Funding

$1.32 Billion Raised by 26 Alums in Q1 of 2018

$1.32 Billion Raised by 26 Alums in Q1 of 2018
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings

It seems as if it was only yesterday when we were looking at the first quarter funding numbers for our alums in 2017 and wondering if the slow start was a harbinger of investment stinginess to come.

Fortunately, by the end of 2017, investment in fintech in general and our Finovate alums in specific had rebounded strongly. As the financial world accommodated itself to the incoming Trump administration, so too did fintech investors get back to the business of putting major money behind some of our industry’s most innovative startups. The result was a big year for Finovate alums who raised more than $2.7 billion for 2017, recording their fourth consecutive year of more than $2 billion in funding.

And it looks like the momentum is still going strong. For the first quarter of 2018, 26 Finovate alums have raised more than $1.32 billion in funding combined. This number is not only more than 5x our first quarter funding total from last year, it also rivals any other first quarter in our history – as our quarterly comparison below shows.

Previous Quarterly Comparisons

  • Q1 2017: $230 million raised by 20 alums
  • Q1 2016: $656 million raised by 32 alums
  • Q1 2015: $680 million raised by 29 alums
  • Q1 2014: $600 million raised by 23 alums

What is especially tantalizing about Q1 numbers this year is the high number of undisclosed investments. This quarter, five of the investments were undisclosed. This compares with two undisclosed investments from Q1 2017, five in Q1 2016, one in Q1 2015, and one in Q1 2014. The actual amounts of undisclosed investments can vary widely, of course, but having five such investments in a quarter suggests our real alum funding total for Q1 is actually higher.

Top 10 Equity Investments

  1. Credit Karma: $500 million
  2. NuBank: $150 million
  3. eToro: $100 million
  4. Ledger: $75 million
  5. Wealthfront: $75 million
  6. Alkami: $70 million
  7. defi SOLUTIONS: $55 million
  8. Endor: $45 million
  9. Stash: $37.5 million
  10. Ohpen: $31 million

In terms of the top equity investments in the first quarter, Credit Karma stands out with their secondary investment of $500 million. NuBank’s $150 million comes in second place, with the $100 million raised by eToro being our third largest equity investment of the first quarter of the year. Tied for fourth place are Ledger and Wealthfront, each raising $75 million in funding. The top 10 equity investments in Q1 totaled $1.14 billion or 86% of the quarter’s total funding.

Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q1 2018.

January: More than $338 million raised by ten alums

February: More than $156 million raised by ten alums

March: More than $825 million raised by six alums

If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the first quarter of 2018, and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at research@finovate.com. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum not included.

Top image designed by Freepik

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

Micronotes to Scale AI-Enabled Marketing Platform with $3 Million in Funding
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Micronotes

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.

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DriveWealth Closes $21 Million in Funding

DriveWealth Closes $21 Million in Funding
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: DriveWealth, 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.

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SpyCloud Lands $5 Million in Funding

SpyCloud Lands $5 Million in Funding
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, SpyCloud

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.

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Nubank Challenges Brazil’s Big Banks in Wake of $150 Million Funding Round

Nubank Challenges Brazil’s Big Banks in Wake of $150 Million Funding Round
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Nubank

The startup that made headlines recently for its antitrust complaint against some of its country’s largest banks is the same fintech that raked in a major investment from a group of investors earlier this month.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Nubank has charged Brazil’s big banks with hindering competition in financial services, specifically in the credit card space where Nubank has been making inroads . And now Brazil’s antitrust watchdog, Cade, is on the case. According to Reuters, the five biggest Brazilian banks hold 85 percent of assets in the country’s highly concentrated banking system.

The investigation into Nubank’s complaint is the second time this month that the company has made fintech headlines. Only a few weeks ago Nubank announced receiving $150 million in new funding in a round led by DST Global Investment Partners. Nubank founder and CEO David Velez noted at the time the company had been “cash flow positive since 2017” and that the funding would “serve to further strengthen our balance sheet to support the accelerated growth we have seen since launch.”

“In a little less than four years, more than 13 million Brazilians have applied to become a Nubank customer, a reflection of how ready consumers were to welcome new alternatives to the significantly concentrated Brazilian banking market,” he added. “We look forward to expanding our reach and product offering to many millions more in the years ahead.”

The Series E also featured participation from current investors Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital LP, and QED. New investors Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital Partners joined the round, as well.

In addition to its equity capital of $330 million, Nubank received a $137 million (R$455 million) line of credit from Goldman Sachs last year. The company, which won regulatory approval to operate as a bank in January, was named to the KPMG/H2 Ventures’ Fintech 100 in 2017, and also unveiled its new digital account offering to go along with its credit card business.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Nubank participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr New York 2016. At the event, Nubank co-founder and CTO Edward Wible and Lead Software Engineer Lucas Cavalcanti presented Our Money, Our Rulebook, a discussion of how the company built an accounting system in house based on data science modeling, real time customer visibility, guaranteed conservation of money, and customer account histories.

