Funding

Fintonic’s $21.4 Million Funding Boosts Valuation to $180 Million

Fintonic’s $21.4 Million Funding Boosts Valuation to $180 Million
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Fintonic, Funding

Personal finance app Fintonic earned $21.4 million (€19 million) in a Series C funding round this week. The new investment values the Spain-based company at $180 million (€160 million).

The deal, which brings Fintonic’s total funding to $51 million (€45.2 million), was led by ING Ventures, which holds a 22% stake in the company. The round also saw participation from additional shareholders including the PSN group.

The funding comes at a time of major growth for Fintonic, which has increased its active users by 74% in the last 14 months, bringing its total number of active users to 700,000. In the past year, the company has seen a 45% quarter-over-quarter increase in revenue and expects to break even in the next six months. Since it was founded in 2012, Fintonic has expanded to Mexico and Chile; an expansion that boosted its app downloads to 2.8 million.

Part of this growth is owed to the success of Fintonic’s lending offering, which allows customers to take out loans of up to $45,000 (€40,000). The company expects to lend over $1.1 billion (€1 billion) in less than three years. Helping to make this possible, Fintonic has extended its own financing for the lending platform, issuing a $79 million (€70 million) bond listed on the MARF (Alternative Fixed-Income Market) and approved by the Spanish CNMV (National Securities Market Commission).

In addition to its lending product, Fintonic offers insurance, having obtained an insurance broker license from the General Directorate of Insurance. The company said the offering is part of its goal to help users save money without having to compromise on service.

At FinovateSpring 2016, the company debuted its alerts and inbox system to help users act in a timely manner on their financial needs and recommendations. Last year, Fintonic teamed up with BBVA to boost its in-app lending capabilities, allowing users to borrow up to $39,400. Most recently, the company bolstered its lending offering via a partnership with Unicaja Banco to offer the bank’s consumer loans through its mobile app.

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Onfido Raises $50 Million in New Capital

Onfido Raises $50 Million in New Capital
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Onfido

A new round of funding led by SBI Investment and Salesforce Ventures has driven identity verification specialist Onfido’s total capital to more than $100 million.

“With this new funding, we can protect more businesses, in more countries – and in more ways – from the effects of fraud,” Onfido co-founder and CEO Husayn Kassai said. “We’ll also be able to expand the reach of our technology, so that people without a credit history can finally access the online services they badly need.”

This week’s $50 million financing, which featured participation from M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), FinVC, and other investors, will help Onfido fulfill its goal of leveraging AI to standardize how businesses verify identity. In a statement, the company said the funding would also help it “consolidate its core market in the U.S.” as well as support growth in areas like Europe and Southeast Asia.

As part of the investment, former Chief Sales Officer and Vice Chairman of Salesforce Frank van Veenendaal (pictured right with Onfido CEO Kassai) will join Onfido’s board of directors. “There has never been a more important time for companies to build trust with their customers by showing they are one step ahead of fraudsters,” Veenendaal said.

“I believe Onfido has the unique opportunity to transform the digital identity market and deliver robust and scalable authentication-as-a-service,” he added, “similar to how Salesforce transformed customer relationship management.”

Onfido demonstrated its Facial Check with Video solution at FinovateFall 2018. The technology offers enhanced security during new user onboarding by having users video themselves performing specific actions such as repeating random numbers to ensure liveness. Onfido’s solution then leverages machine learning to compare the facial image in the video to the image on the user’s identity document.

Appointed to the FIDO Alliance Board of Directors in March, Onfido also last month announced a project to help train officials at INTERPOL to better identify fraudulent ID documents. The company has made a number a partnerships in the first few months of the year including teaming up with PensionBee, collaborating with P2P RV rental firm, RVshare, and providing verification services for extended stay marketplace, 2nd Address.

Most recently, Onfido partnered with IDValidation to fight the growing problem synthetic identity fraud in which only a single element of an individual’s identity – rather than the users’s complete identity – is stolen and used to make transactions.

