Funding

$230 Million Raised by 20 Alums in Q1 2017

$230 Million Raised by 20 Alums in Q1 2017
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings

The big story for fintech investment in the first few months of 2017 was uncertainty. Whether it was the upset election victory of Donald Trump in the U.S., or continued concerns in the aftermath of the Brexit vote in the U.K., it was clear that venture capital – like much of the rest of the world – was taking a wait-and-see approach to deploying capital in the fintech industry in the first quarter of this year.

While more upbeat on European investment trends, CB Insights took a more conservative tone toward funding to VC-backed fintechs in the U.S. and the world at large. The firm suggested that the Q1 2017 investment pace globally was off the 2016 mark by 18%, with the U.S. Q1 2017 pace off by 20%. (Europe, by contrast, was on pace to exceed 2016 by 57%.)

The Q1 funding slowdown was apparent in our review of alum funding for the first three months of the year. Finovate alums raised more than $230 million in the first quarter of 2017. The funding total is less than half that of the previous Q1, and out of line with recent $600 million+ first quarters. The number of alums funded was also on the low end, falling below the 23 alum mark from the first quarter of 2014.

That said, we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that SoFi, which became a FinDEVr alum in March, raised $500 million in funding in February. And while that keeps them from being included in – and dramatically boosting – our tally, it is reminder that fintech investors in the first quarter of 2017 may not have been as overcautious as the numbers suggest.

Previous Quarterly Comparisons

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

The biggest equity deal of the first quarter of 2017 was the $50 million raised by Kensho in February. Workfusion came in second, raising $35 million, and a trio of companies raised between $25 million and $20 million. The top 10 equity investment for Q1 2017 totaled more than $210 million, or more than 91% of the quarter’s total alum funding.

Top 10 Equity Investments

  1. Kensho: $50 million
  2. Workfusion: $35 million
  3. Currencycloud: $25 million
  4. Payfone: $23.5 million
  5. VATBox: $20 million
  6. NYMBUS: $16 million
  7. Qapital: $12 million
  8. Algomi: $10 million
  9. Dream Payments: $10 million
  10. blooom: $9.15 million

Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q1 2017.

January: More than $65 million raised by three alums

  • Dwolla: $6.85 million – post
  • Payfone: $23.5 million – post
  • Workfusion: $35 million – post

February: More than $107 million raised by 12 alums

  • Rippleshot: $2.6 million – post
  • AutoGravity: “double-digit million Euro investment” – post
  • Bitbond: $1.2 million – post
  • Blooom: $9.15 million – news
  • Clinc: $6 million – post
  • Kensho: $50 million – news
  • NYMBUS: $16 million – post
  • Pindrop Security: amount undisclosed – post
  • Qumram: $1.5 million – post
  • SecureKey: $800,000 – post
  • VATBox: $20 million – post
  • Venteny: undisclosed – news

March: More than $57 million raised by five alums

  • Algomi: $10 million – post
  • Currencycloud: $25 million – post
  • Dream Payments: $10 million – post
  • Qapital: $12 million – post
  • SWITCH: $400,000 – post

If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the first quarter of 2016, 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.

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Token Picks Up $18.5 Million to Help Banks Rise to Challenge of PSD2

Token Picks Up $18.5 Million to Help Banks Rise to Challenge of PSD2
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings, Token

With an investment of $15.7 million from Octopus Ventures, EQT Ventures, and OP Financial Group, open bank platform innovator Token has successfully completed its Series A financing. “Securing the backing from such world-class investors allows us to grow and execute faster in our mission to reinvent the world’s payment systems by providing common, secure access to all banks and a modern, bank-centric payment ecosystem,” Token founder and CEO Steve Kirsch said. The total raised in the Series A reached $18.5 million.

Token is leveraging its open banking platform to give financial institutions the ability to fully participate in the digitization of finance. Calling the company’s technology, “a true game-changer in the world of banking and financial services,” EQT Ventures partner and Token board member Andreas Thorstensson said: “Through a secure API, they are creating an open banking ecosystem, which creates possibilities for new revenue streams for its customers and a better user experience for consumers.

Pictured (left to right): Stefan Weiss (Head of APIs and Open Platforms at Fidor) and Marten Nelson (VP, Marketing, Token) demonstrating Token’s technology at FinovateEurope 2017.

