictive marketing analytics on their clients.

DriveWealth Closes $21 Million in Funding

DriveWealth Closes $21 Million in Funding

Wealthtech company DriveWealth has closed a Series B round of funding this week. The $21 million investment was led by Raptor Group Holdings, SBI Holdings, and Point72 Ventures. Existing investor Route 66 Ventures also participated. This brings the company’s total funding to just shy of $30 million.

DriveWealth will use the funds to enhance its existing products. The New Jersey-based company offers a suite of APIs that help online brokers, digital advisors, and financial services companies access the U.S. securities market. DriveWealth also has an API that allows partners to integrate native investment experiences into their own mobile applications. Among the company’s investment offerings are real-time, dollar-based investing capabilities that enable any investor to own shares in U.S. equities, regardless of stock price or deposit size.

Robert Cortright, CEO of DriveWealth, said that the company’s mission is to “provide global partners low cost, frictionless access to wealth building products.” He added, “Our solutions provide our partners native integration into their customer facing, mobile applications and reimagine investing for the clients they serve.”

As you may expect, today’s investors had positive things to say about DriveWealth and its business model. Yoshitaka Kitao, Chairman of SBI Holdings commented: “As a pioneer of internet-based financial services, we are excited to add DriveWealth to the world’s first ‘financial ecosystem’ that SBI has now expanded from Japan to worldwide.” Pete Casella, Head of Fintech Investments at Point72 Ventures, said, “DriveWealth has built a world class tech-driven brokerage stack that allows fintech firms to incorporate a wide range of investments capabilities into their product offerings.”

Founded in 2012, DriveWealth’s clients include MoneyLion, a lending and wealth management app, and INVSTR, a U.K.-based stock trading application. At FinovateAsia 2016, the company released a new API to enable partners to offer a robo advisory product suite and a self-directed equity investing platform. In 2016, the company partnered with Alkanza to bring robo advisory solutions to Latin America.

MapD Shoots for the Cloud

MapD Shoots for the Cloud

Analytics and visualization company MapD has its head in the cloud this week. That’s because the San Francisco-based company launched a cloud-based offering, MapD Cloud.

The new service has been in the making since the company launched in 2016, but proved difficult to implement without widespread availability of GPUs in the public cloud. Previously, it was difficult for customers to set up a cluster of GPUs to run MapD software because it was challenging to find a hardware manufacturer that carried GPU server SKUs– they were scarce in public clouds. This has shifted, however, with the rise of GPU computing adoption and major technology players providing support for GPU infrastructure.

Leveraging this shift, MapD has partnered with hardware vendors to standardize on-premises deployments and launched on the AWS marketplace. These moves have helped the company become a leader in GPU-accelerated analytics.

MapD was founded in 2013. The company’s CEO Todd Mostak most recently demoed the company’s Core and Immerse components at FinovateSpring 2017. Mostak also gave a presentation at FinDEVr New York 2017 titled How GPU-Powered Visual Analytics Are Remaking Financial Services. Last fall, MapD teamed up with IBM Power Systems to enhance the speed at which SQL queries can be performed.

SpyCloud Lands $5 Million in Funding

SpyCloud Lands $5 Million in Funding

Security breach detection and account takeover prevention service SpyCloud recently brought home $5 million in funding. The Series A round comes courtesy of existing investors Silverton Partners and March Capital Partners. This brings the Austin-based company’s total funding to $7.5 million.

SpyCloud helps prevent account takeovers by proactively identifying exposed accounts as early as possible so that businesses can force password changes for vulnerable accounts before fraudsters take action. The company will use the new funds to fuel product development, conduct deeper security research, expand its database of assets, and grow its team.

The company was founded in 2016 and emerged from stealth mode a year later. Since that time, SpyCloud has compiled a database of 32 billion exposed accounts, leaked passwords, and pieces of personally identifiable information; it adds billions of new account data points every month. This data repository is available to service providers via an API to help prevent customer account takeover. SpyCloud has protected tens of millions of accounts for notable companies across a variety of industries, including finance, retail, and healthcare.

“There isn’t a company in the world that doesn’t run the constant risk of having its employee or customer accounts exposed, and that leads to a host of other issues,” said Ted Ross, CEO and co-founder of SpyCloud. “The only chance businesses stand against these increasingly-proficient criminals is to know as soon as possible which accounts have been exposed and to take preventative measures well before credentials make it onto the dark web.”

SpyCloud CEO and Co-Founder Ted Ross, along with Head of Business Development, Chris LaConte, gave a Best of Show-winning presentation at FinovateFall 2017. The company also has the honor of winning the NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency Defense Innovation Challenge. We published a profile on SpyCloud, along with an interview with Ross, last fall.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • SpyCloud Lands $5 Million in Funding.
  • Finovate Alums Earn Spots on insideBIGDATA IMPACT 50 List.
  • The Faves of FinovateSpring: A Brief History of Best of Show Winners

Around the web

  • Benzinga reports: Tuition.io Helps Enterprises Tackle A $1.4 Trillion Crisis.
  • Speedway names InComm as Innovative Business Partner of the Year.
  • Revolut updates business accounts.
  • Bazaarvoice launches new solution to make personalization more powerful.

