Funding

Kantox Closes Debt Financing

Kantox Closes Debt Financing
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Kantox

Currency and risk management solutions company Kantox closed a venture debt financing deal late last month. Silicon Valley Bank supplied the funds to the U.K.-based company. The amount of the funding was undisclosed.

Craig Fox, Vice President at Silicon Valley Bank’s U.K. Branch said, “At Silicon Valley Bank, we love businesses that solve real problems, create value and lead their market. Kantox is doing just that, changing the game for how companies manage their FX risk. We are excited to be a part of this amazing growth story.”

In the press release, Kantox noted that partnerships between banks and fintechs are on the rise. “Banks are approaching fintechs because their technology is attractive to them,” the company said. For more on this idea, check out Forbes’ piece The Banks Wanted to Sink this Forex Fintech: Now They’re Vying for It’s Technology.

Philippe Gelis, Kantox CEO and co-founder, said that the agreement with Silicon Valley Bank is “the first step in the process of business and product partnership projects with financial institutions which have approached us interested in our technology.” As a continuation of this trend, Kantox is currently negotiating partnerships with banks in the U.K. and across Europe, anticipating many deals will close in 2018.

Gelis demoed Kantox Peer FX at FinovateEurope 2013 in London. The company’s 2,000 clients have leveraged Kantox’s foreign exchange management solutions to trade more than $5 billion in 20 countries. In November of last year, the company boosted its currency portfolio from 35 to 92, adding markets in Latin America and Asia. Founded in 2011, Kantox has raised $27 million.

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Passport Raises $43 Million from Bain Capital

Passport Raises $43 Million from Bain Capital
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Passport

Transportation mobile payments company Passport is starting 2018 with an extra $43 million in the bank. The North Carolina-based company closed the Series C round– an investment that brings Passport’s total capital to $60 million–  just before the holidays.

Today’s investment comes from Bain Capital, which joins previous investors Grotech Ventures, MK Capital and Relevance Capital. Bob Youakim, Passport’s founder and CEO, said that he sees the Bain Capital team as partners who “align really well with both our vision and our culture.”

In the press release, the company notes it will use the funding to evaluate strategic acquisition opportunities and bolster sales and marketing efforts. Youakim also said the investment, “gives us additional resources to expand quickly and strategically into new markets, innovate rapidly, and support our clients around the world.”

Proving its readiness for expansion, the company has already achieved notable growth. In the past three years, Passport has experienced 3.5x revenue growth and has expanded its staff to 100 employees in the past year with plans to add 50 more employees in 2018.

Founded in 2010, Passport offers mobile payment solutions for parking, transit, and tolling. To date, the company’s solutions have been adopted by more than 450 agencies in over 5,000 locations worldwide, including Chicago, London, Toronto, Boston, Vancouver, Portland, Montreal, and Miami. At FinovateEurope 2016, the company demoed its Mobile Ticketing for Transit solution. Last month, the company partnered with TransLink to develop and launch Park&Go, a free mobile payment app for Park & Ride users in Metro Vancouver.

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Financeit Recapitalizaton Gives Goldman Sachs Majority Stake

Financeit Recapitalizaton Gives Goldman Sachs Majority Stake
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinanceIt, Funding

Point-of-sale financing provider Financeit completed an investment round today with existing shareholder Goldman Sachs. The round gives the firm a majority stake in the Toronto-based fintech.

Michael Garrity, CEO and President of Financeit, said the investment was a sign of Goldman Sachs’ “continued confidence in our leadership team, our business model, our platform, and the ability to grow our service.” He highlighted the recent integration with Centah, a SaaS workflow and lead management solutions provider, as an opportunity to expand into the home improvement industry “from lead generation to closing the sale.”

Financeit helps merchants increase closing rates and transaction sizes by enabling them to offer customers affordable monthly or bi-weekly payment plans. The cloud-based technology provides a fast and transparent application process for consumers, and helps merchants better manage cashflow, get paid sooner, and offer customers additional payment options. Financeit is free to use, and requires no merchant fees.

But Financeit adds a twist. “We service the transaction on both sides,” Garrity explained during his Finovate demo. “On one side we have a set of merchant partners who rely on us to power sales at the point-of-sale every day with our innovative solutions. On the other side, we have a set of financial institutions who rely on us to originate and to manage these loans on their behalf in their name and within their compliance framework.”

Financeit most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2014, during which the company, in partnership with fellow Finovate alum FIS, launched its U.S.-compliant POS financing platform. Founded in 2011, Financeit was named to CB Insights’ Fintech 250 list in July and in June, the company received new funding capacity of $85 million from a “major Canadian life insurance company.” Since inception, the company has worked with more than 7,000 merchant partners in Canada and processed more than $2.5 billion in loan applications.

