Flybits Raises $6.5 Million to Help Banks Put Data to Work

Flybits Raises $6.5 Million to Help Banks Put Data to Work

Consumer data contextualization company Flybits pulled in $6.5 million this week, bringing the Toronto-based company’s total funds to $14 million.

The Series B funding was led by Information Venture Partners. New investor Portag3 Ventures LP also participated along with existing investors Robert Bosch Venture and Trellis Capital. As a part of the agreement, Information Venture Partners’ co-founders Robert Antoniades and David Unsworth will join Flybits’ board of directors.

“This funding will allow us to ramp up our sales efforts in the United States and Europe, reinforce our existing global presence and expand our product and engineering teams to strengthen Flybits’ unique machine learning capabilities,” said Dr. Hossein Rahnama, Founder and CEO of Flybits. “Our product focus now is simplifying how our customers leverage their data ecosystem and drive customer engagement.”

Jordanne Pavao, Product Manager (left) and  Hossein Rahnama, CEO & Founder (right) demo Flybits Experience Studio at FinovateSpring 2017

Founded in 2013, Flybits helps banks convert big data into business intelligence to offer consumers personalized experiences, promotions, and product recommendations. Earlier this year, the company debuted its Flybits Experience Studio at FinovateSpring 2017. The Experience Studio helps banks create and deliver personalized, digital experiences for their clients at scale. This helps banks waste fewer resources on IT complexities such as machine learning, semantic processing, and data contextualization and instead focus on delivering an exceptional user experience.

Rahnama was recently named to Forbes’ Top 40 under 40 for 2017. In 2016, the company earned recognition as a cool vendor in Gartner’s Platform-as-a-Service report and in 2015 received Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Canada award as a “Company to Watch.” With offices in Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Area, London, and Singapore, Flybits not only serves the financial services industry, but also travel and hospitality, retail, and events.

Turnkey Lender Raises $2 Million in Series A

Turnkey Lender Raises $2 Million in Series A

In a round led by Vertex Ventures, the venture capital wing of Temasek Holdings, Turnkey Lender has picked up $2 million in funding. The Singapore-based company specializes in loan management technology, delivered over the cloud, that automates all stages of the lending life cycle – from application processing to collections and reporting. Turnkey Lender will use the funds for product development, adding staff, and growing its business in the Asia-Pacific region – especially Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Quoted in DealStreetAsia, Turnkey Lender co-founder Dmitry Voronenko emphasized the “enormous” opportunity to provide machine-learning and data analysis-enabled solutions to small and medium-sized lenders.  He added that the partnership with Vertex Ventures would help Turnkey Lender enter new markets as well as continue to grow in existing ones.  The company currently has more than 40 customers in 25 countries including the United States, Turnkey Lender’s biggest market.

Pictured: Turnkey Lender’s Arthur Timothy Timchenko demonstrating the company’s SaaS solution at FinovateSring 2017.

Founded in 2014, Turnkey Lender demonstrated its SaaS solution at FinovateSpring 2017. The company’s platform leverages machine learning to tackle many of the challenges of credit scoring in growth markets, such as the lack of borrower data. As Elena Ionenko, Turnkey Lender co-founder explained, the technology enables small and medium-sized lenders to begin with a generic scoring template that will adapt and evolve to the needs of the borrowing customers. This, in combination with accessing other alternative credit scoring methods via API, creates an automated, enterprise-grade lending solution that is flexible and scalable.

“We continue to disrupt the lending industry by providing the same great technology used by large retail banks to nonbank lenders,” Turnkey Lender Business Development Manager Arthur Timothy Timchenko said from the Finovate stage earlier this year. “It is our mission to fill in the gaps in the underserved markets making sure that even the smallest lenders can assess their credit risk properly, make good decisions, and offer (the) best rates to good borrowers,” he said.

A winner of a MAS FinTech Award at the inaugural Singapore FinTech Festival last fall, Turnkey Lender is also a veteran of FinovateAsia 2016. For more information about Finovate’s upcoming return to Hong Kong for FinovateAsia this November, visit our FinovateAsia 2017 page.

