Just a few days after Till Financial picked up a $5 million investment for its “kids-focused” spending management app and Greenlight raised a whopping $260 million for its technology that helps parents raise “financially smart kids,” teen banking app Step announced that it had scored $100 million in Series C funding for its financial wellness solution dedicated toward helping young people develop sound financial habits.

“Our mission is to help improve the financial futures of the next generation and we’re thrilled to have such a massive vote of confidence from investors, especially during Financial Literacy Month,” Step CEO and founder CJ MacDonald said. “Thirty-eight percent of teens say they lack the financial resources needed to achieve financial independence and this is a problem Step is well positioned to help solve as we educate millions of households every day.”

The round was led by General Catalyst and featured participation from an exceptionally diverse group of existing investors. This roster included Coatue, Stripe, Charli D’Amelio, The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC, Will Smith’s Dreamers VC, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s firm WndrCo, actor Jared Leto, Franklin Templeton and NBA All-Star Stephen Curry. The investment takes Step’s total funding to more than $175 million.

In the time since Step launched in September of 2020, the company has amassed more than 1.5 million users of its financial wellness app. Step gives users a free, FDIC insured bank account, a secured spending card, and access to a P2P payments platform that enables users to send and receive money instantly. With 88% of the company’s users saying that Step is their first bank account, the platform claims that it is the only banking platform that enables youth to build a positive credit history before they reach 18 years old.

“For too long, conversations about money –– specifically how to manage it –– have been avoided despite what a critical role they play in shaping the future of the next generation,” actor, musician, and serial tech investor Jared Leto said. “Over twenty years ago, I set out to tackle this problem by starting a company in the space, so I’m excited to see Step addressing the financial literacy crisis head on with game-changing technology built to help young people learn about money in their digitally native environments.”

Step is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and was co-founded by MacDonald and Alexey Kalinichenko. The company’s financial solutions are backed by bank partner Evolve Bank & Trust.

Greenlight, a company that provides financial services technology for kids, announced today it has landed $260 million in funding. Today’s investment nearly doubles the Georgia-based company’s valuation, boosting it up to $260 million.

The Series D round, which brings Greenlight’s total funding to more than $550 million, was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors TTV Capital, Canapi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, BOND, Fin VC, Goodwater Capital. New investors Wellington Management, Owl Ventures, and LionTree Partners also participated. Andreessen Horowitz General Partner David George will join Greenlight’s board of directors.

As for Greenlight’s valuation, the company saw an increase from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billion over the course of six months.

Greenlight will use today’s funds to add more services to its platform, increase its distribution partnerships, and expand to more geographies to ultimately reach more families. Additionally, the company will use the investment to increase its human resources, with a plan to add 300 employees over the next two years.

“Our vision at Greenlight is to create a world where every child grows up to be financially healthy and happy,” said Greenlight Co-founder and CEO Tim Sheehan. “Today’s financing will enable us to bring even more value to families as we continue to introduce new innovative products that shine a light on the world of money.”

Founded in 2014, Greenlight offers a money management platform for families that helps three million parents and kids gain skills to manage their earnings, savings, spending, giving, and learn to invest via a debit card, companion app, and educational resources.

Greenlight has struck a chord with its family-based finances approach. In the past year, the company has more than tripled its year-over-year revenue, more than doubled its users, and doubled its workforce. Earlier this year, Greenlight launched a new products, Greenlight Max, which helps kids research and invest in stocks with parental approval.

“The demand for Greenlight’s family finance solution continues to grow,” said Greenlight Co-founder and President Johnson Cook. “With the support of our investors, we look forward to empowering even more parents to raise financially-smart kids.”

In a round led by Tiger Global, financial services and technology company Brex has raised $425 million, boosting its valuation to more than $7.4 billion.

“Our investors – new and existing – believe in our team, our business model, our product vision, our customers, and the future of Brex,” company co-CEO Henrique Dubugras said. “We are delighted to have them on board for the next phase of our journey.”

Speaking of the next phase, today’s investment comes as the company, which began with a corporate credit card product for venture-backed startups four years ago, announced the launch of a new all-in-one finance platform. The new offering combines spend management technology with billpay in a single dashboard and will be available for $49 a month. The platform facilitates responsible employee spending via corporate and vendor cards, eliminating the need for expense reports and personal reimbursements. Business owners can also easily track spending across business divisions to better understand spending trends by department, merchant, account, as well as by individual employees.

