AI-powered decision making firm Fractal Analytics landed a $360 million investment from alternative asset firm TPG Capital this week. The round brings the 21-year-old company’s total funding to $685 million.

While there is no official word on Fractal’s valuation, Fractal CEO and Co-founder Srikanth Velamakanni told Bloomberg earlier this year that the company is “assessing interest from investors valuing the company at significantly more than $1 billion.”

The funds are coming from TPG’s Asia-focused private equity firm, TPG Capital Asia. The deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, is comprised of a combination of a primary investment and secondary share purchases from funds advised by private equity advisory firm Apax. Both TPG and Apax will be minority shareholders in Fractal.

As part of today’s deal, TPG’s Puneet Bhatia and Vivek Mohan will sit on Fractal’s board of directors.

“Fractal is building a great workplace and an innovative culture that’s driving significant client outcomes through our ‘user focused, decision-backwards’ approach to solving problems,” said Velamakanni. “TPG’s capabilities across all our markets and their proven success in building and supporting top AI providers is the perfect complement to the partnership we’ve enjoyed with Apax, whose insight and expertise have been instrumental in accelerating our growth.”

Headquartered in New York City, Fractal helps businesses leverage AI to power and inform human decisions. The company serves a range of industries, offering products including Senseforth.ai, a conversational AI platform; Samya.ai, a revenue growth AI; Crux Intelligence, an AI-powered analytics platform; Eugenie.ai, a tool for AI-driven operational efficiency.

Fractal employs 3,500 employees in 16 offices across the globe, including the U.S., the U.K., Ukraine, India, Singapore, and Australia. Last month, the company appointed Manish Tiwari as Chief Information Officer. Last summer, Fractal announced it is exploring an IPO. The funding route would help fuel the company’s growth now that companies have made a post-pandemic push to move their operations to the cloud. “The floodgates have opened,” said Velamakanni. “We have the scale to be a public company.”

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Embedded finance platform Ant Money has secured $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Franklin Templeton’s Franklin Venture Partners, RX3 Ventures, SteelBridge Laboratories, Steelpoint Capital Partners, and Ant Money founder Walter Cruttenden. The company, whose founder also launched micro-investing platform Acorns in 2012, also completed its stock-for-stock merger with Blast. A financial services platform for gamers, Blast went live in 2018 with its Game-Based Savings technology that leverages gameplay as a way to help individuals passively fund a free savings account.

The deal brings the total number of apps on the Ant Money platform to three: ATM, Blast, and Learn & Earn. Together the trio of offerings enables users to earn money and easily fund investment accounts.

“Building an investment account early in life can help people on the road to financial success, but many people don’t start because they lack the knowledge or funds,” Ant Money’s Walter Cruttenden said. “My hope is that Ant Money, which helps people generate small amounts of money to seed accounts, can foster new growing accounts and provide increased financial security for millions.”

ATM enables users to earn micro-income by engaging anonymously with leading worldwide brands. That income can be saved or invested in the stock market via Ant Money Advisors, a registered investment company and robo advisor that is embedded in the ATM app. Users can earn a minimum of $10 for the first month of participation, and more than $100 a month afterwards if enrolled in the ATM rewards program. Learn & Earn was developed in partnership with Junior Achievement USA. The app helps users earn money by completing lessons on concepts like budgeting, launching a business, and the power of compound interest. The money earned from Learn & Earn, like the money earned via ATM, can be automatically invested in the stock market, enabling users to start saving for the future at the same time as they are learning how to be good investors.

Ant Money co-founder Michael Gleason said that the merger of the companies made sense because they shared “similar visions for helping people enter the financial investment world.” Combined with what Gleason called “overlapping management,” the companies seemed ripe for consolidation. “(It) seemed like the logical next step was to merge the companies and build a larger one together,” Gleason said.

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Decentralized credit platform Credix landed $2.5 million in early stage seed funding this week. The Belgium-based company will use the fresh capital to speed up the release of its alpha version and launch its protocol on the Solana mainnet.

DRW Cumberland and ParaFi Capital led the round. The Transfero Swiss BRZ Solana Ecosystem Fund, Solana Ventures, Parrot Finance, MGNR, Mercurial, Petrock Capital, Fuse Capital, and several angel investors also contributed.

Credix was founded just last month by Thomas Bohner, Maxim Piessen, and Chaim Finizola. The team is seeking to bridge the gap between decentralized finance and real-world assets, bringing uncollateralized loans to emerging markets, starting with Latin America.

“The rise of DeFi, crypto, and stablecoins provided Credix with all the required lego blocks to rethink the end-to-end debt capital markets flow,” said Bohner. “Credix is democratizing access to credit investing for both borrowers and investors by connecting them through a decentralized credit marketplace.”

Along with today’s funding announcement, Credix also appointed four new members to its advisory team. Chike Ukuagbu, Head of Crypto Strategy-Emerging Markets at Visa; João Bezerra Leite, Former Managing Director and CTO at Bank Itaú; Reginald de Wasseige, Investor at Augmentum; and Kenneth Bok, Managing Director Blocks, ex-Goldman Sachs will all serve as advisors to the Credix team.

In the next few weeks, Credix will launch its first credit lines for Latin American borrowers. In the first quarter of 2022, the company will extend access for underwriters and liquidity providers and will open the pool to the community within the first half of next year.

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In a Series A funding round led by FINTOP Capital, automated fraud and dispute resolution solution provider Quavo has raised $6 million in funding. The financing, according to FINTOP partner John Philpott, will help the company “expand their go-to-market strategies, grow their brand, and add further expertise fo the Quavo ecosystem.”