Ephesoft Earns $15 Million Investment from Mercato Partners

Ephesoft Earns $15 Million Investment from Mercato Partners

Document capture and data analytics company Ephesoft landed $15 million in Series A funding from Mercato Partners. This marks the company’s first round of funding since it was founded in 2010.

“Mercato’s investment will help Ephesoft realize its vision of liberating meaning through machine learning technology,” said Ike Kavas, Ephesoft’s founder. “We view Mercato as a long-term strategic partner, and we appreciate their experience in helping visionary technology companies accelerate and manage growth. This funding will enable Ephesoft to help organizations improve business outcomes by identifying and rationalizing dark data, then understanding how it impacts their business.”

Ephesoft’s cloud-based, machine learning technology generates insights from unstructured content by capturing, extracting, and analyzing raw data for its 500 customers that operate in a variety of sectors ranging from financial services, Federal government, insurance, mortgage and healthcare. At FinovateSpring 2017, the company demoed how its platform can be used to comb through international transaction data to identify and catch money launderers.

(pictured left to right): Ike Kavas (CTO)and Alex Welsh (Vice President, Analytics Practice) at FinovateSpring 2017

The California-based company will use the investment to accelerate product development and expand operations, market presence, and sales. As a part of the investment, Joe Kaiser Principal at Mercato Partners, will join Ephesoft’s Board of Directors.

In a press release, Kaiser said:

“Organizations are struggling with the enormous volume of unstructured content, which represents upwards of 80% of all available content, and is growing at a rate of 43% per year. To provide tangible value, that information needs to be processed and analyzed. Ephesoft’s solutions are disrupting the advanced capture market with a definitive value proposition: apply machine learning to convert these unstructured information streams and repositories into actionable data.”

Earlier this month, the company announced the availability of its cloud services on Microsoft Azure. In June, Ephesoft established its Asia Pacific offices in Sydney, Australia. The company was named to the 2015 Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing companies in America and has recently received a patent for its machine learning technology.

Volkswagen Finance Arm Invests in AutoGravity

Volkswagen Finance Arm Invests in AutoGravity

Volkswagen’s finance arm, VW Credit, has agreed to make an equity investment of an undisclosed amount in auto financing platform AutoGravity. This will be the company’s fifth round of funding since it was founded in 2015, bringing its total raised to more than $50 million. Andy Hinrichs, CEO at AutoGravity, said the company will use the funds to “accelerate in the face of rapidly growing consumer and industry demand.”

Also of note, VW will be using AutoGravity to power its Volkswagen Credit iOS and Android app. The app, which matches users with financing options for their VW vehicle purchase, will offer Volkswagen dealers a new source of potential clients. Volkswagen credit options are also now available to the 400,000 users who have downloaded the AutoGravity app.

Horst Meima, President and CEO at VW Credit said, “Customers are becoming more demanding of mobile technology and the world of auto financing is no exception.” Meima continued, “We are ready to become a leader in shaping this part of the industry and believe that AutoGravity can help get us there.”

AutoGravity aims to simplify the car shopping and financing experience by offering access to transparent loan and lease offers on a user’s mobile device. CEO Hinrichs notes that offering the service via a mobile app “saves time and improves satisfaction for all parties.” The app gives consumers up to four personalized financing offers on a vehicle of their choice before visiting a dealer. By providing the customer with this type of information up front, AutoGravity is arming consumers with the information they need to make educated purchase decisions.

At FinovateFall 2016, AutoGravity took home a Best of Show award. The company recently began offering its auto loan financing app to car shoppers in New Jersey. Earlier this year, AutoGravity landed a multi-million euro investment from Daimler, adding to the $50 million the company raised in 2015.

