Mortgagetech player UpEquity landed $50 million this week to help democratize home buying. The investment brings the Texas-based company’s total funding to $76.7 million in combined debt and equity.

The Series B round, which consisted of $20 million in equity and $30 million in debt, was led by 3 Ventures with participation from Next Coast Ventures, BP Capital Management, Alumni Ventures, Gaingels, Launchpad Capital, and Early Light Ventures.

UpEquity was founded in 2019 and, simply put, is a digital mortgage provider. The company offers three main products for potential homebuyers. Buy with Cash helps average homebuyers make all-cash offers on a home, Buy Before You Sell enables buyers to purchase a new home before selling their current one, and UpEquity’s third solution enables homeowners to refinance their existing mortgage.

For the end consumers, the cost of getting a mortgage from UpEquity is similar to costs they would incur with a traditional mortgage lender. UpEquity aims to compete by not only helping buyers make an all-cash offer, but also by doing so quickly. UpEquity’s average time-to-close is 18 days.

“At the end of the day, our vision is to create equal access to the American dream through frictionless, on-demand homebuying, and it starts with bringing technology into the underwriting process,” said UpEquity Co-Founder and CEO Tim Herman. “By removing cost and inefficiencies from the mortgage process, our customers can make all-cash offers at zero cost to them and still get access to competitive interest rates. They get the best of both worlds.”

UpEquity is part of a newly emerging set of companies called Power Buyers that purchase a home on a buyer’s behalf using cash, then sell it back to them using a traditional mortgage. Rivals in this space include Knock, Homeward, Orchard, and Blend. Like these players, UpEquity makes money on interest paid on the mortgage and commissions from reselling loans.

UpEquity’s revenue has grown 500% year-over-year. The company anticipates it will originate more than $1 billion in mortgages over the next 12 months.

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In a world in which a new enabling technology seems to capture the fintech imagination at least every other year, quantum computing remains relatively elusive. The promise of being able to leverage quantum computations to accomplish tasks that challenge if not overwhelm current, classical computing technologies is one that, in the area of fintech, has yet to be realized.

Is this about to change? Multiverse Computing, which bills itself as the first quantum computing startup focused on finance, announced this week that it has secured $11.55 million (€10 million) in seed funding. The round was led by JME Ventures and featured participation from a sizable number of investors including Quantonation, EASO Ventures, Inveready, CLAVE Capital, Ikerlan, LKS, Penja Strategy, Seed Gipuzkoa, and Ezten Venture Capital Fund.

“We are a unique company in the quantum computing field,” Multiverse Computing co-founder and CEO Enrique Lizaso said. “While other firms are focused on improving the fundamental hardware and software components of quantum computers, we are keenly focused on leveraging the most advanced quantum devices available now to deliver near-term value for the financial sector.”

Multiverse Computing enables financial professionals to manage complex financial problems such as portfolio optimization and fraud detection. Using the company’s solution, Singularity, users can leverage a simple spreadsheet to run quantum algorithms on any quantum computer without requiring any expertise or experience in programming or working with quantum computers.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Basque Country’s San Sebastián, Multiverse Computing enjoys the support of not only its native government, local startup accelerators, and technology centers; but also of institutions like Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL). MultiVerse Computing also has forged partnerships with a wide range of technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Fujitsu, and Quantum Technologies, and said it is collaborating with a number of financial institutions, as well.

“We believe Multiverse Computing will be a global leader in the quantum computing industry,” Lizaso said. “We expect to have annual revenue close to €100 million by 2027 with a staff of 100 people.”

The company plans to use the funding to support its expansion into markets like energy, mobility, and smart manufacturing. The capital will also help fuel Multiverse Computing’s international growth including an office in Toronto and new offices in Paris, France, and Munich, Germany.

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CRED, the members-only credit card management platform that rewards users for paying their credit card bills, has landed $251 million in funding this week. The Series E round boosts the India-based company’s total raised to $722 million and increases its valuation to just over $4 billion.

The round was led by existing investors and private equity firms Tiger Global and Falconedge. DST Global, Insight Partners, Coatue, Sofina, RTP, and Dragoneer also contributed. New investors Marshall Wace and Steadfast also joined the round.

CRED, which did not disclose its plans for the investment, launched its online bill payment platform in 2018. The company incentivizes its 7.5 million members to pay their bills on time to improve their credit score. If the user pays on time, CRED sends them CRED Coins they can use to earn rewards or receive access to curated products and experiences.

The Bangalore-based company launched a new product called CRED X IPL last month. The new offering allows members to use their CRED Coins to shop at the CRED Store, book stays on CRED Travel, receive exclusive rewards and cashback, and access offers when they shop online. CRED X IPL also incorporates a competitive aspect; users are pitted against each other on a leaderboard and the one at the top each month receives a jackpot prize.

CRED also counts itself as a fintech investor. The company recently invested $5 million in CredAvenue, a digital platform that helps investors discover, trade, execute, and fulfill debt solutions. CRED is also in talks to invest in Uni, a startup that aims to make credit cards more accessible.

Pagos, a startup that provides intelligent payment infrastructure for commerce, is placing its stakes in the payment space today. The newly-minted company landed $10 million in a round led by Underscore VC and Point72 Ventures that also included participation from Amit Jhawar, Bill Ready, Billy Chen, and Rich LaBarca.

Pagos will use the funds to build out its team with more engineers.

