Hello Fintech Friends,

TBC Bank in Uzbekistan secured a $25 million debt facility this week, only a month after raising $38 million in new equity. The bank is led in-part by former Tinkoff CEO Oliver Hughes, who could run the same playbook that scaled Tinkoff to 17 million customers. Given the success of comps like payments and banking platform Kaspi in neighboring Kazakhstan, which currently trades at a $26 billion market cap, this could be the next global neobank to watch.

The Third Age of credit | TechCrunch

Society is beginning to wake up to a tremendous shift in one of the most fundamental underpinnings to how we live our lives: the credit system. Even though it’s not commonly known, credit infrastructure has existed about as long as civilization itself. In one way or another, credit systems have always formalized the one essential basis for relationships between people: trust.

TechCrunchNik Milanovic

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

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📊 Stat of the Week

Over 15 million Colombians have registered their cell phone for digital payments; the Transfiya ACH payments system represents a 44% share of the country's banked population. (Source)

💸 Venture Financing

• The Miami International Securities Exchange, a national stock exchange with its headquarters in Miami, raised $100 million.
• Bridge, which is building a new payments network on stablecoins, raised $58 million.
• nOps, which builds software to optimize the budgets that businesses allocate to cloud products and services, raised a $30 million Series A on the back of 450% growth in the last 18 months.
• Comun, a digital bank focused on serving immigrants in the United States (shown below), raised a $21.5 million Series A.
• Axio, an Indian buy-now-pay-later firm, raised $20 million from strategic investor Amazon.
• SatLayer, a Bitcoin-powered restaking platform, raised an $8 million pre-seed.
• BSX, a DeFi derivatives protocol that plans to launch a Layer 3 network on Base, raised $6.2 million.
• Revenew, a platform to help businesses manage their payments, optimise their margins, streamline business operations, raised $4.55 million.
• Magie, a Brazilian AI-powered financial assistant, raised a $4 million seed round and disclosed $5.1 million in total funding.
• Linker Finance, a platform that allows community banks to launch their own digital banking apps, raised a $3.7 million seed round.
• Peregrine Exploration, developer of a stablecoin protocol called Level, raised $3.6 million.
• Stripe, the online payments platform, is proposing another employee seconary sale, this time in which Stripe would use its own cash for the tender offer.

💵 Debt Financing

• TBC Bank, an Uzbek neobank and digital lender, raised a $25 million debt facility.

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