Logical Glue Locks in Investment from New Look Founder, Tom Singh

Logical Glue Locks in Investment from New Look Founder, Tom Singh

Terms of the investment were not disclosed, but London-based predictive analysis specialist Logical Glue has secured funding from Tom Singh, founder of U.K.-based fashion retailer, New Look. The investment will support the continued development of Logical Glue’s machine learning and statistical modeling platform, including its white box, decision-making engine and data visualization technology.

Singh highlighted the platform’s effectiveness in a range of verticals. “Fast, accurate and automated decisions based on data have a place within many industries, from retail through to finance,” he said, crediting Logical Glue for “(bridging) the gap between data science and the boardroom.” Logical Glue co-founder Daniel McPherson called the company’s technology “the machine learning platform of the future,” and added that FSOs would be among the big beneficiaries of a solution that was “delivering better, faster decisions and providing the consumer with the best customer experience.”

Pictured (left to right): Robert De Caux (Chief Product Officer) and Jon Rimmer (UX Architect) demonstrating Logical Glue Ensemble at FinovateEurope 2016.

Logical Glue has developed a cloud-based platform that enables companies to use data to solve “prediction problems.” As the company’s Chief Product Officer Robert De Caux explained during his FinovateEurope demo last year, questions like:  “Will a customer repay their loan? Will they buy my product?” “Is this transaction fraudulent?” are answerable by applying the right predictive analytic tools to data that lenders and banks already have. More importantly, Logical Glue enables lenders and banks to use these tools without having to hire data scientists and coders to build and run them. During the company’s demonstration of its platform, Ensemble, De Caux and UX Architect Jon Rimmer showed the automatic categorization feature during the data input process, and the feature selection tool which helps ensure that only the most historically valuable and predictive features in the data are included during the model building process.

“You’ll find if you have hundreds or thousands of predictive variables that you want to assess, it’s often that if you remove some of them, you can improve your model performance,” De Caux explained. “At a time when companies are drowning in a sea of data from multiple sources they don’t properly understand,” he said, “it’s a great way to reduce costs and improve insight.” In addition to the data input and model building stages, the team from Logical Glue demonstrated how the models can be customized to the company’s specific business preferences, and then easily deployed in the cloud.

Logical Glue gives users three different predictive models to choose from: one geared toward the best statistical technique, one based on the best machine learning technique, and another De Caux called “the best for insight, which allows you to see why a decision has been made.” The company says its technology helps improve acceptance rates for lenders by 40% and grow profits by between 5-20%. Logical Glue adds that the platform also decreases default rates by 15%, boosts recovery collection rates for debt collectors by 18% and reduces manual interventions for underwriters “20-fold.”

Founded in 2012, Logical Glue demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2016.  The company’s partners include fellow Finovate alums ExperianmiiCard and Equifax.

Ohpen Garners $17 Million Investment

Ohpen Garners $17 Million Investment

Ohpen landed new funding to fuel its mission to develop the best core banking platform in the world. The Amsterdam-based company earned $17 million in Series B funding from Amerborgh this week, but its total funding remains undisclosed.

The investment boosts the company’s valuation to more than $114 million. Ohpen will use the funding to grow the company geographically, specifically to the U.K. where the company recently opened a new office. Ohpen received approval from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority in January.

In a press release, Ohpen founder and CEO Chris Zadeh said, “The first step, back in 2009, was to actually develop a whole new core banking engine and offering it as SaaS using cloud technology,” Zadeh added, “The second step was to get a client and create a strong home base. After becoming the number one player in our home market, we knew it was time to enter new markets and truly scale up the company.”

Founded in 2009, Ohpen offers a cloud-based core banking API that gives banks a different option from legacy systems. At FinovateFall 2012, the company explained its multilingual cloud banking platform. Ohpen’s 100 employees have facilitated the execution of 14.6 million transactions in the past 12 months. The company recently won third place in the popular vote of the fintech impact awards at the NRC Live conference.

