BlackFin Tech Weekly — March 27th
Dear Fintech folks, we hope you all had a great week. Despite the turbulence of the last week with rising rates, layoff plans, and a plummeting Deutsche Bank stock, let’s keep smiling and approach this new week with optimism! Let’s start right now by taking a closer look at last week’s fundraisings.
Congrats to Germany for closing the most deals and raising the largest amounts.
Last week, we saw 18 deals in Europe for a total of €269.4m with three deals in Germany, two in Spain and in the UK, and one deal each in Norway, France and Lithuania.
Congratulations to the German ESG platform Integrity Next for its €100m Venture round, followed by online marketplace Raisin in a €60m Series E. Finally, the Spanish banktech platform ID Finance raised €30m structured in a convertible loan.
Let’s dive in :
- Integrity Next raised €100m in a Venture round with EQT Growth. The company has been bootstrapped since it launched in 2016.
- The company has created a cloud-based software platform focused on ESG risks, which aggregates data from thousands of suppliers and helps its customers monitor their own ESG metrics. It also does that while ensuring they comply with international standards and regulations, from carbon footprint and hazardous substances to social aspects like child labour, modern slavery and health and safety laws.
- Raisin has raised a €60m Series E round with Golman Sachs and M&G’s Catalyst and other existing investors.
- The Raisin marketplace lets you shop around and compare different rates European-wide. However, the key difference to a comparison site is that, via its own banking partner, the company offers consumers a single interface that includes account opening and anti-money laundering checks, making it easy to switch and continually ensure you get a competitive interest rate.
- They recently exceeded 1m customers, for which a total of €850m in interest has been generated since founding the company in 2012.
- ID Finance has secured €30m in a convertible with Kingsway Capital.
- The deal includes both a primary capital infusion and a buyout of shares from the company’s early investors. The capital injection is structured as a convertible loan with a maximum valuation of €235m.
- ID Finance uses advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms to provide access to competitive financial services via its financial wellness app Plazo.
Congrats also Ejara, ClearToken, Payflow, Recognise Bank, Two, Radix, TaxDown, Monite, Roundtable, HeavyFinance, NPEX, Coolset, Focalpay, Zipzero, Carbonable, on their respective rounds.
In addition to the fundraising activity, we also observed some interesting M&A deals this week across the banktech and paytech sectors:
- Mangopay, the payment provider, has acquired WhenThen, the payments orchestration specialist. The deal follows its acquisition in 2022 of Nethone, the fraud prevention company, and is part of its plan to accelerate its payment capabilities.
- Topicus, the specialist software provider, has acquired Five Degrees, the cloud native core banking platform. Topicus has over 100,000 customers in 14 European countries, while Five Degrees is used by over 40 banks in Europe and North America.
- Silvr, the revenue-based finance startup, has acquired Uplift1, a German competitor. The deal will help Silvr to launch operations in the country.
- PSG Equity, the growth equity firm, has acquired Unnax, the Open Banking embedded finance provider. Unnax offers its customers Banking-as-a-Service solutions including bank aggregation, payments, onboarding, and e-money services through a single API.
And here are the news that caught our eye last week, enjoy:
- Europe’s central banks mirror Fed in hiking rates despite turmoil. On Wednesday, the Fed decided to push interest rates by 25 basis points, taking it to 5%. The next day, The Swiss National Bank increased its policy rate by 50 basis points, taking the rate to 1.5%. The rate is the fourth consecutive hike and was in line with economist expectations, despite recent turmoil in Switzerland’s banking sector. Norway’s central bank hiked by 25 basis points, in line with market expectations.Finally the bank of England lift rates from 4% to 4.25% after the inflation rate rose unexpectedly last month.
- Deutsche Bank shares slide 11% after sudden spike in the cost of insuring against its default. Deutsche Bank shares have lost more than a fifth of their value so far this month. Swiss and global regulators and central banks had hoped that the brokering of Credit Suisse’s sale to UBS would help calm the markets, but investors clearly remain unconvinced that the deal will be enough to contain the stress in the banking sector. Olaf Scholz told on Friday that Deutsche Bank had “thoroughly reorganized and modernized its business model and is a very profitable bank,” adding that there is no basis to speculate about its future.
- These tech giants are still making money, but layoffs are coming hard and fast. About 166 tech companies laid off 55,863 employees thus far in 2023, according to layoffs.fyi, a company tracking job cuts in the sector. With interest rates rising, capital has become more expensive, and companies started reining in their headcount costs. Here are some of the most prominent global tech firms that have announced big layoffs plans:
- Coinbase warned by SEC of potential securities charges. The SEC issued Coinbase a Wells notice, warning the company that it identified potential violations of U.S. securities law. A Wells notice is one of the final steps before the SEC formally issues charges. Coinbase described the investigation as “cursory,” and said the Wells notice provided relatively little information about potential violations.
Have a great week & see you next Monday!