With more than 1,500 customers around the world – including industry leaders like DraftKings, Remitly, and Zipcar – Onfido was founded in 2012. The company is headquartered in London, U.K.

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Fintech’s Newest Unicorn Bill.com Raises $88 Million in New Funding

Fintech’s Newest Unicorn Bill.com Raises $88 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bill.com, Funding

In a round led by Franklin Templeton, business payments innovator Bill.com has raised $88 million in new funding. The investment, which also featured participation from Mastercard, Fidelity Canada, FLEETCOR, Tamasek, and others, takes Bill.com’s total funding to $275 million, and gives the company a valuation of more than $1 billion.

“Bill.com is changing how payments are made in the SMB market by defining an industry leading payment and software platform for SMBs,” company founder and CEO René Lacerte said. “Businesses struggle with conventional payment processes which are complex, manual, paper-based and not always secure. Our cloud payment platform is changing all that. We automate payments and back office business processes resulting in significant efficiencies and cost savings.”

In addition to the funding announcement, Bill.com revealed that it has teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Mastercard to offer its virtual cards as part of Bill.com’s automated AP solution for SMEs. The move is part of Bill.com’s effort to further digitize the payment process, leveraging virtual card technology to make funds more readily available to cardholders and to ensure accurate matches between payments and receivables.

Mastercard Small Business Lead for North America Ginger Siegel highlighted the advantages of virtual cards, and praised the collaboration with Bill.com as a way to increase adoption of the technology. “Virtual cards are more secure and provide transparency into cash in-flows and out-flows, which is critical to the growth of all small businesses,” Siegel said. “With the partnership with Bill.com, we can bring the benefits of virtual cards to hundreds of thousands of smaller enterprises in the United States.”

Bill.com demonstrated the Cashview feature of its platform at FinovateSpring 2012. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company made fintech headlines recently when it announced that it was ending wire transfer fees for small businesses using its International Payments technology. Earlier this year, Bill.com announced a partnership with American Express to offer a new solution to streamline vendor payments, Vendor Pay.

Founded in 2006, Bill.com manages $60+ billion in annual payment volume in its three million member network, and includes more than 70 of the top 100 accounting firms in the U.S. among its clients. Bill.com is also partnered with major accounting software providers like QuickBooks and Xero, and is the preferred digital payment solutions provider for CPA.com.

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YellowDog Raises $3.3 Million in Series A

YellowDog Raises $3.3 Million in Series A
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, YellowDog

In a round led by Bloc Ventures, cloud computing scheduling and orchestration management platform YellowDog announced securing an additional $3.3 million (£2.5 million) in Series A funding. The investment brings the total raised for the company’s Series A to more than $5.5 million (the company raised $2.2 million – £1.7 million – in March of last year.)

The financing also featured participation from Vodafone and ARM Holdings. YellowDog said that it will use the additional capital to scale its business and continue its successful expansion into financial services.

The company also announced that Reid Downey, an executive with 10 years’ experience leading software and cloud enterprise sales of Microsoft Azure and Office365 to Fortune 500 firms, will join YellowDog’s board of directors.

Left to right: CEO and founder Gareth Williams and CTO Simon Ponsford demonstrating YellowDog for Financial Services at FinovateEurope 2019.

“We are excited to welcome Reid to the Board and to secure this further funding given our tremendous year of growth ahead,” YellowDog CEO Gareth Williams said. “With our recent wins in the financial services market and more in the pipeline this year, we are only at the tip of the iceberg in this market.”

“The funding will enable us to support our global customer base and extend our technology into new markets such as aerospace,” he added.

YellowDog demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2019. With more than 1,500 customers in 42 countries around the world, YellowDog leverages high performance cloud compute orchestration technology to enable businesses to accurately anticipate the computing resources required to complete complex computational workloads.