Fintonic to Use $28 Million Round to Move Beyond Loans and Insurance

Fintonic to Use $28 Million Round to Move Beyond Loans and Insurance

Personal finance app Fintonic landed $28 million (€25 million) in Series B funding today. The venture round comes from ING Group, PSN, and others.

When combined with a Series A round the company received in 2012 and a round of an undisclosed amount in 2014, today’s funding brings the company’s total raised to $29.5 million. Fintonic will use the new cash to grow its presence in Spain and Latin America, as well as to further build out the product.

The company has 400,000 users and is available to users in Spain and Chile. The mobile app aims to offer users more visibility into their financial health. Fintonic leverages big data and uses its proprietary credit score (FinScore) and machine learning algorithms to match users with targeted loans and insurance products from more than 50 companies.

Fintonic CEO Sergio Chalbaud demos Fintonic’s alert system at FinovateSpring 2016

Founded in 2012, the Madrid-based company counts Ideon Financial Solutions, Inception Capital, Onza Capital, and Atresmedia as previous investors. 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.

Yoyo Wallet Raises $15 Million in Series B

Yoyo Wallet Raises $15 Million in Series B

 

 

In a round led by Horeca, London-based Yoyo Wallet has raised more than $15 million (£12 million) in new funding. Alain Falys, company co-founder and CEO, said the new investment “will allow us to provide the benefits of customer identification and mobile engagement to a wider array of retailers, large and small, in the U.K. and across Europe.” Horeca is the venture capital arm of German retail conglomerate, Metro Group.

Also participating in the round, which takes Yoyo Wallet’s total capital to more than $30 million, were Woodford Investment Management and Touchstone Innovations. Hansjorg Sage, Metro Group digital unit GM, highlighted Yoyo’s partnership with Caffe Nero, the #3 coffee retail chain in the U.K., as evidence of the company’s “strong track record of deploying digital technology at the customer interface.” Sage said the the trend toward greater digitization in the food and beverage segment of the hospitality industry gave companies like Yoyo Wallet the chance to make a “meaningful positive impact on a wide spectrum of retail businesses.” As part of the investment, still subject to FCA approval, Metro Group partner James Hook will join the Yoyo Wallet board of directors.

Pictured: Yoyo co-founder and COO Michael Rolph demonstrating the Yoyo mobile app at FinovateEurope 2015.

With more than 400,000 registered users and an acceptance network of more than 1,700 outlets, Yoyo Wallet combines payments and loyalty into a seamless mobile experience. The company leverages QR code technology to enable PoS payments, providing SKU-level digital receipts for each transaction while also recording and applying any rewards or loyalty points the purchaser is due into the Yoyo app. Available on iOS and Android platforms, Yoyo wallet features the ability for users to send rewards (“yo-yo’ing”) to others via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or other social media. Merchants can then tie other rewards to their customers who “yo-yo” the most. “Yoyo is now delivering proven benefits to a rapidly growing number of merchants and their customers in universities, corporate campuses, and the High Street,” Falys said.

Yoyo allows retailers build their own branded app, establish a branded presence within the Yoyo app, or use Yoyo’s acceptance rails and SDK to power their own solution. This gives retailers great flexibility in designing the specific mobile experience that is relevant to their customers. In their funding announcement, for instance, the company used the example of a restaurant chain providing customer experience-enhancing options such as being able to order and pay from the table with a Yoyo-powered app. Yoyo Wallet also provides an analytics and campaign generation platform for retailers to enable them to operationalize their insights into customer behavior and better personalize rewards and marketing campaigns.

Founded in 2013, Yoyo demonstrated its mobile app at FinovateEurope 2015. This spring, the company hired former PayPal GM Simon Moran as its first VP of Commercial. In February, Yoyo marked its 10 millionth transaction,  having “helped retailers across the U.K. and Ireland award over 1.2 billion loyalty points and 1.8 million coffee stamps.” Yoyo began the year with the introduction of its AI-powered, marketing automation platform, Yoyo Engage at Davos in January.