In the company’s live demonstration at FinovateEurope earlier this year, Token co-founder and VP of Marketing Marten Nelson emphasized the relative speed and low cost of using Token as a PSD2 compliance solution. “It eliminates security mass breaches, reduces fraud and, perhaps best of all, it paves the way for revenue,” Nelson added. Joining Nelson on stage was Stefan Weiss, Head of APIs and Open Platforms at Fidor Bank who noted, “At Fidor, we believe that PSD2 and open banking is not a threat to banks, it is an opportunity. An opportunity to stay relevant.”

With programmable money, Token has developed a technology that “can transform the way the world transacts,” according to Octopus Ventures partner Simon Andrews. Programmable money uses tokenization and cryptography to enable parties to take advantage of a “vastly greater range of parameters … when exchanging value.” And value is defined as more than just money. Writing at the Token blog, Nelson explained: “Far more than conventional money – time, contracts, expertise, goods, services, and more can all be traded.” For FIs, this offers not just greater security and verification standards for their transactions, but the ability to use more efficient self-validating transactions that would reduce costs for FIs, as well. “The potential applications for self-validating transactions conducted using programmable money are practically limitless,” he wrote.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Token presented The Future of Payments Now at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2015. Earlier this month, the company announced a partnership with Finland-based OP Financial Group and, in January, Token teamed up with information technology consulting firm, VirtusaPolaris.

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Signifyd Raises $56 Million to Fight eCommerce Chargebacks

Signifyd Raises $56 Million to Fight eCommerce Chargebacks
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Signifyd

Signifyd launched in 2011 to mitigate e-commerce chargebacks and this week landed $56 million to continue the fight. The Series C round, which brings the company’s total capital to $87 million, was led by Bain Capital Ventures with contributions from Menlo Ventures, American Express, and other existing investors.

The company will use the funds to expand its team of engineers and fraud experts. Specifically, Signifyd plans to double its current engineering team over the course of the next year. Signifyd will also scale its fraud protection technology to serve enterprise merchants in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. This will continue an already impressive growth curve. The company now protects 5,000 merchants and in the past year experienced a 20x growth in transaction volume, 4.5x YOY revenue growth, and increased its workforce to more than 100. This 50% increase in employees from the year prior prompted the expansion to a new office to accommodate the growth.

Signifyd’s Guaranteed Fraud Protection, which it debuted at FinovateSpring 2013, helps shift fraud liability away from online retailers by offering a 100% guarantee against fraud or chargebacks on every order. The company stands behind its technology by reimbursing clients for “any fraudulent transactions that slip through the cracks.” Enabling technologies such as machine learning and AI offer a scalable approach that can be implemented with large, enterprise retailers.

Among Signifyd’s recent partnerships are Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento, Accertify, and ThreatMetrix. The company has received multiple honors recently, including multiple wins in the American Business Awards earlier this week. It has also been recognized by Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Bloomberg, and has been named one of the Bay Area’s Best Places to Work by the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal.

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FinDEVr Alum Quovo Raises $10 Million

FinDEVr Alum Quovo Raises $10 Million
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Quovo

Financial data provider Quovo landed some serious cash last week in a Series B funding round. The New York-based company received $10 million from Napier Park Global Capital and F-Prime Capital Partners, who led the round. They were joined by existing investors, FinTech Collective and Long Light Capital. The company now boasts $15.2 million in total funding.

Lowell Putnam, CEO and co-founder of Quovo said that the capital will enable the company further its “mission to help firms build strong, data-driven client relationships, ” and that it will “enable [it] to build upon [its] success and help anyone trying to innovate or disrupt within financial services.”

Quovo will use the investment to “accelerate the growth of its suite of data analytics offerings,” which include Quovo Connect, a module that enables companies to pull transaction data from a user’s financial accounts. Quovo also offers a Bank Authentication API, which the company’s CTO & Co-Founder, Michael Del Monte, along with Stephen Sikes, Head of Strategy for SoFi Wealth, showcased at FinDEVr New York. SoFi, along with Finovate alums Wealthfront and Betterment leverage Quovo’s Authentication API to offer end users a smooth way to authenticate their financial accounts securely.

Stephen Sikes, Head of Strategy for SoFi Wealth (left) and Michael Del Monte, Quovo CTO & Co-Founder (right)

Founded in 2010, Quovo has presented at FinDEVr New York 2016 and FinDEVr New York 2017, where it was awarded Favorite FinDEVr Alum. Earlier this year, the company announced that its Bank Authentication API now covers 215 financial institutions, a growth of 10x since it was launched in November 2016.

