FinTech Forum | Europe

Here are the early stage financing rounds and new funds to watch this week. Happy holidays and see you after a two week break! Ayan, a London-based Islamic fintech, has secured £2.8 million in equity funding to expand halal car finance and other Islamic finance products in the UK. NAO, which recently won the FinTech Germany Award, is an app-based co-investment platform for alternative investments, opening the door to alternative asset classes such as private equity, infrastructure, or hedge funds, previously reserved for a financially strong elite or institutional investors. Superform Labs, the onchain wealth app to effortlessly grow your crypto portfolio, announced today it has raised $3 million in a strategic round led by VanEck Ventures. Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of over 20k, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar. https://lnkd.in/e6ApxTWR

"Most of the insurance brokers are in their harvesting phase, so they have to reduce their liability risk and work on their portfolios to have a high automation rate in place. Insurers/MGAs have a lack of talent, especially when it comes to sales & underwriting capacities, so it requires an efficient & standardized process to identify profitable insurance portfolios." - Check out our Q&A with Maximilian Würz of PolicenTransfer, a marketplace for insurance broker portfolios. https://lnkd.in/eTeK9KTn Here are the early stage financing rounds and new funds to watch this week: - Margarita Finance, a Solana-based platform for structured investment products, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to bring the $7 trillion structured products market onchain. - Two ex-Revolut employees have raised $2.3 million in pre-Seed funding to build Bleap, a self-custodial stablecoin app with an accompanying debit card. - CAT Labs Raises $5.4M Seed Round to Combat Crypto and AI-Enabled Crime. The funding will support their mission to equip law enforcement, defense, and intelligence agencies with the tools they need to address the growing threats posed by the nefarious use cases of emerging technologies like cryptocurrency, AI, and quantum computing. - GAIB AI Raises $5M Pre-Seed to Build the First Economic Layer for AI Compute. It tokenizes GPUs and their yields, enabling the creation of a new asset class backed by real AI demand. Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of over 20k, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar. https://lnkd.in/e8C-ZzZT

"£197bn of retail sales, or almost half of the UK's annual retail sales in goods and services, are insurable. Amazon alone makes almost £1bn in insurance revenue, and most UK SMEs have never been offered the opportunity to distribute insurance. Bolt Cover exists to help retailer make incremental revenue and customer LTV through embedded insurance, which projects to grow 25% per year through 2028 (Munich Re, 2023), especially in the UK market which is growing 8% per year (Statista, 2023)" This week we feature a Q&A with Jamie Hamer of Bolt Cover: embedded insurance revenue engine for (online) retailers. Deal Highlights Here are the early stage financing rounds and new funds to watch this week: Revenew offers an all-in-one solution for digital platforms and marketplaces (e.g. Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, Fiverr or Deliveroo) to help manage their payments, optimise their margins, streamline business operations, and improve the end-to-end customer experience driving growth and retention. @SatLayer allows users to earn rewards on their BTC by staking and liquid restaking. Similar to actively validated services, dApps and other providers on SatLayer offer users the opportunity to lock their BTC for yield. Swiss early stage VC redalpine has closed its seventh fund of $200m — its largest early stage fund to date — and has opened a new office in London. The VC will write cheques of between €1-6m into 15-20 startups across AI, software, biotech, food, fintech, healthcare and energy. Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week: https://lnkd.in/eF2YRKum. If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of over 20k, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar.

"The need for Fume protocol comes from the direct pain we’ve experienced managing our own investment fund in traditional finance. In a world where blockchain technology exists, we can’t stand trying to manage an investment fund paying enormous fees to fund administrators to perform tasks that could be automated. Nor do we accept the idea of paying 20-80 bps to move capital around. Finally, we were personally heavily impacted by the FTX collapse. We need to build a better alternative, where intermediaries are no longer the point of failure." This week we feature a Q&A with Riccardo Conti of Fume: Compliant, On-Chain Fund Administration Deal Highlights: in the spirit of Deal Highlights at over 20 FinTech Forum events, here are the early stage financing rounds or new funds to watch this week: ETH Zurich spin-off Optiml is a platform for Net Zero real estate investment and renovation planning, providing indicative ESG due diligence, optimal decarbonization & investment strategies, detailed Net Zero renovation action plans, and alignment to company requirements over the entire building lifecycle. Swiipr enables airlines to digitize flight disruption payments to enhance the passenger experience and drive cost efficiency. Used by 26 airlines in 70 countries, it offers virtual and physical pre-paid compensation cards, along with a mobile app, and tools for airlines to ease pain points for airlines themselves and for passengers. Skyfire has created a payment network specifically for AI agents to make autonomous payment transactions on behalf of businesses. One of their first customers, Denso, a global auto parts manufacturer, created AI agents to source materials without the help of humans. TON Ventures (TON Foundation) raised $40M fund to support early-stage crypto projects- it will link investors and builders to the opportunities available in the TON blockchain ecosystem, which supports blockchain apps on Telegram. @The Open Network says it is crucial for gaming because it offers a highly scalable and efficient infrastructure capable of handling millions of transactions per second, essential for real-time multiplayer experiences. Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week: https://lnkd.in/eXpAuuBd  If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of over 20k, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar.

