BlackFin Tech Weekly — July 19th
Dear Fintech folks,
If you thought for a second that fintech funding trends were going to slow down in H2 2021, then you were clearly wrong. This second semester is off to a great start. Last week was one of the biggest week of the year in amount raised (and probably ever) with more than €1.3Bn raised and 5 mega-rounds (>$100m).
Deal count-wise, 18 deals got announced! The top 3 gathered more than $1.2bn. Alright, it’s quite fair to acknowledge these numbers are heavily biased by Revolut’s announcement. The neo-bank crushed the week with its mammoth $800 Series E! The second-largest fundraising is Danish, with Lunar raising a €210m Series D. (Yep, Neo-banks are not dead!) Quantexa takes third place with its $153m Series D. Congrats!
Geography-wise, we spotted 12 deals in the UK alone. Looks like summer hasn’t kicked off just yet on the other side of the Channel. Denmark accounted for 2 deals. We’ve also spotted a deal in Germany, Poland, Belgium, and Sweden.
Subsector-wise, there were 8 deals in Banktech and 4 deals in Regtech. We also reported 2 deals in Payments and Insurtech. Investment Banking and Wealth Management represented 1 deal each.
Let’s dive in:
Revolut raises $800m:
- The Series E was led by two major investors: SoftBank and Tiger Global Management.
- Revolut’s last fundraise was about a year ago when the company closed a Series D round at $580m, but what’s amazing is how much its valuation has changed since then, as it’s increased sixfold (it was $5.5bn last year).
- Revolut now has over 16m customers and performs over 150m transactions per month.
- Revolut’s ambition with these new funds is to become the first financial “super-app” in the world. The funds will also be used to support Revolut’s presence in the US and to finance its entry into the Indian market.
Lunar receives €210m:
- Founded in 2015, the neo-bank has had a banking license since 2019 and operates in both BtoB and BtoC.
- The funding round was led by the family office Heartland. Kinnevik and Tencent also participated.
- The fresh capital will help its expansion in the Nordic countries, which will include acquisitions. In particular, the neo-bank bought Lendify, a loan player in Sweden, in April 2021 and now claims 325,000 customers, almost doubling its customer base in one year (+90%).
Quantexa gathers $153m:
- This Series D, led by Warburg Pincus, included existing investors Dawn Capital, AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners, HSBC, ABN AMRO Ventures, and British Patient Capital.
- The funds raised will be used to accelerate its expansion and develop more solutions for the banking, insurance, public sector, and telecom verticals.
- The financial crime-fighting tools platform last raised $64.7 million in Series C funding in July 2020. The company is said to be valued at between $800 million and $900 million, up from $250 million last summer.
Congrats also to LIQID, Tide, YuLife, Railsbank, Moneyhub, Weavr, Collective Benefits, Nethone, Digiteal, KodyPay, Interlay, Limina, Rvvup, HelloFlow and FNA.
See you next week!
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