Founded in 2015, Quavo offers a chargeback management solution for fintechs and financial institutions that provides automatic regulatory, card network association, and product enhancement updates. The company’s Disputes-as-a-Service technology is cloud-based, and integrates with core banking platforms, financial service providers, and merchant collaboration software with zero upfront implementation costs. With its AI-enabled fraud management solution, ARIA; its automated dispute management software, QFD, and its human intelligence service, Dispute Resolution Experts; Quavo offers end-to-end dispute management that helps financial services firms reduce losses and provide real-time resolutions while remaining compliant.

“We are incredibly excited about our Series A raise,” Quavo co-founder and Managing Partner Joe McLean said. “FINTOP has a fantastic reputation, depth of knowledge in the financial services space, and its team is comprised of genuine and authentic leadership.”

Speaking of leadership, the investment comes as Quavo announces the formal creation of its board of directors, which will feature FINTOP partners John Philpott and Jared Winegrad as board members. Quavo co-founder and managing partner Dan Penne credited FINTOP for its “specialization in fintech and familiarity scaling companies to the next level.” He added, “Access to the FINTOP network and this infusion of capital will drive advances in Quavo’s products and services for existing and future clients.” Among the fintechs in FINTOP’s portfolio are firms such as FISPAN and Digital Onboarding, both Finovate alums.

Quavo’s recent fundraising is the second major capital infusion in recent years. In June of last year, the company announced a “multi-million dollar funding round” from Decathlon Capital. More recently, Quavo was recognized as a “Rising Star” at the 2021 Pega Partners Innovation Event in May for its work with credit unions and regional banks in particular.

“Our mission from day one was to create a complete Disputes-as-a-Service offering,” Quavo co-founder and Managing Partner Richard Jefferson said upon receiving the Rising Star award from Pegasystems. “The capabilities of the underlying Pega platform allowed us to accomplish this quickly and economically, which has enabled us to capture the imagination of the market. We thank our key vendor Pega for recognizing this accomplishment.”

Quavo’s clients include banks such as KeyBank, TD Bank, and Euro Pacific Bank; credit unions including NASA FCU, Schools First FCU, and Patelco CU; as well as fintechs like ADP, CardWorks, and Green Dot. The company is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware.

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Small business financial platform Fundbox closed a $100 million Series D funding round this week. With this funding, the California-based company is now a freshly-minted unicorn with a valuation of $1.1 billion.

The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $553 million, was led by Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) and had contributions from existing investors Allianz X, Khosla Ventures, and The Private Shares Fund. New investors Arbor Waypoint Select Fund and funds managed by Newton Investment Management North America also contributed.

Fundbox was founded in 2013 to help small businesses access working capital through credit and payments solutions. The company has invested $100 million into AI technology with an aim to gain deep insights into the small business ecosystem.

Today’s investment comes at a time of growth for Fundbox. The company has experienced new customer acquisition growth of over 200% this year, has surpassed $2.5 billion in transaction volume, and has connected with over 325,000 businesses since launch.

The new capital will also help Fundbox expand into payments. The company is launching a tool called Flex Pay that will offer small business owners additional payment options and flexibility for business expenses. In addition to repaying loans via bank account or credit card, businesses have a buy now, pay later option in the form of a Line of Credit draw.

“The addition of Flex Pay to our product offerings is critical as small business owners look to utilize buy now, pay later solutions for business,” said Fundbox CEO Prashant Fuloria. “We remain committed to leveraging our superior AI, data-native approach, and small business insights to solve working capital needs and power the resurgence of the small business economy.”

Fundbox has additional financial products in the pipeline for next year. The company is working on a subscription revenue stream, a product for entrepreneurs with multiple small businesses, and tools to help new businesses that lack financial history.

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An investment of $35 million will enable Solutions by Text (SBT), a compliant text messaging platform for consumer finance companies, to power broader adoption of its solution across the consumer finance lifecycle. The growth financing round was led by Edison Partners, and featured the participation of Stifel Venture Bank, a division of Stifel Bank.

In addition to the funding news, Solutions by Text also announced the appointment of former ACI Worldwide executive David Baxter as its new Chief Executive Officer

“Now more than ever, consumer finance organizations are taking a hard look at how to strengthen digital consumer relationships while maintaining compliance with national standards,” Baxter said. “Our opportunity to capture market share through existing and expanded platform capabilities is immense and we’ve assembled an exceptional team and board to turbo-charge this next chapter of growth.”

As part of the investment, co-founder Mike Cantrell and Edison Director Network members Ron Hynes and Nick Manolis will join the Solutions by Text board of directors.

Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and maintaining remote teams and offices throughout the U.S. as well as in Bangalore, India, Solutions by Text was founded in 2008. The company’s technology is used by more than 1,400 consumer finance companies – ranging from auto finance and lending to banking – who use SBT’s compliant texting solutions to support origination, servicing, and collection operations. Solutions by Text helps ensure that communication policies and practices are compliant with key regulations such as the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau’s Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), including a new Regulation F which went into effect today. The revision clarifies the ability of consumers to stop collection calls and/or text messages and is intended to respond to the rise of new communications methods.

Solutions by Text offers two-way texting to ensure seamless communication with customers, as well as a pay-by-text product, Text Pay, and a customizable URL shortening tool called SmartURL. SBT’s technology can be integrated via the company’s API, which enables access to the full range of the company’s text messaging tools including budgeting, reporting, file imports, message templates, and distribution lists.

“(SBT) is uniquely positioned to scale growth in the fintech market with a team of deep regulatory compliance, messaging, and payments expertise, not to mention a sizable loyal customer and partner base with significant embedded opportunity,” Edison Partners General Partner Kelly Ford said. “Eight in ten U.S. adults use text messaging on a regular basis,” Ford noted. “With Solutions by Text, financial institutions are meeting these consumers where and how they want to be met, and doing so with peace of mind.”

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