With customers in a wide variety of verticals – from entertainment studios to financial services, YellowDog helps companies not only use computing resources more efficiently, they also save significantly on the cost of connectivity – which can be significant when it comes to cloud-based high performance computing.

And in addition to providing intelligent, optimized orchestration, YellowDog’s technology also functions across multi-vendor cloud fabric, providing the high level of compute resilience that some firms, especially those in financial services, require.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Bristol, U.K., the company was shortlisted for the Tech Company of the Year award at the U.K. Business Tech Awards in 2018. Also last year, YellowDog won the Business Innovation Award at the inaugural Best New Business Awards. U.K.-based Business Leader magazine identified the company among its 32 South West Tech Businesses That Are Shaping the Future profile.

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Alternative Data Platform Thinknum Raises $11.6 Million

Alternative Data Platform Thinknum Raises $11.6 Million
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Thinknum

“I still think I’m the first person with dreads to raise $11.6 million.”

That’s how Gregory Ugwi, co-founder and CEO of alternative data provider Thinknum, summed up the company’s just-closed Series A funding round in a tweet earlier today. The firm, which made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2014, enables investors to access non-traditional data on company performance and behavior that can provide actionable insights.

“Over the past couple of years, we have helped hundreds of data-driven companies and investment firms derive valuable insights from alternative data,” Thinknum co-founder Justin Zhen wrote at the company’s LinkedIn page today. “We believe that the greatest challenge any society has to face is how to efficiently allocate resources. The movement of commercial activity to the web provides important data sources that businesses need to make smarter decisions.”

He added, “By helping companies track that data, we’re helping businesses make critical strategic moves ahead of their competitors.”

Thinknum gives non-programmers the ability to query large datasets quickly, using intuitive tools and advanced visualizations to make data easier to understand. The platform enables users to scan open source data on 400,000+ of companies, and alert users when specific metrics are triggered.

Today’s funding comes as the company announces that it has been cash flow positive for “the past few years” and doubling revenues every twelve months. Green Visor Capital led the Series A, which takes Thinknum’s total capital to $12.6 million.

The company plans to use the new capital in three main areas: make it easier for non-programmers to use external, alternative data; build its business and engineering teams; and “spread the word” about the actionable insights available via alternative data.

“We will continue to share our economy-changing findings with the world and reach out to decision makers and analysts and show how they can leverage these new information sources to solve their specific problems,” Zhen wrote.

Founded in 2013, Thinknum was featured last fall in TechCrunch’s look at 14 seed-stage startups. The company, which includes Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch among its clients, is headquartered in New York City.

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Stash Scores $65 Million; Launches Stock-Back Rewards

Stash Scores $65 Million; Launches Stock-Back Rewards
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Stash

With the stock market in rally mode and up significantly from the Christmas Eve lows, micro-investing fintech startup Stash is celebrating the occasion with a $65 million fundraising.

The Series E was led by an unnamed private institutional investor and featured participation from current investors including Union Square Ventures and Breyer Capital. The new capital takes Stash’s total funding to $181.3 million. The company said it will use it to drive product growth as well as marketing.

Stash also announced this week that it was launching a new rewards program, leveraging its Stash debit card, that will provide users with fractional shares of stock whenever qualified purchases at publicly-held companies are made. The Stock-Back rewards program gives consumers a micro-investment in companies like Amazon and Chipotle every time they shop using the Stash card. For privately-held companies that do not have stock available, consumers will get their Stock-Back rewards in the form of fractional shares in a broad-based, global equity exchange-traded fund (ETF).

“During the testing period, we saw an overwhelming positive response from users as they pay ordinary bills like Netflix, and in returned received Netflix stock as well as access to dividends, educational resources and financial advice,” Stash co-founder and president Ed Robinson said.

Stash demonstrated the Stash Retire feature of its mobile-first, micro-investing platform at FinovateFall 2017. Stash Retire offers users a low-fee, self-directed Roth IRA account that can be invested in for as little as $100 to start. Users of Stash Retire can take advantage of all of the options available in their Stash Invest accounts, such as auto-invest and $5 investment minimums.