“Growing and maintaining a business should not depend on how good a small business owner is at managing their finances,” Brex CTO Cosmin Nicolaescu said. “Our all-in-one finance solution gives business owners peace of mind, and the time back to do more of what they love and remember why they started their business.”

In addition to this news, the fact that Brex applied to establish a “Brex Bank” earlier this year suggests that the company also could be en route to offering FDIC insured products to small businesses without requiring an intermediary bank as a partner.

“Brex Bank will expand upon its existing suite of financial products and business software, offering credit solutions and FDIC insured deposit products to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs),” the company noted in February. “Brex and Brex Bank will work in tandem to help SMBs grow to realize their full potential.”

Located in San Francisco, California, Brex includes ecommerce platforms like Cheers and Dr. Squatch, accounting companies like Pilot and Kruze, and startups like Hourly and Bounce among its customers. Founded in 2017, Brex enables companies in a variety of industries to better manage their finances via a combination of payment and cash management solutions. In the first quarter of this year, Brex reported customer growth of 80% and total monthly customer addition gains of 5x. The company said that 45% of its customers are currently small and medium-sized businesses.

“Brex is building the future of finance for the next generation of businesses,” Tiger Global partner Scott Shleifer said. “We are excited to partner with them as they continue growing rapidly, innovating their product offerings, expanding their customer base and leading an industry that is dominated by incumbents.”

Also participating in this week’s Series D round were new investors TCV, GIC, Baillie Gifford, Mardrone Capital Partners, Durable Capital Partners LP, Valiant Capital Management, and Base10. Existing investors Y Combinator Continuity, Ribbit Capital, DST Global, Greenoaks Capital, Lone Pine Capital, and IVP were also involved in the investment.

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Small business financial services platform Hatch unveiled its funding total today. The California-based company has pulled in $20 million in two funding rounds since it was founded in 2018.

The first investment, a Seed round that closed in January 2019, totaled $5 million. The company’s Series A round closed in February of last year, totaling $14 million.

Hatch’s investors include Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital, and SVB.

Hatch offers small businesses a line of credit and a business checking account which it launched this January. The checking accounts come with a Mastercard debit card and allow Hatch’s 4,000 business users to send money through ACH, billpay, or via digital checks from the Hatch dashboard. Additional features include overdraft protection and cashback rewards.

Because Hatch uses machine learning to complete KYC, KYB, and OFAC compliance checks, businesses can get approved for a checking account in under five minutes. Accounts cost $10 per month and feature a transparent fee structure.

Founded by Thomson Nguyen, Hatch has a team of 48 people, 40 of which were brought on in the past year during the pandemic.

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Mortgagetech innovator Better.com recently landed a $500 million investment from Japan-based Softbank, bringing the company’s total funding to over $900 million.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the news, Softbank is buying shares from existing Better investors, a list which includes Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Kleiner Perkins.

With the new round, experts estimate Better’s valuation to be around $6 billion. This is a significant jump from the company’s most recent valuation, which sat at around $4 billion after Better closed a funding round in November of last year.

Better was founded with the goal of reengineering the mortgage process. The company streamlines mortgage originations by taking the entire process online. Better also offers Better Real Estate, which matches buyers with real estate agents; Better Settlement Services, which offers title insurance; and Better Cover, a home insurance marketplace.

The new investment comes at a time of significant growth for Better. Inspired by low interest rates, more consumers have been refinancing their properties. The Wall Street Journal reports that because of this increase in demand, Better lent out $25 billion in loans in 2020 and has extended $14 billion in loans the first quarter of this year.

Better saw $800 million in revenue last year and is expected to go public by the end of 2021. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in New York City. Vishal Garg is CEO.

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Open banking platform TrueLayer recently landed $70 million in Series D funding.

The investment, which brings the London-based company’s total funding to $142 million, was led by Addition, with contributions from all major existing investors, as well as new investors including Visionaries Club, Surojit Chatterjee, Zack Kanter, Daniel Graf, and David Avgi.

TrueLayer’s mission is to open up finance with its open banking network that connects payments, data, and identity to help people spend, save, and transact more freely online.

