BlackFin Tech Weekly — February 1st

Hello everyone,

Taking over Romain, I hope you are all doing fine and handling the situation as good as possible. Remember, the vaccine has never been so close so let’s stay hopeful!

European Fintech deals reached €180m across 12 deals last week. Huge congrats to Alma, a French BNPL solution, leading the podium with a €49m Series B! Second place goes to another BNPL solution called Scalapay, an Italian company that raised a Seed funding of €40m. Third on the podium is Numbrs, the Zurich-based bank accounts management app, raising €25m.

Geography-wise, last week was quite diversified. France leads the week with 4 deals, followed by Germany with 3 deals. There were also 2 deals in the UK, 1 deal in Italy, 1 deal in Switzerland and 1 deal in Lithuania.

Subsector-wise, there were 4 deals in Banktech, 4 deals in Payments, 3 in Insurtech and 1 in Investment Banking.

Let’s have a closer look:

Made with ❤ by BlackFin Tech

Alma raises a €49m Series B:

• Founded in 2017 and launched in 2018, Alma is a buy now pay later solution, allowing e-merchants to propose to their customers to pay in 3 or 4 instalments, while Alma covers 100% of the risk involved.
• Alma’s utilization rates reach 30 to 40% among some of its e-merchant customers and its CEO mentions an increase in the average basket which can reach up to 60% (depending on the verticals) and a 20% increase in the conversion rate.
• Cathay Innovation, Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance Large Venture, Seaya Ventures and Picus Capital are participating in this round. Alma is also raising a credit line of €21m.
• Overall, the company raised €61.5m in equity funding since its creation.
• With the new funds, the startup plans to triple the size of its team and reach €1bn in annual payment volume within two years.

SESAMm raises a €7.5m Series B:

• Created in 2014, SESAMm is a data visualization platform for financial institutions to anticipate financial markets movements.
• The round was led by NewAlpha Asset Management and The Carlyle Group. Its existing investors Havenrock, Angelsquare, La Caisse d’Epargne, BPI and Banque Populaire also took part in the round table.
• With this fundraising, the company wants to accelerate its global growth by acquiring new people and expand operations in Europe, Asia and North America. SESAMm also wants to develop AI-enabled research tools and dashboards for corporate customers as well as investing in R&D in its machine learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) tools.
• This round comes after a €4.4m Series A in April 2019. Overall, the company has raised €15.5m.

Congrats also to Token, Compeon, INZMO, Datafolio, Kevin, Insly and Soan!

Have a great week everyone, stay safe & keep powering on!

• If you’re a fan of crystal balls, feel free to head over to Michele’s predictions to find out the trends that we expect will shape the new year!
• Have a look at our Linkedin page to have some insights about our portfolio their recruitment, our events and the activity of the team!
• And if you wish to receive BlackFin Tech posts straight into your inbox and stay updated, click here