Named to the Forbes Fintech 50 last month and honored by the FinTech Breakthrough Awards in the Best Robo Advisory Platform category last spring, Stash was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in New York City.

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GreenKey Technologies Secures Strategic Investment from IPC

GreenKey Technologies Secures Strategic Investment from IPC
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Green Key Technologies

GreenKey Technologies (GK) and IPC have strengthened their relationship with a strategic investment that gives IPC exclusive rights to GreenKey’s machine learning voice solutions. The deal combines GK’s markets and customer insight extraction technology with IPC’s trading communications background and cloud-based financial ecosystem of more than 6,400 market participants.

“IPC and the OTC market at large have recognized the value in our patented natural language processing solutions,” GreenKey CEO Anthony Tassone said. “GK’s rapidly growing team looks forward to refining the exclusive synergies created by this partnership. He thanked IPC CEO Bob Santella for his “mentorship and guidance through the next phase of GK’s evolution.”

Tassone will become an IPC advisor as part of the strategic investment, with Santella joining GK’s board of directors. Former GreenKey CEO Nader Shwayhat will return to the company’s advisory board.

IPC and GreenKey have a history. The two companies collaborated as recently as last month to develop technology that will convert real-time voice into useable data for financial market participants. GreenKey’s speech recognition and natural language processing platform turns complicated financial jargon and terminology embedded in real-time audio and text into actionable insights. The platform also helps sell side firms automate sales and trading workflows by converting unstructured communication streams into structured data solutions.

IPC will deploy GreenKey’s technology to its IPC Unigy 360 platform to transform voice quotes and trades into a streaming transcript in real-time that is visible on the trader’s desktop. And by matching quotes and trades to conversational text, the technology provides an enhanced real-time price feed that unifies communications among market participants for greater visibility and more efficient trading.

“Our investment in GreenKey is a powerful step in furthering financial services market transformation through artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and data optimization innovation,” IPC’s Santella said.

GreenKey Technologies participated in our developers conference, FinDEVrNewYork 2016, demonstrating its voice software and VoIP network solution. Founded in 2014, and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, GreenKey – in partnership with IPC – won the 2018 American Financial Technology Award (AFTA) for Best Partnership or Alliance in December.

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TurnKey Lender Locks in New Investment from OSK Ventures

TurnKey Lender Locks in New Investment from OSK Ventures
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Turnkey Lender

TurnKey Lender, a Singapore-based digital solution provider for non-bank lenders, just closed a Series A1 round led by Malaysian private equity firm, OSK Ventures International. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

The company plans to use the capital to support growth objectives in the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. Vertex Ventures, who led the company’s previous $2 million funding round in 2017, and Western NIS Enterprise Fund also participated in the Series A1.

Company CEO Dmitry Voronenko called the funding a “vote of confidence” in TurnKey Lender and its momentum over the past year. Calling technology access the key factor in credit access, Voronenko said the goal of the company was to make it easier for “banks, non-bank lenders, and alternative lending companies around the globe” to access AI-powered digital lending technology.

Founded in 2014, TurnKey Lender demonstrated its SaaS solution at FinovateSpring 2017. The technology supports the complete loan lifecycle, from application processing to collection and reporting, fully automating the process for lenders. The platform readily integrates with both internal and external data sources and services, and leverages advanced scoring of applicants to reduce credit risk.

TurnKey Lender won Best SME FinTech SaaS Software Company in Singapore at Acquisition International’s Business Excellence Awards earlier this year. The company was also named a top auto loan origination platform by HCCResearch. Last month, TurnKey Lender co-founder and Head of Business Development Elena Ionenko was shortlisted for the Women in Credit Awards sponsored by Credit Strategy.

