Hello Fintech Friends,

Fintech's comeback era is on display in this week's fundraises: Monzo brought in $400 million at a $5 billion valuation, Indian microfinance lender Svatantra raised $230 million, and Saudi payments firm Salla raised $130 million.

Our portfolio company Argyle,* which offers a unified income and employment verification ecosystem, also announced their $30 million Series C this week.

Elsewhere, Jillian is back with a new monthly interview, this time talking with Karim Atiyeh of Ramp!

🎧Building the Best, with Jillian Williams feat. Karim of Ramp

Hello fintech friends, We’re back with our fourth installment of Building The Best, our podcast hosted by the fantastic Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures. In this podcast, we dive deep into the fundamentals of creating and scaling transformative fintech products by interviewing the founders themselves. In this episode, Jillian is

This Week in FintechNik Milanović

Please find another week of fintech financing events below. (PS: Have feedback for us? 👍👎 Let us know!)

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📊 Stats of the Week

The UK's Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology claims that open finance could boost the country's economy by £30.5 billion.

And we have new 2024 fundraise data from CommerzVentures:

💸 Venture Financing

• Monzo, the British neobank with 9 million customers, raised $400 million at a $5 billion valuation and announced plans to expand back to the US.

What Monzo’s Monster Fundraise Says About Fintech

For much of the past year, most articles about fintech startups have sounded alike: A once high-valued startup struggles to live up to its lofty valuation after interest rates spike, making it difficult to fund expansive growth plans. (I wrote about one, Chipper Cash, earlier this week.) But an…

The InformationAbubakar Idris

• Svatantra Microfin, an Indian non-bank lender, raised $230 million.
• Salla, a Saudi fintech which offers software for e-commerce firms to build websites and handle online payments, raised $130 million.
• Argyle*, builder of a unified income and employment verification ecosystem, announced their $30 million Series C.
• Remofirst, a global payroll and HR platform, raised a $25 million Series A.
• Yuno, a Latin American payments orchestration provider, raised $25 million at a $150 million valuation.
• MoeGo, which provides pet grooming payments and scheduling software, raised a $24 million Series A.
• Baanx, a British-licensed crypto payments provider, raised a $20 million Series A.
• Synctera, a banking-as-a-service provider, raised an $18.6 million Series A extension.
• Harness Wealth, a provider of sophisticated tax tooling for the masses, announced its $17 million Series A extension.
• Utila, the builder of a self-custodial crypto wallet, raised $11.5 million.
• Theia Insights, an AI-enabled retail investing platform, raised $6.5 million.
• Buildnow, a Saudi buy-now-pay-later provider for construction industry materials, raised a $6.5m seed round and $2.9 million of debt.
• Lettuce Financial, a democratized accounting and tax services provider, raised a $6 million seed round.
• Carputty, an auto financing, purchase, and ownership platform, raised $5 million in equity (and $75 million in debt from SVB).
• Agio Ratings, which provides crypto wallet risk analytics, raised $4.6 million across a pre-seed and seed round.
• FinanZero, a Latin American credit provider that processed 8 million loan applications in 2023, secured $4 million in a media-for-equity exchange.
• Stack, a provider of on-chain points infrastructure for blockchain, raised a $3 million seed.
• Ubirider, a Portuguese mobility-as-a-service platform that processes payments, raised a $1.95 million seed round.
• LAVA, a Hong Kong-based decentralized lending market built to optimize liquidity across blockchains, raised $1 million.
• Sibstar, a debit card and app designed for dementia patients and their families, raised £125,000.
• Wagely, an Indonesian fintech that provides earned wage access loans, raised a mixture of equity and debt.
• Capstack, a bank-to-bank loan network, received strategic funding from Citi.
• Knock, which provides revolving lines of credit and bridge loans, is opening $5 million of an anticipated $15 million fundraise to crowdfunding.
  

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