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

$500 Million Secondary Investment Boosts Credit Karma’s Valuation to $4 Billion
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Credit Karma, Funding

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.

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Endor Raises $45 Million in ICO

Endor Raises $45 Million in ICO
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Endor, Funding

Predictive analytics specialist Endor has raised $45 million in an initial coin offering that was launched just last month. This fast funding is a reminder that ICOs as a funding source for startups will be one of the big fintech stories of 2018.

“During the pre-sale we received a staggering amount of participation requests,” the company’s homepage reads. “Our motivation was to allow as many contributors as possible to participate, which was achieved by significantly limiting the individual contribution amounts, This torrent of support allowed us to reach our pre-defined cap of $45 million.”

More than a funding source, Endor’s ICO will also be the key to accessing the company’s predictive analytics platform. Known as “Google for predictive analytics,” Endor combines massive computing and MIT-developed proprietary social physics technology to create a predictive analytics platform that responds to questions asked in plain language with automated accurate predictions. This is accomplished without requiring coding experience or expertise in data science. And after the company’s successful ICO, all that businesses will need in order to take advantage of the new technology is a pocket full of EDR, the company’s cryptocurrency tokens.

Left to right: Endor Chairman Doron Alter and COO Inbal Tirosh demonstrating the company’s predictive analytics platform at FinovateFall 2017.

The company has developed the ENDOR.coin protocol to help “democratize data science,” specifically by making predictive analytics more accessible to SMEs. Endor issued 1.5 billion EDR tokens, with 20% of the total available as part of the ICO. The company says that 40% of the tokens generated will be used to finance R&D efforts. The tokens were initially priced at $0.27 USD. In his review of the offering at CryptoCompare, Ricardo Bago points out that companies will pay in tokens for prediction analysis of their data and are compensated with EDR token “when insights derived from their data are being used for predictions.” This, Bago suggests, helps “incentivize the contribution and maintenance of high-quality data streams.”

For a deep dive into the data science behind, social physics and the Endor protocol, check out the white paper from Altshuler and Pentland published earlier this year. The technology promises:

  • Constantly-expanding catalogue of predictions
  • Do-it-yourself API for advanced users
  • Automatic fusion of private and public data
  • Guaranteed data privacy
  • “Predictions by the people for the people”

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Endor demonstrated the company’s predictive analytics platform at FinovateFall 2017. Endor was named a Cool Vendor in 2017 by Gartner, and a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. The company was featured earlier this month in a profile on UTB (Use the Bitcoin). Yaniv Altshuler is co-founder and CEO, having taken the helm from Doron Alter who transitioned to the position of company Chairman at the beginning of the year. Endor includes Coca-Cola, Twitter, and Mastercard among its clients and is partnered with fellow Finovate alum, Market Prophit.

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eToro Raises $100 Million in Series E

eToro Raises $100 Million in Series E
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: eToro, Funding

In a round led by China Minsheng Financial, social trading network eToro has raised $100 million in new funding. The Series E, which featured participation from SBI Group, Korea Investment Partners, and World Wide Invest, as well, will help the company expand into new markets. The new capital will also help eToro build on its R&D efforts in blockchain technology and asset digitization. eToro’s total capital is now $162 million.

“This round of investment will be critical in helping us to further develop our technology infrastructure to support the rapid growth that we’ve recently experienced,” eToro founder and CEO Yoni Assia said. “It will also help us to enter new markets, enabling us to bring our social approach to investing to more people around the world, and providing more people with safe and secure access to the markets.”

Assia added that the funding would enable eToro to remain as innovative technically as it is in the field of social trading and investing. “As new technology continues to change finance,” he said, “we want to remain at the forefront of that change. So today’s announcement will help us to continue our market leading work in blockchain research and the development of digital assets.”

Digital assets and blockchain have proven to be significant opportunities for growth for eToro. In February, the company added XLM (Stellar Lumens) to its offerings. Back in December, eToro teamed up with CoinDash to build blockchain-based social trading products. The company enabled direct trading of five major cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Ripple – back in September, shortly after earning a spot on the European Fintech 100.

Named a company to watch by Disruptor Daily, eToro has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, and New York City. The company demonstrated its CopyFunds for Partners solution at FinovateEurope 2017. With a trading and investing community of more than nine million users, eToro’s network gives users the opportunity to automatically copy the buying and selling of the network’s most successful traders and investors. Those traders and investors can earn income when their trades are copied by members of the community as part of eToro’s Popular Investor program. Stocks, exchange-traded funds, currency pairs, indices, and commodities, as well as cryptocurrencies can be traded on eToro’s platform.

