This Week in Fintech (10/17)

Open roles, financings, exits, and deeper reads

Hello Fintech Friends,

I’m excited to announce some of the speakers we’ll feature at our Fintech Geo Deep-Dives on November 13th: Vaibhav Puranik and Ankit Singh (India), Mike Packer and Mark Heynen (Latin America), Sumi Das and Alex Johnson (US), Simon Taylor (Europe), Danielle Chike-Ogwo and Stone Atwine (Nigeria and East Africa), and Mohamed Okasha (MENA).

Open role spotlight

Nova Credit, building a platform to enable lenders to access cross-border credit data, is hiring a Head of People.

Financings

Canadian roboadvisor Wealthsimple raised C$114 million in new funds at a $1 billion valuation.
Razorpay, an Indian business payment processing startup, raised a $100 million Series D.
NYDIG, an investment management solution for digital assets, raised $50 million in growth equity from backers including Fintech Collective.
M1 Finance, a platform for automated investing, borrowing, and banking products, raised a $45 million Series C.
Extend raised $40 million from investors including PayPal Ventures to bring its extended warranty product to consumer purchases.
Finexio, the ‘accounts payable as a service’ platform, raised $23 million.
Argyle, an API platform that provides visibility into employment status and payroll, as well as direct deposit-switching, raised a $20 million Series A.
Spendesk, a French B2B spend management software, announced it added an $18 million Series B extension.
Commission-free white-label brokerage platform Alpaca raised a $10 million Series A.
Aumni, a provider of automated investment analytics for private capital markets, raised a $10 million Series A.
Tiltify, working with creators to build a crowdfunding platform, raised a $6.5 million Series A.
Tugende, an SMB asset finance company in Uganda and Kenya, raised a $6.3 million Series A.
Clair, which provides free instant payroll to hourly and gig economy workers, raised a $4.5 million seed round.
NowPay, an Egyptian employee financial wellness platform, raised a $2.1 million seed.
Fivestars, a small business payments and point of sale service, raised a combination of equity and debt for its Series D.
Standard Chartered made an undisclosed investment in passwordless authentication platform Secret Double Octopus.
N26 is evaluating funding at a valuation north of $3.5 billion in 2021.

Exits and M&A

Kaspi, a Kazakhstani fintech that operates a payments business, an e-commerce superapp, and the country’s third largest bank, IPO’ed on the London Stock Exchange at a market cap of roughly $6.5 billion.
Stripe announced its acquisition of Nigerian fintech Paystack, which provides payments integration services both online and offline by API to African businesses. This was an exciting deal to wake up to, and hopefully signals the significant potential for expansion of financial services platforms into new markets.
Following its acquisition of E*Trade earlier this year, Morgan Stanley continued to push into wealth management with its $7 billion acquisition of Eaton Vance.
Mode Global Holdings, which makes the UK neobank Mode, plans to list on the London Stock Exchange at a valuation of around £40 million.
Auto lender First Investors Financial Services will merge with private equity investor Gallatin Point.
And it’s off! Yandex failed to reach terms to acquire online bank Tinkoff and ended its $5.48 billion takeover approach.

SPACs

Finance of America, a consumer lender owned by Blackstone, will go public at a $1.9 billion valuation through the SPAC Replay Acquisition.
Kingswood Acquisition, a SPAC targeting a financial services acquisition target, filed to raise up to $150 million.