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Video Conferencing Specialist 24sessions Scores $1.1 Million

Video Conferencing Specialist 24sessions Scores $1.1 Million
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: 24sessions, Funding

In a round led by Capital Mills, Dutch video conference innovator 24sessions has raised $1.1 million (€1 million) in new funding, The Series A investment will help the company expand internationally, and takes its total capital to more than $1.4 million.

“We’re really excited to partner with Capital Mills,” 24sessions’ CEO Rutger Teunissen said. “In the last year, we tripled our revenue, doubled our team, and grew to a leading position in the Benelux. This investment enables us to grow even faster by entering new markets and investing in sales.”

Above: 24sessions’ CEO and co-founder Rutger Teunissen demonstrating 24s Conversational Analytics at FinovateEurope 2019.

24sessions video conference technology supports 1-click video chat and both screen- and filesharing. Scheduling is easy via the platform’s automated self-service scheduling functionality that includes embeddable booking forms for leads and clients, as well as calendar integration with Google, Office365, and Outlook.

The platform also provides meeting analytics and the ability to record the video conference for compliance or training purposes. No downloads or installations are required, and users can participate in video calls with any mobile or desktop device. Video calls can be branded and embedded into the customer journey, as well.

“Until now, most enterprises have struggled to roll-out video calling as a major customer interaction channel, even though the ROI potential is tremendous and customers expect such a service,” said 24sessions’ CTO Konstantin Goncharuk. “This is because their existing systems, such as Skype and Webex, are simply not built for customer interaction.”

Founded in 2015 and based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 24sessions demonstrated its 24s Conversational Analytics platform at FinovateEurope 2019. The company includes Rabobank, ING, and Aegon among its customers.

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Identity Verification Specialist Socure Raises $30 Million

Identity Verification Specialist Socure Raises $30 Million
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Socure

Socure is the latest identity verification and fraud prevention innovator to attract the interest of – and big investment from – fintech’s venture capital community. The New York City-based company, which demonstrated its digital-to-physical identity verification platform at FinovateFall 2017, has scored $30 million in new funding in a round led by Scale Venture Partners.

“This funding will enable us to grow our footprint in new strategic U.S. market sectors that are in need of accurate, automated identity verification technology, including healthcare and the public sector,” Socure CEO Tom Thimot said. “We will invest in the talent required to continue innovating and expanding our machine learning-based predictive analytics platform.”

The round also featured participation from Commerce Ventures, Flint Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Synchrony, and Sorenson Capital. The Series C round takes the company’s total funding to $57.5 million.

Socure’s platform leverages AI and machine learning techniques to analyze trusted on- and offline data from email, phone, IP, physical address, social media and the Internet, and provide real-time authentication. The technology helps drive financial inclusion, boosting acceptance rates for millennials and other thin-file applicants by as much as 40%. Socure’s platform also supports CIP/KYC programs and AML compliance, lowering fraud by up to 80% and cutting manual review costs by up to 90%.

“Companies from banks to insurance carriers to healthcare providers struggle with just how slow, expensive, and inaccurate today’s identity verification services can be,” Scale Venture Partners’ Rory O’Driscoll said. “Socure offers them better accuracy and fraud detection, delivered through an easy-to-implement API connection.”

O’Driscoll, who will join the company’s board of directors as part of the investment, called Socure’s technology “a compelling proposition (that) explains why this company has been so successful so fast.”

Socure finished 2018 with 3x gains in annual revenue and more than 100 deployments with leading banks, lenders, and payment providers. In a statement on the year’s accomplishments, the company highlighted the introduction of its Socure Sigma Fraud Scores risk metrics, the launch of its integrated document verification service, and the release of  version 3.0 of its ID+ platform.

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SpyCloud Scores $21 Million in Round Led by Microsoft’s M12

SpyCloud Scores $21 Million in Round Led by Microsoft’s M12
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, SpyCloud

Account takeover (ATO) prevention specialist SpyCloud has raised $21 million in funding in a round led by Microsoft’s venture fund, M12. And if there’s one phrase to describe how the company plans to spend the new capital, it’s “we’re hiring.”

