Upvest is one of few financial institutions in Europe owning a regulatory license for securities and crypto brokerage. The Berlin-based startup successfully closed a $42 million Series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with Earlybird, ABN AMRO Ventures, Notion Capital, Partech, 10x Group, Speedinvest, and Maximilian Tayenthal (N26) all participating.
Berlin-based fintech Airbank, co-founded by an Austrian, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round. According to the company announcement, venture capitalist Molten Ventures led the funding round; the Austrian early-stage investor Speedinvest also participated. The startup plans to use the new money to finance its future growth.
The former Wirecard managers and partners Ruediger Trautmann, Ayelet (Fruchtlander) Knoechelmann, Frank Schoonbaert, and the Israeli Nissim Zarfati founded the PowerCash21 Group around 2010 with several legal entities in different jurisdictions. Sometime over the last couple of months, the PowerCash21 Group reincarnated into Payabl and recently led a CHF3 million seed finance round for Swiss FinTech Klarpay.
HostBooks (www.hostbooks.com), an Indian FinTech startup focused on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), has raised $3 million in a Series A round led by payments platform Razorpay (PC42 profile). The funding comes when many MSMEs in India are looking for new technology to help them cut costs, reach more customers and improve productivity.
Just over a year since raising $900 million in a Sequoia-led round, Berlin's Trade Republic secured another €250 million in a Series C extension at a valuation of €5 billion. The round was led by Ontario Teachers', one of the world's largest pension funds and institutional investors, along with the participation of existing investors. The German FinTech was founded in 2015 by Christian Hecker, Thomas Pischke and Marco Cancellieri.
According to the #DealMonitor of Deutsche Startups, the German-British FinTech SumUp is about to close a finance round for $400 million at a value of $6.5 billion. The Fintech was founded in 2011 by Daniel Klein, Marc-Alexander Christ, Stefan Jeschonnek, and Jan Deepen. It positions itself as a mobile point-of-sale payment service provider and was most recently valued at between €4 billion and €4.5 billion. However, SumUp is also cutting jobs. Around 100 employees in Brazil have to leave.
Competition in the "buy-now-pay-later" segment is fierce. While Swedish pioneer Klarna has just laid off hundreds of employees, Berlin-based Mondu secured another investment. Malte Huffmann, Philipp Povel, and Gil Danziger founded the fintech in Aug 2021 and secured €13 Mio in a seed financing round. Now they successfully raised around €40 million in a funding round A led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures.
Brazilian fintech firm Marvin has secured $15 million in Series A financing, led by U.S. venture capital firm Canaan. Founded in 2020, Marvin is a B2B payment platform that allows merchants to use credit card receivables as collateral for working capital or short-term loans. The merchant thus can bypass the anticipation fees charged by point-of-sale operators, which can be as high as 4%.
Merge (www.mergedup.com)wants to bring the banking and payment infrastructure into the Web3 economy. After the great excitement about web3 in 2021, more and more new start-ups are emerging to provide financial infrastructure. Merge is one of them. The FinTech was founded by Kebbie Sebastian, a former executive at PayPal and Barclays, and other former executives from Coinbase, and Luno. Merge secured $9.5 million in seed capital financing.