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Narrative Science Raises $11 Million Series E

Narrative Science Raises $11 Million Series E
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Narrative Science

NarrativeScience_homepage_April2017

In a round co-led by Sapphire Ventures and Jump Capital, advanced natural-language generation technology innovator Narrative Science has raised $11 million. The Series E round takes the company’s total funding to more than $40 million. Quoted in Crain’s Chicago Business, Sapphire Ventures partner Jai Das wasted few words in explaining Narrative Science’s edge. “People like to read,” Das said. In other words, it’s all about the Advanced NLG.

Narrative Science specializes in using advanced natural-language generation technology to turn ordinary numeric and symbolic data and visualizations into what the company calls “intelligent narratives.” These narratives express in language indistinguishable from that of a human author all the relevant insights and context from the chosen data. This data can take a variety of forms, including business intelligence reports, customer communications, and regulatory filings – any information that is based on quantifiable data can be turned into an intelligent narrative. “People who don’t have skill with spreadsheets, people who might not have skills with visualizations … they can still get to the insights within that data,” Kris Hammon, Narrative Science Chief Scientist explained during the company’s demo at FinovateFall.

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Narrative Science demonstrated its Quill Financial solution at FinovateFall 2013. The company, which celebrated its seventh anniversary in April, has been on a partnership spree in recent months. A deal with Sisense in February will put Narrative Science’s Narratives for Business Intelligence API to work for the company’s business intelligence technology, Sisense Everywhere. Also in February, Narrative Science partnered with FactSet to integrate automated portfolio commentary within FactSet’s analytics and client reporting platform. We featured Narrative Science in our look at artificial intelligence in fintech back at the beginning of the year. Stuart Frankel is CEO.

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Meniga Scores $8 Million to Help Banks Leverage their Data

Meniga Scores $8 Million to Help Banks Leverage their Data
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Meniga

Screen Shot 2017-04-07 at 7.53.32 AM

Digital banking solutions company Meniga has brought in $8 million (€7.5 million) today in a round led by by new investor Industrifonden with participation from previous investors Frumtak Investment Fund, Velocity Capital Private Equity, and Kjolfesta. This boosts the London-based company’s capital to almost $23 million. Meniga plans to use the funds to strengthen its R&D efforts and bolster its sales team to meet current demand.

Founded in Iceland in 2009, Meniga helps banks in 18 markets leverage their customer data to market and up-sell products and services to the banks’ 40 million end customers. The company’s clients include Santander, Intesa, ING Direct, Commerzbank and mBank. In addition to its focus on harnessing banking data, Meniga’s latest challenge is helping banks comply with PSD2 regulations.

Meniga CEO Georg Lúðvíksson and Chief Product Owner Finnur Magnusson debuted Meniga Challenges at FinovateEurope 2016 earlier this year. The API offers a variety of ways to help users with different savings personalities save for goals or simply compete with their friends to spend less. We featured Meniga’s Challenges in our recent overview of the savings technology horizon last month.

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SwipeStox Lands $13 Million, Hints at Asia Expansion

SwipeStox Lands $13 Million, Hints at Asia Expansion
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Swipestox

Screen Shot 2017-04-06 at 1.59.34 PM

SwipeStox, the Tinder for stock trading startup announced this week that its parent company The NAGA Group has landed $13 million in financing. This boosts the company’s total funding to $15 million.

The backing comes from Chinese investment group FOSUN. Guo Guangchang, FOSUN Group’s founder and chairman, said he was compelled to invest in Germany-based NAGA Group because of the company’s “vision to disrupt the trading space” and its “experienced team and strong technology focus.”

Benjamin Bilski, Founder and CEO of SwipeStox added, “Together with FOSUN we will accelerate our product development for SwipeStox and expand into more areas in the trading ecosystem. We are aiming to become the largest social network for stock traders worldwide.” Hamburg, Germany-based SwipeStox also has offices in London and Sarajevo, Bosnia. The company’s app is open to users in the U.K., Spain, and Germany, and may soon expand to Asia. According to the press release, NAGA Group’s CEO Yasin Sebastian Qureshi mentioned the new relationship offers NAGA “a solid bridge into China mainland.”

SwipeStox launched in 2016 and nine months after going live the startup’s global user base had already traded more than $21 billion over the platform. Benjamin Bilski, along with Managing Director & Co-Founder, Wladimir Huber, showed off the SwipeStox platform at FinovateSpring 2016. At FinovateEurope 2016 in London, SwipeStox took home Best of Show honors for the debut of its platform. Also last year, the company won Wolves Summit 2016 and most recently launched a web trading platform to expand on its mobile services.