Blockchain Lands $40 Million Series B

Blockchain Lands $40 Million Series B

Web-based bitcoin wallet Blockchain seems to have benefitted from all of the bitcoin buzz in the past month. The Luxembourg-based company pulled in a Series B round of $40 million today, bringing its total raised to $70 million.

The funding, which the company describes as “rocket fuel” in its blog, comes from new investors Lakestar, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Nokota Management, and Digital Currency Group. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mosaic Ventures, Prudence Holdings, Virgin, and Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Group) also participated.

Since it was founded in 2011, Blockchain has amassed millions of active users from across the globe, formed partnerships in 34 countries, and has built an API platform used by large fintech companies. The company anticipates the new funds will help it deliver its mission to “create an open, accessible, and fair financial future for billions across the globe, one piece of software at a time”

Blockchain presented at FinDEVr 2014, when the company was hosting 2 million wallets on its platform. Today, the company boasts 14 million wallets. Blockchain differentiates itself from competitor wallet Coinbase because, unlike Coinbase, it does not host cryptocurrency exchanges on its site. Instead, Blockchain has set up partnerships with exchanges so that it cannot see users’ transactions or balance amount.

Earlier this year, Blockchain partnered with Imperial College London to launch the Digital Asset Research Lab, an environment that supports research and activities related to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Late last year, the company announced plans to add a buying option to its wallet.

Scalable Capital Raises $33 Million in BlackRock-Led Series B

Scalable Capital Raises $33 Million in BlackRock-Led Series B

In a round led by BlackRock, robo advisor Scalable Capital has raised $33 million (€30 million) in new capital. Also participating in the Series B were existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and Tengelmann Ventures. The company, with offices in London, U.K., and Munich, Germany, now has total funding of more than $45 million (€41 million). The investment gives BlackRock a minority stake in Scalable Capital; BlackRock’s Chief Operating Officer of EMEA, Patrick Olson, will join Scalable Capital’s Supervisory Board.

Adam French, Scalable Capital co-founder and CEO U.K., said the investment served as a “fantastic validation of our work so far” and would “open up new growth avenues” for the company.  French added that bringing technology to bear in the wealth management business was “not just a competitive advantage, but a requirement for wealth management businesses to be successful in the future.” BlackRock’s Olson put the investment in the context of growing demand from European wealth managers and advisors for “high-quality technology-enabled investment solutions.” The firm’s investment in Scalable Capital, Olson said, “allows us to meet these evolving needs of our clients and their customers and to help shape their business models for the future.”

Pictured (left to right): Co-founders Erik Podzuweit (Co-CEO) and Adam French (U.K. CEO) demonstrating Scalable Capital at FinovateEurope 2016.

With more than €250 million in assets and more than 6,000 retail clients, Scalable Capital is a digital investment manager that invests client funds in globally diversified exchange-traded fund (ETF) portfolios. Calling itself “a service so cost-efficient, honest, and transparent that even a banker could use it, Scalable Capital differentiates itself from its rivals in the robo advisory space by its commitment to superior risk management. “We’ve developed a risk management technology which was previously reserved for institutional investors,” French announced at the beginning of his company’s FinovateEurope demo, adding “And we’re really excited to take this technology, and put it in the hands of retail investors.”

During their live demo, French and co-founder Erik Podzuweit showed how investors could determine their precise risk tolerance level and see how their willingness to take (or reduce) risk would likely affect future returns. Scalable Capital also avoids the vague marketing jargon that describes portfolios as “conservative” or “moderate” or “dynamic.” Podzuweit explained, “At the end of the day, that doesn’t tell you anything. What is a ‘moderate’ portfolio? Can I now lose half my portfolio more or less? And will this ‘moderate’ portfolio always stay moderate in all market conditions?” Instead, Scalable Capital quantifies the risk and gives it an institutional risk measure, value at risk. This measure gives investors a sense of maximum potential losses over a one-year horizon within a 95% likelihood.