"The largest banks globally need to monitor their liquidity in real-time. This means they must ensure adequate intraday liquidity balances, not just at the end of each day. Banks have two choices to meet this requirement: hold an excessive liquidity buffer, or improve their cash balances during the hours of large net outgoing payments, to mitigate the impact of these payments on their liquidity. The former choice creates a significant opportunity cost, tens of millions pounds per large bank. The latter choice is preferable, but banks do not have the right tools available to them. Finteum is making it possible for bank teams to borrow and lend to each other for hours at a time, instead of overnight and longer (htttps://finteum.com)." This week we feature a Q&A with Brian Nolan & Zbigniew Czapran of Finteum: enabling interbank lending for hours at a time: https://lnkd.in/epwhD3Th Last week's deal highlights: payments and remittance startups dominated the headlines: - Skydo’s platform offers a comprehensive suite of cross-border payment solutions tailored for businesses operating across multiple countries - Sling Money combines stablecoin technology with a user-friendly interface and seamless integration with fiat payment systems to enable a better, faster, and cheaper way of moving money globally. - Conduit's B2B cross-border payments platform pivoted from crypto to traditional banking, finding success in Latin America, and now making inroads in Africa - Mesh enables users to seamlessly connect, deposit, and pay with their crypto accounts across hundreds of other platforms, all embedded within their existing experience. Click here to read more on the founders and investors in the news last week, or to sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/et6qrzVH If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of over 20k, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar.

"Every financial service company that works with or invests in companies needs to track their portfolio. There are many great legacy tools like iLevel/eFront, but portfolio management requirements have significantly changed over the past few years because of the rise of sustainability regulations, which require seamless integration of sustainability data into financial decisions, risk management and reporting, and existing solutions fall short of." This week we feature a Q&A with Alex Lu, building PortF - a holistic Portfolio Management Platform with Sustainability at its core. Last week's deal highlights: - investors continued to bet on startups in the CFO Stack, with HubiFi, a provider of financial intelligence and revenue recognition solution, raising $2.5M in Seed funding and Hyperbots Inc., "the cutting-edge AI company specializing in finance and accounting solutions" announcing the successful closure of a $2 million seed funding round. - Real-world asset startup ZOTH raised $4 million in a strategic round to launch its Tokenized Liquid Note, featuring assets like U.S. Treasury Bills and corporate bonds. - Rich Data Co secured an additional AU$9 million to accelerate the expansion of its AI decisioning platform for business and commercial lenders in North America. Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of over 20k, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar.

"Nobody denies the opportunity that digital assets represent. What is a massive problem is risk management: asset managers are helpless when it comes to hedging their portfolios, because adapted instruments do not exist or are too expensive. Most asset managers decide then to leave their portfolios un-protected to downside risk and suffer massive losses in adverse market conditions." This week we feature a Q&A with Romain Dutrenois, a derivatives and structured products expert and founder of Phalanx Capital, helping institutional investors manage the downside risk of Digital Assets. Last week's FinTech deal highlights, in quotes: FreeBnk "Despite the crypto market rebounding to a $2 trillion valuation, it still poses significant challenges for investors....Moreover, the market continues facing security vulnerabilities, exemplified by the staggering $5.5 billion lost to theft between 2022 and 2023..." Niva "The rapid growth and digitization of cross-border transactions, estimated at over $150 trillion in annualized payments in 2022, has created growing complexities & risks, especially for companies operating in multiple countries. Over 97% of cross-border transactions are between businesses, and verifying business identity—by screening for fraud and meeting local and international KYB requirements—is a major point of friction." Scaler "Real estate is the world’s largest polluting industry, contributing nearly 40 per cent of global emissions, of which 70 per cent comes from building operations and 30 per cent comes from construction." lemon.markets "In Germany alone, a significant portion of financial assets – 41.7 per cent, according to the Bundesbank — are held in cash and bank deposits, including overnight and fixed-term deposits." Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week: https://lnkd.in/egvD9pRf If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of over 20k, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar.

There are over 500k financial advisors and intermediaries in Europe, as per industry organisation FECIF - The European Federation of Financial Advisers and Financial Intermediaries. However, advisors are struggling to cope with rising demand- e.g. as per the IFA Magazine, in the UK, between 2017 to 2022, there have been only 3000 new advisers in the same time that firms have added 1.1mn new ongoing clients. This week we feature a Q&A with Mark Whitcroft, a venture capital industry veteran, and co-founder of PlannerPal, an AI assistant transforming financial advisor productivity. Early stage FinTech deal highlights include Trever, enabling financial institutions (banks, brokers, and funds) to offer and manage digital assets (round co-led by TX Ventures and Market One Capital); TRIVER, providing working capital to UK SMEs in just 20 minutes using Open Banking data and sophisticated AI (a debt round with Avellinia Capital – AvCap); and Bling, a pocket money card and associated app that has grown into a holistic platform for families (round led by Owl Ventures). Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. https://lnkd.in/efvZKNU3 If you are a startup, investor or corporate building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with the FinTech Forum network of 20k+, reach out to Frank Schwab and Samarth Shekhar.

We are back after an intense month of travel, events and deals. In this week's newsletter, we feature a Q&A with the co-founders of Swiss InsurTech Bind, enabling AI-powered insurance targeting for ecosystem players, banks, telcos etc. "Advice is scarce, as brokers are actually good at understanding customer needs, but isn’t scalable nor catering to a digital self-serving solution." FinTech-focused investors that have raised new funds: Elevator Ventures, MiddleGame Ventures. Early stage FinTech deal highlights this week include Viio.io (reducing SaaS and cloud spend), BlueFlame AI (generative AI platform for alternative investment managers), and Bling (family finances and investing). Read on for more on the founders and investors: Following hops in Amsterdam for Money20/20 and Madrid for South Summit, we were in Frankfurt to attend the inaugural TOKENFUTURE 2024 organised by Blockstories and Particula- check out our crisp 65 second key takeaways from the event. If you are building “what’s next in finance” (or know somebody who is), do connect to Frank Schwab & Samarth Shekhar, and subscribe to our weekly Venture Insights: https://lnkd.in/ecrnaT4x