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New Funding for Savedroid Boosts Total Capital to More than $22 Million

New Funding for Savedroid Boosts Total Capital to More than $22 Million
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings, savedroid

savedroid_homepage_April2017

What would it take to get you to save a little more of your hard-earned money? How about automatically setting aside a dollar every time Donald Trump tweeted? Or five bucks each time your favorite sports team loses a match? If unique and atypical motivations are your idea of a savings solution, then savedroid has the app for you.

And this week we learned that the German startup had picked up funding from investment bank Rhineland-Palatinate and a group of angel investors including Debjit Chaudhuri, founder of Traxpay and former Infosys manager. The amount of the funding was not disclosed (Crunchbase reports €20 million) but savedroid says that the company’s total capital, which includes a million euro seed round, now stands at more than $22 million. Company founder Dr. Yassin Hankir says the funds will help “accelerate user growth.”

Founded in 2015, savedroid is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In its demonstration at FinovateSpring 2016, the company introduced the term “smooves” into the PFM lexicon, showing how the savedroid app makes it easy to “turn everyday activities into automated savings.” By using technology to set aside small amounts of money every time a certain event takes place – a combination of positive, negative, and even random incentives – users can improve their personal finances in ways that can improve their overall lifestyle, as well.

The company launched its savings solution in the summer of 2016 and, in February, added an AI-based, savings algorithm to the app. Profiled last fall in Frankfurter Allgemeine, we interviewed savedroid’s Hankir for our recent feature on savings technology.

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Moneytree Sees Green with $9 Million Funding Round

Moneytree Sees Green with $9 Million Funding Round
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Moneytree

Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 2.37.46 PM

Japanese personal finance app Moneytree has landed $9 million (¥ 1 billion) in a series B round recently. This is the company’s third round of funding and brings its total raised to $10.5 million. SBI Investment led the round. Mizuho Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Fukuoka Technology Partners, Hiroshima Venture Capital, Senshu Ikeda Capital, and Baillie Gifford also participated.

The Tokyo-based company will use the funds to expand its personal asset management, expense reimbursement, and corporate account apps. Moneytree’s founder and CEO, Paul Chapman, explained the big picture plans for the new capital, saying, “Moneytree will be moving on to the next stage of growth… More than ever, we will focus on maintaining the security of our services, protecting privacy, and transparency of information.” Chapman added, “In addition, while supporting the conversion of the financial industry to digital banking, and while contributing to the foundation of the accounting industry’s cloud accounting system, we will continue to devote our efforts to constructing an industry-wide ecosystem based on users. Furthermore, we have set our sights on the globalization of our services through deploying Japanese technology overseas.”

Moneytree was founded in 2012. At FinovateAsia 2016 in Hong Kong, the company debuted Moneytree LINK. Moneytree’s head of platform, Mark Makdad and Chief of Marketing, Zach Taub, demonstrated how the new mobile SDK connects their MT LINK aggregation platform to third party products and services. MT Link is in use with 20 financial institutions, including megabanks, regional banks, and accounting software firms, which helps it reach more than 200,000 businesses.

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SWITCH Lands $400,000 Angel Investment

SWITCH Lands $400,000 Angel Investment
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings, SWITCH

Switch_homepage_March2017

SWITCH, a Seattle-based startup that makes it easy to manage your online payment information, has raised $400,000 in funding from angel investors. The company, which made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring last year, now boasts $1.9 million in total capital.

Chris Hopen, SWITCH co-founder and CEO, called his technology the “first of its kind, credit card updater for online accounts.” SWITCH makes it easy for card holders to update their payment methods at online merchants and e-commerce sites, as well as for subscriptions and recurring repayments like cable and utility bills. It also helps card issuers get new and replacement cards to cardholders faster, and provides issuers with analytics and data on card usage to better understand their competition. Hopen highlighted the benefit this analytics component provided for issuers, saying “If I’m in 10,000 wallets, I want to know who my top five competitors are in those wallets, so I can do something about increasing my profile and getting more sites using my card.”

SWITCH was founded in 2014 by Chris Hopen and David Pool. The company demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2016, and has 10 employees. SWITCH opened early access to its free, credit card updating service in February.

