Funding Archives - Page 65 of 92

Bitbond Gains $5.4 Million Debt Commitment and Undisclosed Equity Investment

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on May 10, 2017
Categories: Bitbond, Funding

Peer-to-peer small business financing platform Bitbond announced today it has received a debt commitment from Obotritia Capital, which has agreed to fund $5.4 million worth of loans on its platform. Obotritia has also invested an undisclosed amount of equity in Bitbond, whose current funding now totals more than $2.14 million.

Headquartered in Germany, Bitbond offers small businesses across the globe fast access to working capital. It does so by connecting small business owners with individual and institutional investors. Because it leverages the blockchain, Bitbond sends cross-border payments to merchants quickly and inexpensively. Since it was founded in 2013, Bitbond has originated 1,700 loans to small businesses in 120 countries.

Above: Bitbond’s Radko Albrecht (CEO & Founder) and Jarek Nowotka (CTO) debut the company’s automated SME scoring engine at FinovateFall 2016

At FinovateFall 2016, the company launched an automated SME scoring engine. “The main challenge about creating an international lending platform is credit scoring because data is different from one country to another,” said Bitbond CEO and founder Radko Albrecht in his recent FinovateFall demo. He added, “At Bitbond we have solved this and created the most international and most scalable SME scoring mechanism.” The tool offers a universal, automated scoring method that offers borrowers instant funding after their application is accepted. Because Bitbond requires less manual involvement than traditional underwriting methods, it also has the advantage of scalability.

Earlier this year, Bitbond partnered with blockchain remittance service Bitpesa to improve access to working capital for small businesses in Africa. Last fall, the company received its BaFin license, a certification that allows it to conduct asset brokerage on its platform independent of banks.

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FinDEVr Alum Symbiont Scores Funding from China’s Hundsun Technologies

By David Penn Posted on May 10, 2017
Categories: Funding, Fundings, Symbiont

The amount of the investment was undisclosed. But blockchain startup and smart contracts specialist, Symbiont has picked up funding from China-based Hundsun Technologies. The investment in Symbiont is the first in the U.S. for the financial services software provider and the company, which is partly-owned by Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, will also add an observer to Symbiont’s board of directors. Symbiont CEO Mark Smith referred to the investment as a “clear vote of confidence for Symbiont” and called Hundsun Technologies a “strong partner in Asia.”

Symbiont’s innovation is a smart contracts platform that enables FIs to develop applications based on distributed ledger technology. Current use cases enabling the issuance, trading, and processing of corporate bonds, syndicated loans, and other low-liquidity financial instruments. Guan Xiaolan, executive president of Hundsun highlighted the company’s “superior, mature, and highly differentiated DLT stack,” as well as the technology’s high level of security. “Its smart contracts have a proven ability to automate complex business logic, such as highly tailored employee compensation waterfalls for private companies,” he added.

Pictured: Symbiont CTO and co-founder Adam Krellenstein during his presentation at FinDEVr New York 2016.

It has been almost a year since the State of Delaware partnered with Symbiont in a project called The Delaware Block Initiative designed to make it easier for state government and businesses to leverage blockchain technology. In an update published as part of the Delaware law series last month, Andrea Tinianow of the Delaware Blockchain Initiative and Caitlin Long of Symbiont noted that the “first milestone of DBI’s roadmap” – deploying distributed ledger technology at the state’s public archives – had been achieved. Underscoring the relevance of this initial effort, the two wrote: “By being the first to adopt the technology, the State will maintain its leadership in corporate registry services.”

Also this spring, Symbiont added Yale University computer science professor, Dr. Zhong Shao, to its Technical Advisory Board, and partnered with commodity services specialist, Orebits, who will use Symbiont’s smart contract technology to further develop their eponymous commodity-backed digital assets. The first digital assets, called “orebits,” were made available on Symbiont’s platform in March.

Symbiont was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in New York. Adam Krellenstein, CTO and co-founder of the company, presented “Distributed Ledgers and Smart Contracts” at FinDEVr New York 2016.

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Vera Announces $15 Million Strategic Investment from Hasso Plattner

By David Penn Posted on May 9, 2017
Categories: Funding, Fundings, Vera

Data security specialist Vera announced a strategic investment of $15 million today. The funding was led by Hasso Plattner Ventures (HP-Ventures), and featured the participation of Amplify Partners, Battery Ventures, Clear Venture Partners, Leslie Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. The company’s total capital is now more than $50 million. Ajay Arora, CEO and co-founder of Vera said the investment will help fuel expansion particularly in Europe where new regulations on data security, specifically the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), are pending.

GDPR was enacted just over a year ago by the European Parliament and Council in an effort to improve data security for individuals in the EU. The scheduled implementation date of the GDPR is less than a month away on May 25th and observers like Gartner are warning that less than half of companies are will be fully compliant by the end of 2018, much less the end of May. “The GDPR will affect not only EU-based organizations, but many data controllers and processors outside the EU as well,” Gartner research director, Bart Willemsen said. He added that both the threat of “hefty fines” and what he called “the increasingly empowered position of individual data subjects” are pressuring companies to do a better job of protecting personal data.

Pictured: Vera CEO and co-founder Ajay Arora demonstrating Vera Security at FinovateSpring 2016.

And this is where companies like Vera come in. Vera’s technology innovates by securing the data itself. From files and Word documents to images and video, Vera enables companies to control access and the ability to manipulate data after it has left its traditional perimeter of control. During the company’s live demonstration at FinovateSpring, Vera’s Grant Shirk used a single click to secure a word document and an Excel spreadsheet after attaching them to an email. In addition to quickly establishing a variety of access permissions, Vera’s technology also enables digital watermarking, restrictions on the ability to edit (including cut and paste), and provides auditing and tracking.

Underscoring Vera’s uniqueness as its first cybersecurity investment, HP-Ventures General Partner, Yair Re’em credited the company’s “incredible momentum and hypergrowth in markets large and small” as well as Vera’s ability to “help protect and control data after a breach has happened.” He said: “The crumbling state of enterprise security has clearly demonstrated the need for a fundamental paradigm shift in cybersecurity.” Chris Rust, Clear Venture Partners co-founder and General Partner, added that Vera was “the driving force behind a positive and profound shift away from perimeter-based security and towards a more flexible and reliable data-centric model.” Rust will join Vera’s board of directors as part of the strategic investment.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Vera demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2016. Earlier this year, the company launched its enterprise communications security solution, Vera for Mail. Last fall, Vera announced that Logica Capital Advisors had selected them to manage business information and internal collaboration files. The company has produced more than 4x revenue growth since launching publicly in 2015 and grown its Fortune 100 customer base by 5x. Vera won the 2017 SC Trust Award Winner for Best Cloud Computing Security in February and, in March, the company was named to CRN’s annual Security 100 list.

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$230 Million Raised by 20 Alums in Q1 2017

By David Penn Posted on May 8, 2017
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

Kensho: $50 million
Workfusion: $35 million
Currencycloud: $25 million
Payfone: $23.5 million
VATBox: $20 million
NYMBUS: $16 million
Qapital: $12 million
Algomi: $10 million
Dream Payments: $10 million
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 [email protected]. 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

By David Penn Posted on May 5, 2017
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

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on May 5, 2017
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

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on May 1, 2017
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

By David Penn Posted on April 18, 2017
Categories: Funding, Narrative Science

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

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on April 7, 2017
Categories: Funding, Meniga

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

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on April 6, 2017
Categories: Funding, Swipestox

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

By David Penn Posted on April 5, 2017
Categories: Funding, Fundings, savedroid

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

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on April 5, 2017
Categories: Funding, Moneytree

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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