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YellowDog Secures Funding Courtesy of Round Led by Bloc Ventures

YellowDog Secures Funding Courtesy of Round Led by Bloc Ventures
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, YellowDog

YellowDog, which introduced its Limitless Compute technology at FinovateEurope last week, has scored a major investment in a round led by Bloc Ventures. The total amount of the funding was not disclosed. Featuring participation from Bristol Private Equity Club – and a successful Seedrs crowdfunding campaign – the round will enable YellowDog to tackle its next big challenge: big batch processing for financial services.

“The backing of Bloc proves that we are on the right trajectory with our offering,” YellowDog founder Gareth Williams said. “This fundraise will help YellowDog begin to unlock the massive potential in new sectors starting with financial services. Having Bloc as an investor means we can begin to leverage both their expertise and their network to support our growth.”

David Leftley, CTO and co-founder of Bloc, pointed to the unique nature of YellowDog’s offering as a reason for supporting the firm. “The ability of YellowDog’s technology to spin-up massive high performance computing grids already has been proven in the animation market and the potential to scale into other markets such as financial services and engineering fits perfectly with our investment strategy.”

More than 1,000 companies are using YellowDog’s platform to unleash the massive latent potential of their existing computer networks. Combined with the public cloud, the technology gives institutions secure and immediate access to hundreds of thousands of cores without the complication of relying on multiple vendors. Integrated within the company’s current IT infrastructure, the platform enables high performance computing clusters that securely extend any underutilized computing system.

The YellowDog platform can also burst batch workloads to preferred public cloud providers to ensure prompt batch processes. The company said its vendor-agnostic technology is “more flexible than virtualization, more resilient than high performance computing clusters, and less expensive to deploy than hyperconvergence.” Leftley praised YellowDog’s leveraging of both AI and machine learning as “a big differentiator in this market” and said Bloc Ventures was committed to helping the company “unlock (its) full potential.”

Shortlisted by the National Technology Awards 2018 last month in the Startup Tech Company of the Year category, YellowDog was founded in 2015 and is based in Bristol, U.K. The company announced its 1,000th user on its platform last fall – a milestone reached after just two years in operation – and has been awarded both the Bristol Life Technology and Innovation Award and Bristol Post Startup of the Year Award for 2017. Video of the company’s demo from its debut at FinovateEurope 2018 will be available soon.

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Behavioral Biometrics Specialist BioCatch Raises $30 Million in New Funding

Behavioral Biometrics Specialist BioCatch Raises $30 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BioCatch, Funding

In a round led by Maverick Ventures, behavioral biometric innovator BioCatch has raised $30 million in new funding. The investment round, which featured participation from American Express Ventures, NexStar Partners, Kreos Capital, CreditEase, OurCrowd, JANVEST Capital and other investors, takes BioCatch’s total funding to more than $41 million.

More importantly, the financing “cements” BioCatch’s “growth plan and vision to redefine digital identity and enable renewed trust in online interactions.

“BioCatch helps answer the question, ‘who are you’ in an online world where fraudsters operate with the legitimate credentials of others, making it very hard to distinguish them from authorized users,” company CEO Howard Edelstein said. Part of an overall “identity strategy” for its clients, Edelstein noted that BioCatch’s technology takes a prevention-oriented approach to cybersecurity that creates as little friction for the customer as possible.

“(Our) strategy cuts across the digital ecosystem,” Edelstein said. “from stopping fraud in real-time to preventing fake accounts from being opened in the first place, all while enabling a seamless user experience.”

Monitoring more than 5 billion transactions a month, BioCatch’s technology develops behavioral biometric profiles of users and models various types of suspicious and malicious behavior. These profiles enable BioCatch to identify malware, robotic activity, phishing and other social engineering-based attacks as well as other threats both before and after login. The technology leverages artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning and more than 2,000 different parameters to provide real-time alerts when pattern anomalies are spotted.

“Identity is becoming a central component that drives all things digital, which makes the BioCatch story extremely compelling on multiple levels,” Managing Director of Maverick Ventures Matthew Kinsella said.

Last fall, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company partnered with Samsung SDS America, adding a layer of fraud protection to Samsung SDS’ Nexsign enterprise biometric authentication software. BioCatch partnered with Canadian, boutique-based systems integrator, HoneyTek Systems last September, and teamed up with risk management firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions in August. Edelstein, BioCatch chairman since 2016 who added CEO to his list of duties earlier this year, credited these partnerships for helping “demonstrate how BioCatch is contributing to digital transformation” when it comes to “chang(ing) the way identity is managed online.”

