This Week in Fintech (2/27)

Hello Fintech Friends,

Last chance to request a date for the next round of deep-dives!

Please find another week of financings and transactions below.

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💸 Venture Financing

Tymebank, a South African neobank, secured a $109 million (R1.6 billion) round from investors.
Anchorage, which notably received a federal banking charter and backing from Visa, raised an $80 million Series C.
Indian digital lending startup KreditBee secured a $75 million Series C.
Earnix, a banking analytics software for financial services providers, raised $75 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Ageras, a Danish accounting and bookkeeping tech stack, closed a $73 million round at a $244 million valuation.
RecargaPay, a Brazilian fintech that allows users to recharge mobile payment accounts, raised a $70 million Series C.
Mexican credit card startup Stori raised a $32.5 million Series B to develop a mass-market consumer credit card.
Penta, a German business banking and accounting platform, raised a €30 million Series B+.
Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange and prediction market, raised a $30 Million Series A.
Episode Six, a digital API platform for payments, raised $30 million.
Orka, a UK earned wage access payroll provider, raised £29 million.
Monument, a UK neobank for high net worth individuals, raised £28 million.
EarnUp raised $25 million for its financing platform for struggling homeowners.
Borrowell, a Canadian credit education startup, raised C$25 million and acquired credit provider Refresh Financial.
Parkside, a stock trading and clearing platform for brokerages and banks, raised a $24 million Series A.
EquityBee, which provides financing options for employees to buy their own stock options, raised a $20 million Series A.
Wisetack, a buy-now-pay-later service for in-person transactions, raised a $4 million seed and a $15 million Series A.
Purestream, a trading protocol, raised a $14 million Series A with backers including financial services providers Nasdaq Ventures, Goldman Sachs, BMO Financial Group, and Bank of America.
Tarabut Gateway, an open banking platform for the MENA, raised a $13 million seed round.
FundGuard, which uses machine learning to power investment management and asset servicing tools, raised a $12 million Series A.
Bottlepay, a UK micropayments network, raised £11 million in seed funding.
Goodbox raised £9 million to build a digital giving platform with contactless donation capabilities.
FUNDtastic, an Indonesian retail investing platform, raised a $7.7 million Series A.
TreeCard, a UK fintech building a wooden credit card to support reforestation from interchange, raised a $5.1 million seed round.
First Boulevard raised $5 million for a neobank aimed at black Americans.
ErudiFi raised a $5 million Series A to build a financing platform for Southeast Asian students.
Danish subscription management startup Subaio raised €4 million from former Mastercard Europe president Javier Perez.
Stitch, a South African financial data API, raised a $4 million seed round and came out of stealth.
Cameroon’s Diool, which enables small merchants to accept digital payments, raised $3.5 million.
Finix raised $3 million from a black and Latinx investor SPV.
Messenger-based neobank Zelf raised $2 million in a pre-seed funding.
Jay Z invested in Perch Credit, the credit-building app for minority communities.
Currency account startup Sokin received an investment from Manchester United’s Rio Ferdinand.
Stripe is raising at a valuation over $100 billion.
Klarna is in the process of raising around $1 billion at a $31 billion valuation. (And may opt for a direct listing.)
The UK’s Atom Bank plans to raise £40 million ahead of a potential IPO next year.

💵 Debt Financing

Petal raised a $127 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank and Trinity Capital to expand more credit to underserved consumers.
TerraPay entered a strategic partnership with Lendable and raised $20 million in debt for its payment network.

💰 Venture Funds

Oak HC / FT, a fintech specialist investor, announced its $1.4 billion Fund IV.
Avid Ventures raised $68 million for a female-run fintech fund.

☯️ Exits and M&A

💻 Fintech

Toast, the point of sale system for restaurants, is planning an IPO that could value it at up to $20 billion.
Digital banking technology supplier Alkami is preparing an IPO that would value the company at $3 billion.
Tom Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, is merging his bond brokerage, Incapital LLC, with fintech startup 280 CapMarkets to create InspereX, a fixed income trading platform.
Payments enablement software NMI acquired payment solutions provider USAePay.
SIX, a Swiss provider of financial data and software, acquired a majority stake in Orenda Software Solutions, a Canadian AI platform focused on ESG data.
Finablr, a payments and foreign exchange firm that collapsed last year due to obscured debts, is in talks to merge with Bahraini payments firm BFC Group Holdings.
Private equity firm TA Associates bought a part of UK financial services provider Fairstone Group.
Small business lender Fundation and ODX (formerly OnDeck) merged to form Linear Financial Technologies.
RevenueWell bought dental payroll and accounting platform PBHS.

🏦 Bank

M&T Bank, a New York bank, will buy Connecticut’s People’s United for $7.6 billion. The combined banks will have over $200 billion in assets and 1,135 branches.
The British government completed the £5 billion sale of nationalized mortgage lenders Bradford & Bingley and NRAM Limited to a consortium that included Citibank.
Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC will buy a 9% stake in Indonesian lender Bank Jago for S$294 million.
Australia’s Bank of Queensland will buy rival lender ME Bank for A$1.33 billion.
Private equity investor Ares Management is nearing a deal to acquire a controlling stake in Australia’s AMP bank.

💲 Investment Management

In its continued divestiture to meet its asset cap, US bank Wells Fargo will sell its asset management arm to private equity firms GTCR and Reverence Capital for $2.1 billion.
Investment managers IK Investment Partners and Intermediate Capital Group agreed to invest in Norway’s wealth manager Formuesforvaltning.

📈 SPACs

Apex Clearing, the clearinghouse and brokerage services provider that provides clearing services to fintechs like M1 Finance and Betterment, will merge with New York Islanders owner Jon Ledecky’s SPAC Northern Star Investment Corp II, at an enterprise value of $4.7 billion.
Guggenheim Special Purpose Acquisition I raised $500 million for a financial services sector target.
Fusion Acquisition II, focused on financial services, raised $435 million in its IPO.
Freedom Acquisition I, led by Credit Suisse’s former CEO Tidjane Thiam, raised $300 million in its IPO.
Velocity Merger, a Tarsadia fintech SPAC, filed for a $250 million IPO.
EJF Acquisition, a financial services SPAC, raised $250 million in its IPO.
FTAC Athena Acquisition, a fintech SPAC from Bancorp exec Betsy Cohen, filed for a $220 million IPO.
Fintech Acquisition Corp VI filed for a $220 million IPO.
Yieldstreet is reportedly weighing options including selling itself in its own SPAC.

(Source)

🌎 International

Get your weekly fix of fintech in India and Asia with Osborne Saldanha's Fintech Inside. This week's edition includes:

One Big Thought: Deep dive into CRED's business model, products, challenges and future.
Top 3 News Items: 2 Indian fintechs are prepping for IPO in 2021 and 2022. Stock broking fintechs are chipping market share away from incumbents.
Featured Fintechs: Featuring Indian fintechs in Blue collar banking, neobanking and insurtech.
India and Asia Update.

🔎 Weekly Deep-Dive

Need a deeper dive? Check out Simon Taylor’s Fintech Brain Food for more insight into the stories driving this week’s news: That Citi $500m error, how did it happen and what's really going on?

A dive into core banking UX
Welcome to payment ops
And why bank procurement is a big part of the issue
Also: 4 Fintech companies you should see, a breakdown of the Marqeta IPO and the Brex Charter application 📯