YC’s Winter 2019 Demo Day 1: What is happening in FinTech Space?
4 min readMar 19, 2019
Of the 85 startups that demo on day 1 at Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch, only 9 (11%) were related to FinTech. This season, the selected FinTech related startups solved for the following:
- International payments in developing nations: Schoolable for tution payments in Africa and Cuanto for facilitating loans for Latin America businesses selling through Whatsapp and Instagram
- B2B payment related services to contractors (50M domestic and 20M international contractors): Keeper for finding tax write-offs for domestic contractors and Deel for handling contracts, taxes and payments for international contractors on one platform
- Due-diligence for B2B deals: Middesk for ensuring business’ partners have paid their taxes, filed for bankruptcy, or are involved in lawsuits
- AI and Automation platforms for financial services: Rebank for automating business banking (seem stretched!) and Docucharm for extracting information from paystubs to be used be tax prep and lending businesses (though the last one is not limited to financial services; it is interesting that their customer base is currently focused on financial services)
- Credit card fraud mitigation: Dyneti for scanning all type of cards for fraud mitigation and higher conversion and Encarte…