BioCatch demonstrated its Passive Biometrics/Invisible Challenges technology at FinovateFall 2014. The company was founded in 2011.

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Roostify Lands $25 Million to Disrupt the Mortgage Industry

Roostify Lands $25 Million to Disrupt the Mortgage Industry
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Roostify

Mortgagetech startup Roostify raised $25 million to further its quest to improve the mortgage industry today. The Series B round comes from new investors Cota Capital, Point72 Ventures, and Santander Innoventures, and existing investors JPMorgan Chase, Colchis Capital, and a subsidiary of USAA.

The funding brings Roostify’s total raised to $33 million. The California-based company will use the funds to deepen its presence in the enterprise space, implement product enhancements, and expand into new markets.

Rajesh Bhat, co-founder and CEO of Roostify said that when the company launched four years ago, having a digital strategy was simply an ambition for lenders. Today, digitizing the mortgage process has evolved into a business imperative. “Lenders now realize the value of providing consumers with a transparent, mobile, and seamless experience to obtain a loan without needless stress-inducing delays and red tape. We have developed a solution that allows lenders of all sizes to give their teams a tool to digitally engage with clients and to bring the loan origination experience to the consumer,” Bhat added.

Originally launched as a way to create efficiencies by digitizing the traditionally paper-bound processes, Roostify has evolved into an enterprise scale platform aimed to help U.S. lenders accelerate, simplify, and reduce costs associated with the mortgage origination process. Leveraging its cloud-based API solution, lenders help clients with the entire mortgage process– from searching for the loan to close– via a fully-digital, branded experience. Bobby Yazdani, Cota Capital’s Managing Partner, said his team was “immensely impressed with what Roostify has accomplished in the last four years,” He added,“Roostify has evolved not only their own offering and product focus, but the market as a whole, helping the lending industry transform itself for the digital age.”

Roostify presented at FinovateSpring 2016 where the company demoed account aggregation capabilities for asset verification, as well as integrations with TurboTax and Equifax. Since then, the company has teamed up with Chase to power the bank’s self-service mortgage application process. Last month, Roostify launched an integration with LendingTree that blends LendingTree’s aggregation technology with Roostify’s mortgage digitization. For more on the mortgagetech sector, check out our industry overview.

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IdentityMind Global Raises $10 Million to Fuel Global Growth

IdentityMind Global Raises $10 Million to Fuel Global Growth
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, IdentityMind Global

In a Series C round led by Benhamou Global Ventures and Eastern Link Capital, IdentityMind Global has secured $10 million in new funding. The investment, which also featured the participation of Hanna Ventures, Overstock.com, and Zanadu Capital Partners, will help support the digital identity specialist’s expansion within international markets and to grow its new business unit designed to provide KYC and AML solutions for ICO and cryptocurrency markets.

“We feel privileged to be working with an elite group of high quality investors who have a proven track record of success,” IdentityMind Global CEO Garrett Gafke said. “The market demand for digital identity-based solutions in today’s global digital economy is booming. IdentityMind, the pioneer in digital identities, with hundreds of customers spanning six continents, is uniquely positioned to meet growing global market demand.”

An alum of Finovate’s developer conference series, FinDEVr, IdentityMind Global is looking specifically to markets in Asia, Latin America, and Europe for expansion. And with regards to the new market of ICOs and cryptocurrencies, the company’s announcement comes only one week after unveiling its new business unit dedicated to providing anti-fraud solutions for ICOs.

Overstock.com CEO and IdentityMind investor Patrick Byrne referenced the rise of ICOs and their needs in the funding announcement. “ICOs and cryptocurrencies are going mainstream and IdentityMind is one of the key players in helping ensure transparency, legitimacy, security and compliance which will only lead to faster and greater marketplace adoption.”

In addition to new opportunities in the emerging ICO and cryptocurrency space, IdentityMind Global has also taken advantage of new trends in regtech more broadly – including the EU’s GDPR – that will increase demand for its AML, KYC, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, and fraud prevention services. The company cited statistics from Frost & Sullivan that indicated that the global RegTech market could reach $6.45 billion by 2020.

“The ongoing growth of synthetic or stolen identities requires digital identity-based solutions to prevent identity fraud and maintain the integrity of the global digital economy,” Managing Partner for Eastern Link Capital Yodong Hou said. “IdentityMind has been identified as a ‘go to’ partner for those companies needing to implement an effective defense to identity thieves, online fraudsters, and money launderers worldwide.”

IdentityMind Global participated in Finovate’s developers conference in London in 2017, presenting its Entity Link API that helps businesses meet KYC and AML-related risk and compliance requirements. Last month, the company announced a partnership with fellow Finovate alum Mitek, integrating the two fintechs’ digital ID verification capacities. With this investment, the company’s total capital stands at more than $20 million.

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