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SBDA Group Closes Series A Investment Round

SBDA Group Closes Series A Investment Round
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, SBDA Group

Banking personalization company SBDA Group has landed a Series A investment today. FinSight Ventures and Digital Space Ventures contributed to the round, the amount of which was undisclosed. This marks the company’s first ever VC funding round.

The U.K.-based company will use the investment to advance its AI-powered customer engagement solution for banks, grow its product suite, and expand its team. SBDA Group sees pending PSD2 regulation as an opportunity. And while the company has selected Europe as its target market, it also has plans to expand into North America. SBDA Group CEO Nikita Blinov said that the company is proud of their solution that “allows retail and corporate banks to take advantage of open banking reforms utilizing our personalised recommendations-based approach that gives a customer a reason to stick with his or her current bank, as switching banks becomes more frequent.”

At FinovateEurope 2016 Blinov, along with Chief Data Scientist Alexander Fonarev, and Project Manager Anna Laskovaya, demoed SBDA Customer Insight, a product that turns raw banking data – such as transactional histories – into targeted marketing and information for customer relationship management. The technology leverages 10,000+ external sources into 500+ facts and personalized AI-driven recommendations. Alexey Garyunov, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of FinSight Ventures, said, “SBDA’s AI technology helps banks and merchants make their product profiles relevant to each customer by solving any problems as they arise. It also identifies the most appealing communication channels with a customer.” Abdul Abdulkerimov, Founding Partner of Digital Space Ventures, added, “SBDA Group has huge potential for international growth and expansion.”

Founded in 2014, SBDA Group currently serves more than 10 top-tier banks and has processed more than 100 million customer profiles. The company was a finalist of BBVA’s Open Talent Artificial Intelligence 2017, and was a gold winner of the UniCredit international hackathon last year. We featured the company in our Fintech Filter for AI post earlier this year.

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Simility Adds PayPal as Strategic Investor in Latest $17.5 Million Fundraising

Simility Adds PayPal as Strategic Investor in Latest $17.5 Million Fundraising
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Simility

Fraud and risk management innovator Simility locked in $17.5 million in new funding today. The Series B was led by Accel and featured a strategic investment from fellow Finovate alum, PayPal. “This latest funding round will enable us to enter our next phase of growth by bolstering our world-class team of industry veterans in sales, customer success and data science to meet market demand,” Simility co-founder and CEO Rahul Pangam said.

Current investors The Valley Fund and Trinity Ventures also participated in the round, which brings Simility’s total capital to $25 million. Team members from Simility shared their thoughts on the funding and the future of the company in a blog post this morning.

“My team has helped turn our visionary idea into leads among banking customers,” Head of Latin America Sales Paulo Moura wrote. “This second round of funding means more to us than money; it’s also the touching realization that we’ve earned investors’ confidence in our viability as a company, not just a promising startup.”

Above: Simility Head of Engineering Ravi Sandepudi (left) and CTO/Co-Founder Kedar Samant (right) during their presentation “Fraud Mutates – Detect, Understand, and Block It” at FinDEVr London 2017.

“Everything follows from a great team, I’ve learned,” Simility co-founder and CTO Kedar Samant added. “This new funding round will empower Simility to grow our teams and scale up our operations so that more enterprises can better manage fraud and risk.”

Recent news from Simility only underscores the company’s commitment to adding talent. Simility hired Mick Martin as VP of Sales, named Glenn Cobb as VP of Solution Engineering in August, and brought onboard Lynn Strand as VP of Marketing – all in Q3 of this year. The company noted that today’s investment will enable it to grow its sales operations in the U.S., Brazil, and Europe, as well as expand its data science teams in Europe, and add to partnerships in Europe and India.

Founded in 2014, Simility is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. This summer at our developers conference FinDEVr London, Simility’s Kedar Samant (co-founder and CTO) and Ravi Sandepudi (Head of Engineering) led a presentation titled Fraud Mutates – Detect, Understand and Block It which explained how feature engineering and real-time fraud detection pipelines gives businesses the ability to adapt to evolving cyber threats.

Simility’s technology was featured in Network World’s New Products of the Week in March, the same month Simility unveiled its AI-powered Adaptive 3-D Secure solution. Adaptive 3-D Secure is designed to identify high-risk transactions, leveraging machine learning to examine a wide variety of attributes in real-time, including device fingerprinting, geolocation, and in-session behavioral analytics.