“Why do we stress this risk point so much?” Podzuweit asked. Answering his own question, he continued: “Because risk, apart from costs, is the most important factor in investing. Risk is the currency you buy long-term performance with. And our clients should decide themselves how much of their currency they want to put on the table.”

Featured last month in Money Marketing, Scalable Capital was named to FinTechCity’s FinTech 50 this year, as well as being recognized for Financial Innovation of the Year from the Online Personal Wealth Awards. The company announced a doubling of assets in the first three months of the year to €200 million, the same month French earned a spot on the 2017 PAM Top 40 Under 40 roster. Founded in 2014, Scalable Capital demonstrated its risk management technology at FinovateEurope 2016.

StockViews Closes Second Round Equity Funding, Earns FCA Authorization

StockViews Closes Second Round Equity Funding, Earns FCA Authorization

London-based StockViews completed its second round of funding this week. The $640,000 in new capital (£500,000) will help fuel the launch of the company’s equity research platform this summer, putting the technology in the hands of clients before new regulations take effect in January 2018. Both new and existing investors participated in the funding, which takes the company’s total capital to more than $1 million.

“As a result of the upcoming regulatory changes under Mifid II,” StockViews CEO Tom Beevers said, “it is clear there is a growing demand for high quality, differentiated equity research.” He added, “The new capital, our expanding team of leading analysts, and the arrival of our new Executive Chairman will position us well for this opportunity.”

Pictured: StockViews CEO Thomas Beevers demonstrating StockViews Signal at FinovateSpring 2015.

One of the ways Mifid II will change the landscape for asset managers is by requiring them to separate payments for research to investment banks from commission payments. StockViews believes this will encourage asset managers to either pay for research directly or use “Research Payment Accounts” as a way to pass the cost of research to customers. The company sees this as generating opportunities for firms that can provide independent equity analysis at a lower cost.

In addition to the funding news, StockViews announced that the company had been granted FCA authorization and appointed former Fidelity International president, Thomas Balk, as the company’s Executive Chairman. Balk joined the StockViews board last spring, the same month StockViews pulled in $355,000 in seed funding.

Founded in 2014, StockViews demonstrated its StockViews Signal technology at FinovateSpring 2015. Signal aggregates the recommendations from the top-rated analysts on the StockViews network to provide buy and sell signals. Last fall, StockViews won top honors and a $50,000 investment at the G-Startup Worldwide competition at GMIC Bangalore. We featured StockViews in our roundup of top business-to-business wealth tech players. Read more about the company in our Finovate Debut feature.

Trusona Raises $10 Million to Fuel #NoPasswords Revolution

Trusona Raises $10 Million to Fuel #NoPasswords Revolution

Identity authentication company Trusona landed $10 million in funding this week. Microsoft’s venture capital arm led the round. Existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participated, bringing the Arizona-based company’s total funding to $18 million.

Founded in 2015, Trusona provides an insured cloud identity suite that offers everyday logins for SWIFT wires, DTC stock transfers, critical infrastructure logins, high net-worth individual accounts, and more. The company will use today’s funding to double its workforce and generate more demand for its identity application suite that comes in three different versions. The most basic of which, Essential, allows users to log into a website by scanning their fingerprint or entering a PIN on their mobile device. The Executive version is designed to replace OTP tokens, requiring 3-factors of authentication upon login. Businesses may also select the Elite level for identity verification to access sensitive assets or initiate high-dollar wire transfers. This version delivers four-factor authentication and includes insurance.

Trusona’s CEO and founder, Ori Eisen, demonstrated the company’s Cloud Identity Suite at FinovateFall 2016. The platform is so fast and frictionless that Eisen was able to show off the user experience seven times during the seven minute demo. To authenticate themselves, clients use the Trusona app on their smartphone to photograph a QR code on a website login page, then select accept on their mobile device.

The company also provides a free WordPress plugin and earlier this spring launched an offering for Salesforce users. In April, Trusona appointed Karen Dayan as Chief Marketing Officer and earlier this year won Info Security PG’s Global Excellence Award.