The funding comes at a time of major growth in the open banking scene in the U.K. The nation has seen more than three million open banking users and if the growth curve continues, 60% of the U.K.’s population will be using open banking by the end of 2023.

Founded in 2016, TrueLayer now processes more than half of the open banking volume in the U.K., Ireland, and Spain. Much of this growth has come over the course of the past year during which time the company has grown by 600x and expanded across 12 markets.

As for what’s next, TrueLayer will launch new open banking capabilities this year. The company will also expand its network, which will in turn add more account connectivity for consumers.

“We believe that open banking is reaching maturity in several markets and the next phase is about solving bigger, more complex problems for our customers – layering value on top of the raw infrastructure,” said TrueLayer CEO and Co-Founder Francesco Simoneschi. “You’ll see us building more and more in this direction.”

TrueLayer’s clients number in the hundreds and include fintechs such as Revolut, Nutmeg, Trading 212, Stake, and Payoneer.

Here’s an idea: a corporate card that incentivizes spending less rather than rewarding you for spending more.

Ramp, a New York-based fintech launched by Eric Glyman, Gene Lee, and Karim Atiyeh, has raised $115 million in Series B funding to power this approach to business expense management. Taking Ramp’s total capital to $320 million, the investment gives the company a valuation of $1.6 billion.

“Co-founding a fintech unicorn was never my plan,” Ramp CEO Glyman wrote on the company’s blog in a funding announcement, “and almost feels crazy given my job 12 years ago was selling t-shirts and jeans.”

The round was led by D1 Capital Partners and Stripe. Joining them were Founders Fund, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Redpoint, and Box Group. Ramp also announced that it had received a $150 million line of debt financing from Goldman Sachs. “During our next phase of growth,” Glyman added, “we plan to expand our efforts to bring the value of Ramp to more businesses in more places and to transform the way more companies do business.”

Ramp offers a corporate card with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every transaction, 10x to 20x higher limits and no fees, and both smart virtual and physical cards with built-in spend management controls. An integration with Slack makes it easy for managers to get alerts, approve expenses in real-time, and respond to issues from within the business communication platform.

Ramp says that it has identified more than $10,000,000 in annualized savings for 1,000+ customers, with the average Ramp customer saving in excess of $100,000. Companies using Ramp’s spend management platform range from startups to corporations, and include technology innovators in their own right such as Clubhouse and Finovate alum Marqeta. The technology is integrated with popular accounting platforms such as Netsuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, QuickBooks, and more than 100 others.

Onboarding its first company in 2019 and launching publicly one year later, Ramp has experienced 4x growth over the past six months. Glyman said the company is approaching annualized transaction volume of more than $1 billion.

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Digital banking services company Spiral picked up a $14 million investment this week. The New York-based company will use the capital to fund its new app that makes it easy for users to donate to the charity of their choice.

“The future belongs to socially-conscious brands that care as much about giving back to society as they do about generating profits and growth,” Spiral CEO and co-founder Shawn Melamed said. He explained that the company’s goal is to create a new solution to serve an ecosystem of millions of charitable givers and more than one million non-profit businesses.

“People are increasingly supporting brands that align with their values,” Spiral President and co-founder Dan Blumenfeld added. “And they expect a simple and effortless user experience. Spiral will offer customers both a personalized banking experience and a deeper connection to the charities they support.”

Currently in beta, Spiral boasts that it offers account holders 15x more than the national average in savings and cash bonuses. No minimum balance is required and no fees are charged for active accounts or for transferring money by ACH. Spiral provides donation matching of up to $150 per year to more than one million charities and nonprofits ranging from the David Ortiz Children’s Foundation to the Cerebral Palsy Research Alliance Foundation. Automatic donation reports for tax returns are provided, and the company’s deposit accounts are issued by nbkc Bank of Overland, Kansas, and are FDIC-insured up to $250,000.

The funding round was led by Team8 and featured participation from Communitas Capital, Phoenix, Nidoco AB, and MTVO. Melamed and Blumenfeld founded Spiral after Melamed served as Managing Director of Morgan Stanley’s Technology Business Development and Innovation Offices and Blumenfeld served as Head of Product and Growth at Skype.

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