Chime at $1.5B annualized revenue with 7M customers (TWIF 5/4)

Hello Fintech Friends,

We were excited for our friends at Ansa* to announce their latest round, a $14 million Series A (in which The Fintech Fund participated, after backing them at the seed).

Notably, Ansa is a woman-founded fintech company and female investors contributed 95.6% to the round. You can read more about their platform, which helps merchants develop and offer branded virtual wallets, below:

To our UK friends, we'll be hosting our next Fintech Canal Cruise for London Fintech Week on June 13th with our partners at Evervault! Come join us:

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

No time to read? Check out our weekly news podcast briefing below!

📊 Stats of the Week

What slowdown? There were 248 fintech financing rounds ($7.8 billion) and 240 fintech M&A transactions ($70 billion) in Q1 of this year, according to investment bank Royal Park Partners.

New stats also emerged on Brazil's PIX this week:

150 million regular users
$400 billion in monthly transactions
3 billion transactions per month
Expected to represent 40% of online payments in Brazil in 2026

And on US neobank Chime:

7 million active customers (most with direct deposit set up)
1.5 million monthly customer inquiries
30% revenue growth to $1.3 billion in 2023 (now $1.5B run-rate), with over $1B in gross profit
$8 billion in monthly transactions
$8 billion valuation (down from $25 billi0n in 2021)

💸 Venture Financing

Altruist, a wealth management-as-a-service platform that helps smaller advisories scale their businesses, raised $169 million and increased revenue by 550% in 2023 with 3x AUM growth.
Blend Labs, a provider of cloud banking software, raised $150 million, structured as Series A convertible preferred stock; $145 million of the proceeds to repay all amounts payable under its existing credit agreement.
Monzo, the profitable UK neobank, expanded its latest fundraise by £100 million (from £400 to £500 million), bringing on two new investors.
Ageras, a Danish cloud-based solution built to help businesses with accounting, payroll, banking, finance, and invoicing, raised €82 million earmarked for new European acquisitions.
Securitize, a tokenization platform that creates blockchain versions of products like money market funds, public stocks, and fiat currencies, raised a $47 million strategic investment from Blackrock, a customer.
Inhabitr, a real estate furnishing platform that offers a financing solution to allow commercial real estate owners to upgrade their properties, raised a $27 million Series B.
Lunar, a Danish neobank planning to scale across Scandinavia, raised €24.1 million.
Backflip, a buy and sell platform for real estate flipping transactions, raised a $15 million Series A.
Ansa*, a startup that helps merchants develop and offer branded virtual wallets, raised a $14 million Series A.
Numeric, an accounting automation startup, raised $10 million in seed funding.
Backed, a Swiss tokenized asset issuer, raised $9.5 million.
X10, a hybrid crypto exchange providing a centralised exchange experience for DeFi, raised $6.5 million.
Baselayer, building a credit score for businesses, raised a $6.2 million seed round.
Agora, a cross-chain crypto governance platform, raised $5 million in seed funding.
BriskPe, an Indian cross-border payments platform, raised $5 million.
Volta, a multi-signature, non-custodial crypto platform, raised $4.1 million.
Moso, a shop-to-earn platform that merges online shopping with cryptocurrency, raised a $2 million round.
Hinkal, a zero-knowledge protocol enabling institutional investors to trade on-chain privately, raised $1.4 million.
Birdwingo, a Czech platform to help young people with investing, raised €1.2 million.
Monese, a UK checking and money transfer app that was previously exploring a potential shutdown, and XYB, a fintech platform-as-a-service, each secured new funding and will separate from their existing group structure to become two independent businesses.
OPay, the Nigerian digital payments provider, had its valuation rise by 30% to almost $3 billion, as it 4x'ed users in 2023.

💰 Venture Funds

Gideon Valkin – who had formerly worked at Monzo, ClearScore and Entree Capital – raised a $12 million European fintech venture fund, Andrena.
Department of XYZ raised a $5.1 million fund to invest in crypto and decentralized finance.