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NuCypher Raises $4.3 Million from Token Sale and VC Funds

NuCypher Raises $4.3 Million from Token Sale and VC Funds
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, ICO, NuCypher

According to a report from CoinJournal, NuCypher, a platform that offers security and encryption services for distributed systems, has pulled in $4.3 million. This brings the company’s total funding to just over $5 million.

The funds come from a token pre-sale from 13 cryptofunds and venture capital firms. Leading the VC portion of the round was Polychain Capital. Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Assets Fund, FBG Capital, Compound VC, Satoshi Fund, and Blockchain Korea Partners, and others also participated.

Founded in 2016, NuCypher works to secure and encrypt big data, the blockchain, the cloud, and the internet of things (IoT). The San Francisco-based company differentiates its technology with the ability to transfer data from one public key to another without either party gaining visibility to the contents of the message.

CoinJournal reported NuCypher said that it is “part of that core infrastructure, enabling developers to store, share and manage private data on public blockchains.” The company emphasized it has been “very diligent” in building out its network ahead of its token sale to make it usable “from day one.”

Above: NuCypher CEO MacLane Wilkison (pictured left) and CTO Michael Egorov (pictured right) presenting at FinDEVr London 2017

At FinDEVr London 2017, the company’s CEO MacLane Wilkison and CTO Michael Egorov gave a presentation titled Body Armor for Big Data. The company is planning to hold its public ICO in early 2018. The token of the ICO will be used to ensure computations are correct. The company said that a year from now it will power many decentralized applications, from data exchanges and marketplaces to end-to-end encrypted databases to healthcare apps.

Earlier this summer, NuCypher introduced its decentralized key management system, NuCypher KMS. In May, the company earned finalist spots in Citi Tech’s Tech for Integrity Challenge and in TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017’s Startup Battlefield. NuCypher also bears the honor of being a Y Combinator alum.

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Multiple-Time Best of Show Winner Avoka Raises $12 Million in New Funding

Multiple-Time Best of Show Winner Avoka Raises $12 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Avoka, Funding

Digital customer acquisition technology innovator Avoka has raised $12 million (16 million AUD) in equity funding in a round managed by Moelis Australia. Investors included both existing and professional backers, and the company says the funds will be used to support growth plans already underway in Australia, North America, and Europe. “Our planned pace of growth continues across all three of our target geographies,” Avoka founder and CEO Phil Copeland said, “and this financing allows us to maintain an aggressive expansion in our technology, sales, partner and customer success organizations.”

Avoka added in a statement that the company plans also to “focus on investment and hiring to support current and projected customers.” This includes a plan to boost staff numbers by 50% by the end of the current fiscal year. This week’s funding, which echoes a similar investment from last summer, takes Avoka’s total capital to more than $24 million.

Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Avoka most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2017. Hali Khan, Director of Business Development, showed how Transact Insights, a new module of Avoka’s Transact 5 platform, gives businesses the insights and analytics necessary to ensure optimization of the account opening experience. With regard to digital account opening, for example, Transact Insights reveals areas of abandonment, frequent error, as well as where users are spending the most time in order to help business analysts make specific changes and improvements.

Avoka provides solutions for a variety of industries within financial services, including retail, business, and commercial banking, wealth management, superannuation, and insurance. The company, a multiple Finovate Best of Show award-winner, includes five of the top 10 banks in Australia, four of Europe’s 10 leading banks, and eight of the top 50 banks in the United States among its customers.

In August, Avoka announced record growth for a second year in a row and in June, the company introduced its CX Design for Banking offering to help FIs decrease application abandonment and boost conversion rates. Last month, Deloitte recognized Avoka’s 1.76x revenue growth over the past three years, adding the firm to its Technology Fast 50 roster.

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Prevoty Raises $13 Million in Series B

Prevoty Raises $13 Million in Series B
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Prevoty

Real-time app security platform Prevoty announced an investment of $13 million today. The Series B round was led by Trident Capital Cybersecurity, and featured participation from existing investors such as USVP.

“This new round of funding from Trident Capital Cybersecurity and USVP will not only help us meet the exponential growth in demand for our autonomous application security solutions, but will also support continued investment in innovation,” Prevoty CEO and co-founder Julien Bellanger said in a statement.

Calling application security “often the weakest link in a security program,” Trident Capital Cybersecurity Managing Director Sean Cunningham praised the way Prevoty gives developers the ability to deploy apps with more security, less risk, and minimal implementation impact. “Customers and prospects are validating that Prevoty’s unique approach to application security succeeds at embedding security into DevOps,” Cunningham said.

