BlackFin Tech Weekly — July 26th
Dear fintech folks,
This week is a great reminder that the United Kingdom is still the main European Fintech hub, being home to half of the companies this week!
Even though it was a slower week in terms of deal announcement, we still got some large rounds on the list pushing the total amount raised to €441m.
These €441m were raised across 11 deals. The top two are active on the same vertical: corporate expense Management! This is definitely a trend to watch, with several actors reaching substantial traction already and attracting decent amounts of capital. Congratulations to Soldo and Spendesk for their impressive Series C of respectively $180m and €100m. The third place on the podium is held by payment startup Zilch with its $110m Series B extension!
Geography-wise, we’ve identified 5 deals from the UK, 2 from France, and 1 from Ireland, Romania, Spain, and Switzerland respectively.
Subsector-wise, there were 4 deals in Banktech and Payments. In the meantime, they were 2 Insurtech, while Wealth Management represented 1 deal.
Let’s dive in:
Soldo raised €153m:
· This Series C was led by Temasek, which includes also the participation of Sunley House Capital, Advent International, Citi Ventures, and historical investors like Accel or Dawn. Silicon Valley Bank also provided debt financing of an undisclosed amount.
· Soldo provides a platform to issue employees with prepaid company cards that are linked through to an automated expense management system. The company currently has 26,000 customers, ranging from SMEs, to midmarket enterprises and up to large multinationals across 30 countries, with Mercedes Benz, GetYourGuide, Gymshark among some of the more popular of them.
· Soldo said the round was oversubscribed on the back of strong growth for the company which saw the spend volume on its platform grow fourfold since its series B in 2019.
Spendesk raised €100m:
· Spendesk, the leading all-in-one spend management platform for finance teams, has raised €100M in Series C funding led by global growth equity firm General Atlantic. All previous investors, including Index Ventures and Eight Roads Ventures, also participated in this round, bringing the firm total funding to €160M.
· Spendesk offers an intuitive SaaS spend management solution that provides full visibility and control on all company spending — with every purchase trackable to a person, a project, and a budget. The Company now serves 3,000 businesses such as Algolia, Curve, Doctolib, Wefox.
· With the additional investment, Spendesk will focus on hiring top talent and accelerating product innovation to bring more automation and insights to every aspect of business spending.
Zilch raised €93m:
· The round is an extension of its Serie B round in debt and equity, with backing from Goldman Sachs and the venture capital arm of UK newspaper Daily Mail.
· Zilch opened in beta in 2019, looking to distinguish itself in the crowded BNPL arena by connecting directly with customers and using soft background credit checks to determine affordability. Zilch has since grown to record 150,000 new sign-ups a month.
· Zilch has set its sights on international expansion to US markets and pledged to hire a further 100 staff this year to meet growth goals.
Congrats also to Yapily, Price Hubble, Asistensi, WhenThen, Percent, Islamic Finance Guru, Metabeta, and Lovys.
The whole BlackFin team is joining me to wish you all a great summer. We’ll be taking a break in August and are looking forward to seeing you in September!