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Currencycloud Collects $25 Million in New Funding

Currencycloud Collects $25 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Currency Cloud, Funding, Fundings

Currencycloud_homepage_March2017

In a Series D round led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) and featuring participation by existing investors Anthemis, Notion Capital, Rakuten FinTech Fund, and Sapphire Ventures, cross-border payments innovator Currencycloud has raised $25 million (£20 million in funding).  The new capital takes Currencycloud’s total funding to more than $59 million.

Pointing to the rise of what he called “the building block economy,” Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven explained how firms like his add value and create new opportunities in the market. “Companies can combine services such as AWS, Google Maps, Stripe, and Twilio to build innovative new businesses fast and without the overhead of expensive proprietary systems,” Laven said. “Currencycloud provides a set of multi-currency payment and conversion tools that are helping hundreds of companies globalize fast.”

Currencycloud_stage_FF2016

Pictured: Chief Commercial Officer John Hammond demonstrating the Currencycloud Payment Engine at FinovateFall 2016.

Tom Hulme, general partner at GV echoed Laven’s observation, saying, “We believe in empowering developers by making it easier for them to add scalable services to their products, ideally with simple APIs,” Hulme added, “Currencycloud is the leader in providing cross-border payment services in this manner, a real need as companies globalize.” Norton Capital partner Jos White credited Currencycloud with “powering the global economy of the future,” while Rakuten Fintech Fund managing partner Oskar Mielczarek de la Miel pointed to the company’s “flagship deals” in 2016 which he said “validated the market opportunity and … huge momentum (for) 2017.” This list of “flagship deals” includes Currencycloud’s partnership with Arkea Banking Services (a subsidiary of Credit Mutuel Arkea), its agreement with fintech data control services provider, Duco, and the deal with Fidor Bank, forged late in 2015.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in London, U.K., Currencycloud demonstrated its payment engine at FinovateFall 2016. The company added former Misys executive Ed Addario as CTO in January and, last fall, announced its participation in Monitise’s FINkit partner program supporting collaboration between fintechs and banks. A member of FinTech Forward 20’s Companies to Watch list, Currencycloud also participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2015, where VP of Engineering Rachel Nienaber and Liam McAndrew discussed how the company re-built its API. For more about our upcoming developer’s event, FinDEVr New York, coming next week on March 21 and 22, visit our FinDEVr New York page.

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Dream Payments Closes $10 Million Series A

Dream Payments Closes $10 Million Series A
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Dream Payments, Funding, Fundings

DreamPayments_homepage_March2017

Canadian payments innovator Dream Payments raised $10 million in new funding this week. The Series A round was led by the investing division of Fairfax Financial Holdings, FairVentures, and takes the company’s total capital to more than $17 million. In addition to FairVentures, Connecticut Innovations, Real Ventures, and angel investors also participated.

Citing the timing of the investment, Dream Payments CEO Brent Ho-Young said the funding “propels Dream into the American market at a perfect time to serve the critical needs of businesses that are struggling to support emerging payment technologies like mobile wallets.” The company plans to use the new capital to fuel expansion in the U.S., increase its presence in its native Canada, and drive development of its third party app ecosystem. Connecticut Innovations CEO Matt McCooe praised its “unique go-to-market strategy and product offering” while Janet Bannister, General Partner of Real Ventures, spoke from the position as an “early investor,” saying “(Dream Payments is) experiencing exceptional growth as the only payments cloud powering mobile commerce for the leading North American financial institutions.”

DreamPayments_stage_FS2015

Pictured: Chief Marketing Officer Christian Ali demonstrating the Dream Mobile Point of Sale solution.

Dream Payments Cloud enables businesses across Canada to accept mobile payments by accessing a cloud-based, mobile point of sale (mPOS) solution. The company partners with financial institutions, who can then offer the PaaS solution to their business customers. In this way, Dream Payments helps consumers and businesses take advantage of both the latest and their preferred payment methods anytime, wherever they are.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Dream Payments demonstrated its mPOS solution at FinovateSpring 2015. Last month the company announced a partnership with Intuit QuickBooks to enables small business owners and entrepreneurs to accept a wider variety of payments including chip and PIN, cash, and mobile wallet. And, last fall, the company won the Global Fintech Challenge, taking home a $1.5 million investment award. In addition to Intuit QuickBooks, Dream Payments includes TD Merchant Solutions and TruShield Insurance among its partners and, later this month, expects to announce a new partnership with JP Morgan Chase.

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