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.

MicroStrategy Powering Kasasa’s New Insight Solution

MicroStrategy Powering Kasasa’s New Insight Solution

Community banking and marketing services company Kasasa has cut a deal with enterprise software firm MicroStrategy. Under the agreement Kasasa will integrate MicroStrategy 10 into its business intelligence platform, Insight.

Kasasa’s Insight is a data-backed analytics solution that offers community banking clients product and marketing performance awareness, and helps them better understand consumer portfolios and market conditions. MicroStrategy 10 brings to the table a suite of research and adjustable product marketing tools to drive customer engagement at different levels.

Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy said, “This integration allows financial institutions to have a single version of the truth that provides the insight needed to identify new opportunities and drive profitability.”

“Delivering the most practical and impactful insights to our clients is a top priority,” said Gabe Krajicek, CEO of Kasasa. “Our goal is to help community institutions build stronger relationships with their customers so they can win new business and better serve their existing customers. MicroStrategy provides Kasasa Insights with a critical competitive edge to help us accomplish our goals.”

Kasasa selected MicroStrategy for its new adaptive layout capabilities and its bootstrap framework. These elements will help Kasasa’s developers easily update the design across multiple devices. Speaking about a specific implementation of Insight, Krajicek said, “Our analytics platform now allows us to see the entire consumer base of the fifth-largest banking network in the country. We can extract actionable insights from large amounts of consumer data to increase the profitability of their customers.”

Kasasa was founded in 2003 when it launched its flagship REWARDChecking account to help community financial institutions compete against big banks. Since then, the company has expanded to 350 employees and now offers a full suite of branded bank products. Kasasa debuted at FinovateFall 2009 under BancVue, which was founded in 2003, and created a premium, national consumer brand for the BancVue product offering – Kasasa – which launched in 2009. Kasasa will present its newest technology at FinovateSpring next month. To check it out, register before April 27 and save.

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy demoed a mobile identity network at FinovateSpring 2013. The company went public in 1998 and the latest release of its business intelligence platform, MicroStrategy 10, was released in 2016.

Ripple Joins Hyperledger Project, Launches Hyperledger Quilt Project

Ripple Joins Hyperledger Project, Launches Hyperledger Quilt Project

Enterprise blockchain solution Ripple has joined the likes of 231 organizations who belong to the Hyperledger blockchain consortium.

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, Hyperledger is an open source group consisting of leaders in finance, banking, IoT, manufacturing, and technology that seeks to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Other Finovate alum members of the group, which launched in 2015, include Tradeshift, AlphaPoint, BBVA, Blockchain, PWC, Sberbank, SecureKey, and Wipro.

After teaming up with NTT Data last year, Ripple and the Japanese system integration company submitted Hyperledger Quilt, a Java-based Interledger Protocol (ILP), to Hyperledger. Through the partnership with Hyperledger, said Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas, “developers will be able to access Interledger Protocol in Java for enterprise use.” Thomas added that Hyperledger Quilt “connects Hyperledger blockchains with other ILP-capable payment systems such as XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Bitcoin (Lightning), Litecoin, Mojaloop, and RippleNet, helping us to deliver on our vision for an internet of value – where money moves as information does today.”

Ripple was among 14 companies to join the consortium last week. Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf explained that this growth is beneficial to the future of the blockchain. “The accelerating pace of growth and adoption of Hyperledger across industries and geographies underscores the power of our community and the technologies it is building,” he said. “It also reflects a global awakening to the impact of blockchain for business.”

With more than 100 customers across the globe, Ripple has offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney. At FinovateSpring 2013, company co-founder Chris Larsen debuted Ripple (originally known as OpenCoin).

Last week, the company funded every project on DonorsChoose.org, a platform where school teachers crowdfund classroom needs and special projects. Ripple fulfilled all 35,647 open campaigns with a $29 million donation. Earlier in March, Ripple began piloting blockchain-based payments with FLEETCOR. The company was founded in 2012 and has since raised $93 million.

$500 Million Secondary Investment Boosts Credit Karma’s Valuation to $4 Billion

$500 Million Secondary Investment Boosts Credit Karma’s Valuation to $4 Billion

San Francisco-based Credit Karma received a $500 million boost today from Silver Lake. Through a secondary investment process, the technology investing company is taking a significant minority stake from existing investors in the consumer credit monitoring and financial health startup through a secondary investment process. Founder and CEO Kenneth Lin will remain the largest shareholder. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Unlike a primary funding round, Credit Karma will not receive any proceeds from the sale and will not issue new shares as a part of the deal. It will, however, benefit from a 23% increase in valuation, making it worth around $4 billion. As TechCrunch explained, the move may be beneficial in placating investors and employees who are eager to cash out their equity, as well as help postpone an IPO.