SpyCloud announced in a blog post accompanying the funding announcement that it will be adding to its current security research, development, and sales and marketing teams. The Austin, Texas-based company also said it plans to expand to new markets around the globe.

“We are excited and optimistic about what this new round of funding will do for SpyCloud and the world at large,” the post read. “With this money, we are more confident than ever that as criminals scale their methods to collect and weaponize compromised passwords, SpyCloud will be able to go toe-to-toe with even the most sophisticated of them.”

Existing investors Silverton Partners and March Capital Partners also participated in the Series B round, which boosts SpyCloud’s total capital to more than $28 million.

Left to right: SpyCloud Chris LaConte (Head of Business Development) and Tedd Ross (CEO and co-founder) demonstrating the company’s Exposed Credential Monitoring and Alert Service at FinovateFall 2017.

SpyCloud differentiates its cybersecurity offering in a number of ways, such as featuring human experts at the center of its account takeover prevention capabilities rather than relying on an automated solution. The company deploys what it calls “multi-tiered, underground intelligence gathering techniques” to provide a critical additional step in finding stolen credentials before they are sold on the underground markets of the dark web.

The company’s 60 billion asset database of exposed credentials and personally identifiable information (PII) is also a major asset. Last year, SpyCloud recovered and analyzed 3.5 billion sets of online credentials from nearly 3,000 data breaches and other sources from the dark web – including 2.6 billion credential sets with a password. Adding to its development team, the company noted, would enable it to both enhance its password cracking capabilities, as well as add to its API integrations and Active Directory Protection for automated Windows domain protection.

“Passwords and their reuse across personal and work accounts are the leading cause of ATO, one of the most imminent threats to businesses of all sizes,” SpyCloud co-founder and CEO Ted Ross said. “As criminals use more complex, scalable methods to collect and weaponize compromised passwords, organizations need to take proactive measures to prevent, detect, and remediate exposures. SpyCloud meets that immediate need.”

Founded in 2016, SpyCloud demonstrated its Exposed Credential Monitoring and Alert Service at FinovateFall 2017 – winning Best of Show. Last spring, the company announced that it was partnering with fellow Finovate alum Credit Karma, just one month after announcing a $5 million Series A round led by Silverton Partners and March Capital Partners.

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London’s Accountant Marketplace Capitalise Raises $4.5 Million

London’s Accountant Marketplace Capitalise Raises $4.5 Million
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Capitalise, Funding

Capitalise.com, the London-based financial marketplace for accountants, has raised a $4.5 million (£3.5 million) Series A investment round, reports Henry Vilar of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).

The round was led by QED Investors, a US fintech venture capital firm, and supported by existing investor Hambro Perks, as well as Gauss Ventures.

Capitalise positions accountants as experts, using its data analytics and marketplace access, so it becomes the point of advice to discuss growth plans with small business clients.

Paul Surtees, co-founder and CEO of Capitalise, said it wants to build a “culture of funding.”

The firm cites the UK’s Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), which says access to finance and cash flow are business owners’ top concerns despite the UK market having over 360 small business lenders.

Surtees said: “Whilst the bank manager might be a thing of the past, we say it is ‘long live the accountant.’”

According to Capitalise, its platform and online learning for accountants has allowed for an annual compounded growth rate of 234%.

“The recent raise will be used to expand our cloud product for advisers to navigate the market of financial products for SMEs”, explained Ollie Maitland, co-founder and chief product officer at Capitalise.

Through its online platform, Capitalise works with 105 partners, including PKF, Armstrong Watson, Farnell Clarke, BluSky, Wow and Woods Squared.

Not to be confused with fellow Finovate alum Capitalise from Tel Aviv, U.K.-based Capitalise demonstrated its platform at FinovateEurope 2016.

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