Company founders Klas Bäck, Albert Drouart, and Daniel Blomberg launched the company earlier this year to help businesses optimize their payment infrastructure by integrating Pagos’ API micro-services into their payments stack.

Pagos offers a range of four products to help understand and build a better payment infrastructure. Offerings include Parrot, which provides enhanced Issuer Identification Number or bank identification number data; Peacock, which connects to business’ processors to provide payment analysis and optimization tools; Canary, which detects patterns and predicts opportunities from customer data; and Toucan, an API to integrate network tokenization into any payment stack.

“The challenge we saw pretty much for every one of our customers was that they didn’t have enough knowledge, not enough data and not enough tools to be able to execute a strategy around payment processing or know how to optimize it,” Bäck told TechCrunch. “This means they are a lot slower and they have a much harder time doing all the things they need to do and producing the results they want.”

Pagos holds a lot of promise, and not only because of consumers’ recent shift to online shopping and digital payments. As Chris Gardner, partner at Boston-based Underscore VC explained, “…their potential market is every e-commerce merchant in the world — and there are millions of them. Those are two potent ingredients in a winning recipe.” Additionally, company Founders Bäck and Drouart have both held senior leadership roles at PayPal for almost a decade, while Blomberg has launched seven startups, five of which were acquired, over his career.

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California-based insurtech Ladder has secured $100 million in Series D funding in a round led by Thomvest Ventures and OMERs Growth Equity. The company, which brands itself as the first, fully digital life insurance company in operation, will use the new capital to fuel further innovation in accessible, affordable life insurance solutions. The investment will also enable Ladder to expand its team, with a goal of more than doubling its workforce in 2022.

“I know first hand how life insurance can change a life,” Ladder co-founder and CEO Jamie Hale explained. “With our carrier in operation and this new round of funding, we are in the position to greatly accelerate innovation in service of families and communities. I am so excited to see our original vision continue to materialize.”

Ladder offers insurance customers flexible term coverage that can be set up in minutes and save policyholders up to 40%. With coverage of up to $8 million available in all 50 states, Ladder leverages an all-digital infrastructure and real-time underwriting to innovate at every step of the life insurance experience – from acquisition and product design to UX, instant issue, and policy administration. In its funding announcement, Ladder highlighted the fact that this week’s investment comes on the heels of 4x revenue growth in 2020 and in advance of its goal of issuing $30 billion in LadderLife coverage by the end of this year.

“Jamie Hale and his visionary management team are building Ladder into an innovative, market-leading digital life insurance company,” Saar Pikar, Managing Director and fintech lead at OMERS Growth Equity, said. “We are very pleased to count Ladder as OMERS Growth Equity’s first direct fintech investment – as well as our entry in the insurtech space, expanding on the insurtech presence established by our OMERS Ventures colleagues. We believe that the company offers a truly transformative approach, including through its efficient adjudication of risk and enhanced user experience.”

Founded in 2015, Ladder has raised a total of $194 million in funding. The company was named to Fortune’s Best Workplaces for a second year in a row this year and, this summer, appointed eight-year LinkedIn veteran Sanjeev Kapur to the newly created role of President.

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In a round co-led by Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures, fintech-as-a-service platform Rize has secured $11.4 million in Series A funding. The company, founded by Justin Howell and Kirk Voltz six years ago as a B2C fintech firm, has since transitioned into a B2B platform dedicated to “making fintech infrastructure simple, accessible, and ubiquitous for all financial builders.”

The investment takes the Arlington, Virginia-based company’s total funding to $13.4 million.

Writing about the investment on the company’s blog, Howell put his company in the same cohort as fintech innovators – and Finovate alums – like Plaid and DriveWealth. These firms, like Rize, started out as consumer plays, but developed into fintech infrastructure companies as their understanding of challenge of “building intuitive financial user experiences” grew. Realizing that there was more to enhancing the user experience in financial services than UI/UX improvements, Howell and the Rize team concluded that the underlying financial infrastructure was the problem and Rize’s “uniquely flexible approach” could be part of the solution.

Rize’s platform leverages Synthetic Account technology to enable banks, fintechs, and brands to build a wide range of financial account types ranging from checking and savings accounts to brokerage, FBO, and business accounts. The technology also supports quick and secure money movement options including ACH and wires, as well as mobile check deposit and physical and virtual cards.

This summer, Rize unveiled its Developer Toolkit, which enables innovators to build a prototype financial services application in less than 30 minutes. The toolkit features a comprehensive suite of technologies – a self-service sandbox, a launchpad, a software development kit (SDK), a command line interface tool (CLI), and a boilerplate app – designed to help developers both focus on the core elements of their solution as well as get their solutions to market as quickly as possible.

“When we set out to become the best-in-class fintech infrastructure platform, we knew that meant heavily investing in the developer community,” the company said in July when the toolkit was launched. “Our mission is to get clients to market faster, with less effort – and that begins with not only providing great documentation, but creating tools that enhance our builder’s experience and significantly cuts down on development time.”

In today’s funding announcement, Howell said that the funds raised in the Series A would enable Rize to continue innovating on its core solutions, including its Developer Toolkit. The new capital will also support other initiatives such as improving the Rize Admin platform, UDAAP monitoring, and security systems. The funding will also support the launch of new offerings including brokerage accounts and new crypto and credit-related solutions.

In addition to Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures, Rize counts Raptor Group, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Third Prime, Red & Blue Ventures, Graham Holdings, Walkabout Ventures, and Rucker Park Capital among its investors.

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