Lin, who cofounded the company in 2007, said, “As we planned for the future and our continued growth, we sought a partner that could support our growth trajectory and provide existing investors an opportunity to lock in some of the rewards they’ve earned for their support and hard work.”

Silver Lake Managing Partner, Mike Bingle, will join Credit Karma’s Board of Directors. In the press release, he cited multiple reasons for investing in Credit Karma, including the company’s “cutting-edge technology” and its “unwavering focus on long-term partnerships” with both members and financial institutions.

While it’s best known as a consumer-facing tool to help users check their credit for free, Credit Karma’s functionality extends far beyond credit scores, credit card offers, and loan comparisons. Last November, the company launched a new automotive information center where members can manage and organize their vehicle-related finances and information. And in late 2016, Credit Karma unveiled Credit Karma Tax, a free online tax filing service that, thanks to a partnership with American Express, lets users opt to receive their tax refund in advance. The company even has a tool to help return unclaimed money to users.

Credit Karma has 80 million members across North America, almost half of which are millennials and 80% of which access the service via their mobile devices. The company has originated more than $40 billion in credit products including credit cards, personal loans, mortgages, automotive financing, and student loan refinancing. At FinovateSpring 2009, Lin demonstrated the company’s platform, which offers free credit reports from Equifax and TransUnion, and seeks to serve as a hub for users to monitor their financial health.

FreeAgent Acquired by RBS

FreeAgent Acquired by RBS

Cloud accounting platform FreeAgent has agreed to a takeover bid from the Royal Bank of Scotland this week. CEO Ed Molyneux and the rest of the board have accepted the offer, which values FreeAgent at approximately $75 million (£53 million).

In a blog post announcement, Molyneux said that the acquisition will allow the company to progress toward its vision and improve the FreeAgent platform for both customers and partners. “As part of a larger organisation we want to accelerate our growth ambitions in the micro-business and accountancy practice space, as well as significantly improve our core product,” he added.

This agreement comes just over a year after FreeAgent began working with RBS. The two formed a distribution partnership last January in which RBS offered FreeAgent’s accounting software services to its small business clients. The deal will help both parties leverage new opportunities to offer a more integrated banking and accounting experience for small businesses since, as Molyneux said, “the lines between banking, accounting and tax are becoming increasingly blurred.”

After the deal is closed, FreeAgent will continue to operate business as usual. In a Q&A, Molyneux said the company has “no intention of significantly changing the way that [it does] business with [its] customers.” FreeAgent shareholders will receive $1.70 (120 pence) per share. This represents an 86% premium to yesterday’s share price and a 43% premium to the IPO price of $1.19 (84 pence).

Founded in 2007, FreeAgent offers cloud accounting services for small businesses, an API for easy integration, and integrations with existing startups such as Basecamp, Stripe, PayPal, and Xpenditure. The company also has an offering for accountants and a fully-integrated payroll system.

Molyneux debuted FreeAgent’s Financial Health Insights at FinovateEurope 2013 in London. Since then, the company went public in 2016 and last month launched the Customer Sales Report, which allows businesses to see how much income they’ve received from each customer.

Braintree’s New Tool Facilitates Integrated Payments

Braintree’s New Tool Facilitates Integrated Payments

PayPal-owned Braintree is stepping up its game this week. The company has launched Braintree Extend, a solution that allows merchants to offer a more integrated payment experience across multiple partners.

This means that merchants who want to partner with transaction services firms, rewards and loyalty providers, and contextual commerce companies can do so while maintaining a seamless user experience. And because Braintree Extend works with Braintree Vault, merchants can tokenize and store payment information without putting their clients’ data at risk.

In a blog post announcement, Azita Habibi Sr. Manager of Braintree Development described the new release as the “next phase” in the company’s mission “to become the Commerce Operating System for… merchants and partners.”

Braintree is already working with Yelp on its card-linked loyalty program, Yelp Cash Back, which is used by thousands of merchants. Leveraging Braintree Extend, Yelp is able to give users real-time cash rebates at the point of sale after making a purchase at a participating merchant. And Bandsintown, a music performance and discovery platform, is leveraging Braintree Extend for contextual commerce. The platform enables users to discover and select shows and purchase tickets without leaving the Bandsintown platform.

PayPal acquired Braintree in 2013 for $800 million. Braintree most recently showcased Venmo Touch at FinovateSpring 2013. Last week, the company unveiled Transaction-Level Fee Reports, a new reporting capability to help merchants understand and analyze processing fees at a per-transaction level. And last September, the company celebrated four years of operation under PayPal.