By providing visibility into the security weaknesses, he added, Prevoty “allow(s) teams to remediate underlying issues in real-time production, and accelerating application time to market.” As part of the investment, Cunningham will join Prevoty’s Board of Directors.

Prevoty CTO and co-founder Kunal Anand during his presentation “Using Runtime Visibility to Align Application Security with DevOps” at FinDEVr New York 2017.

Prevoty’s technology monitors app activity at runtime and detects attacks in production applications. The platform provides instant mitigation, including against the OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web App Security Risks, as well as content, database, and command injections. Prevoty then issues alerts to log files and any configured SIEMs if the payload is believed to be malicious. The technology also enables seamless integration with DevOps, ensuring that app integration and app deployment is accompanied by real-time visibility and threat mitigation.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, California and founded in 2013, Prevoty is an alumni of our developer’s conference, FinDEVr. This spring, the company’s CTO and co-founder Kunal Anand presented Using Runtime Visibility to Align Application Security with DevOps at FinDEVr New York, where he explained how solutions like Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) are improving app security. Anand’s presentation won the company a Crowd Favorite award from the FinDEVr New York audience.

In November Prevoty took top honors at the SINET 16 Innovation Competition for its app security technology. And in October, the company was named Best in Data Security by Credit Donkey. A 2018 TAG Cyber Distinguished Vendor and Gold Winner of the 2017 Golden Bridge Awards for Best Application Security, Prevoty has raised a total of more than $25 million in funding. The company’s customers include Aaron’s, SpencerStuart, and Michigan State University.

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Payoneer Lands Funding from China Broadband Capital

Payoneer Lands Funding from China Broadband Capital
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Payoneer

Cross-border payments company Payoneer announced today it has received funding from China Broadband Capital (CBC). While the amount of funding was undisclosed, the company specified that this week’s Series E-1 round follows the $220+ million Series E round received last year. This adds to the company’s total funding amount, which previously stood at $270 million.

This marks the second China-based investor for Payoneer, which picked up an investment from PingAn in 2014. Scott Galit, CEO of Payoneer, referred to CBC as “one of the most prestigious and respected investors” and noted that the investor’s knowledge of the China market align them very well.

The company, which facilitates mass payouts for businesses looking to transfer money internationally, will use the funds to strengthen its global partner program and to bolster investment in its China operations. Edward Tina, Chairman of CBC said, “Payoneer is positioned better than any other payments company to help Chinese companies grow globally, as well as help non-Chinese companies sell into China.” He added, “Payoneer’s global footprint, banking ecosystem, and proprietary compliance infrastructure will position Payoneer as the preeminent solution to help companies of all sizes grow internationally.”

At FinovateAsia 2013, Payoneer launched a commercial account that offers businesses the ability to receive funds from a global network. Payoneer’s money-transfer solutions enable millions of businesses from more than 200 countries to reach new audiences by facilitating cross-border payments. The technology supports companies such as Newegg, Airbnb, and Fiverr; as well as Amazon, Google, Airbnb, and Getty Images, who use Payoneer’s mass payout services.

Earlier this fall, Payoneer ranked 1,912 on the Inc. 5,000 list, making the company a five-time Inc. 5,000 honoree. In June, Payoneer opened offices in the U.K. to take advantage of the Brexit opportunity, and in March the company earned a spot on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list.

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PayStand Scores $6 Million in Series A Funding

PayStand Scores $6 Million in Series A Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, PayStand

In a round led by BlueRun Ventures and featuring participation from Cervin Ventures, Serra Ventures, TiE, and Capital for Founders, B2B payment platform PayStand has raised $6 million in Series A funding. The company says that it will use the additional capital to build up its account receivable systems and help launch its new free accounts payable product line – which entered beta availability today. The Series A takes PayStand’s total capital to more than $8 million.

With self-driving cars and rockets to Mars on one side of the balance and paper checks and spreadsheets on the other, PayStand founder and CEO Jeremy Almond made clear which side of history his company was on. Pointing out that “most U.S business payments still run on manual, pre-internet systems,” Almond said, “PayStand takes the best of automation, customization, and blockchain technology to finally bring B2B payments into the Digital Age.”

PayStand CEO and founder Jeremy Almond during his FinDEVr presentation, Comparing the Strengths and Weaknesses of Different Payment Types.

BlueRun Ventures General Partner Jonathan Ebinger added that PayStand’s emphasis on back-office payments in the enterprise “melds seamlessly into our investment themes of digital transformation.” Saying “we see big things ahead for PayStand,” Ebinger added that PayStand represents many of the best practices and “key financial processes that are vital to our economy.”

PayStand also announced the beta availability of its new AP solution. The technology automates the accounts payable process, eliminating the need for paper checks while providing full data tracking throughout the entire cash cycle to maximize visibility and control. The early-access AP release is free to all beta participants.

Founded in 2013, PayStand leverages blockchain and SaaS technologies to provide a smart billing and B2B payment network based on digitization and automation. The company’s Payments-as-a-Service helps businesses lower time-to-cash, cut costs, and generate additional revenue. Headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, PayStand participated in our first developer’s conference, FinDEVr 2014 in Silicon Valley. At the event, Almond presented “Comparing the Strengths and Weaknesses of Different Payment Types,” as an introduction to his company’s multi-payment network technology.

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TrueAccord Lands $22 Million to Humanize Debt Collection

TrueAccord Lands $22 Million to Humanize Debt Collection
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, TrueAccord

Online debt collection service TrueAccord received $22 million in funding this week. Leading the round was Arbor Ventures. A mix of existing and new investors, including Arbor, Nyca Investment Partnership, Assurant Growth Investing, Caffeinated Capital Fund, Felicis Venture, TenOneTen and Crystal Towers, also participated. The round brings the company’s total funding to almost $34.5 million.

In an announcement, the company noted this comes after a period of “sustained and rapid growth”– between 2016 and 2017 TrueAccord grew its collection accounts by 2.5x. The funds will be used to support TrueAccord’s strategic growth initiatives, including product development, compliance functionality, client acquisition and retention, and hiring. Melissa Guzy, co-founder and managing partner of Arbor Ventures, said that TrueAccord’s “unique approach” is making a “positive impact” on the debt collections industry “by empowering many of the estimated 77 million people in debt, to get on a path to better financial health.”

TrueAccord was founded in 2013 as a debt recovery platform. The company has worked with more than 2 million people in debt by creating flexible payment solutions, helping businesses recover billions of dollars in lost revenue. TrueAccord’s clients include top 10 issuers, leading creditors, and companies such as Yelp! and LendUp. Since 2014, the company has facilitated more than $1.5 billion of debt repayment on its platform.

“It was the personal experience of dealing with a debt collector that made me realize the traditional collections industry was ripe for disruption with technology innovation and a more human approach,” said Ohad Samet, Chief Executive Officer of TrueAccord. “With changing consumer preferences, strong regulatory support for innovation, and clients who understand a customer-focus collection process is good for their business, we’re experiencing tremendous demand from the market. We are seizing this opportunity to use machine learning to humanize debt collection for good.”

Ohad Samet demoed the company’s SaaS solution at FinovateSpring 2015 along with CTO, Nadav Samet. TrueAccord landed a place on CB Insights’ Fintech 250 list this spring and contributor Jim Bruene featured TrueAccord in his piece, The Great Rewiring of Financial Services: Consumer Debt Collection.

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TransferWise Raises $280 Million in Series E

TransferWise Raises $280 Million in Series E
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, TransferWise

In a round led by Old Mutual Global Investors and venture capital firm IVP, TransferWise has raised $280 million in new funding. The new capital, which takes the London-based fintech’s total financing to more than $396 million, will be used to help the money transfer innovator grow its services and expand its global presence – particularly in Asia. The Series D also will enable TransferWise to build on its newly-launched service that helps SMEs reduce or even avoid conversion fees by letting them hold money in different currencies.

Also participating in the round were new investors Sapphire Ventures and World Innovation Lab, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Ballie Gifford, and Richard Branson. TransferWise now has an estimated valuation of $1.6 billion.

Quoted in Reuters, TransferWise finance director Matthew Briers noted that the company was “moving significant amounts of money on a monthly basis,” but there is still room for growth. “There are still many trillions of dollars that are moving cross-border,” he said. In addition to plans to expand into the Asia-Pacific region, TransferWise added that it will launch in India “within the next year.” An API that will enable financial institutions to readily access Transferwise’s platform is also in the cards, the company said. Bloomberg’s coverage of the news also featured company chairman and former CEO Taavet Hinrikus hinting at the “very high likelihood” of TransferWise becoming a public company, though Hinrikus added it was “still quite a number of years away.”

TransferWise demonstrated its platform at FinovateEurope 2013. Founded in 2010, the company has more than two million customers and more than 750 currency routes. Last month, TransferWise unveiled new fees for GBP transfers, a month after the company was named to the European Fintech Awards & Conference’s European Fintech 100. Bringing its Borderless Accounts solution to Canada in August, TransferWise announced in July that its customers could use ApplePay to send money globally via its platform – the same month co-founder Kristo Käärmann took over as CEO of the company. With more than $1 billion in transferred funds each month, TransferWise reached profitability in May of this year.

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