BlackFin Tech Weekly — October 5th

Hi Fintech friends,

I hope you had a good weekend and that you are ready to begin October. Here in France, everybody is watching Roland Garros these days. Great games happened this weekend and all the French had their eyes on the 20-year old French player Hugo Gaston who pulled Dominic Thiem to a deciding set.

Last week was strong for European Fintechs: €119m were raised across 15 deals! The list is led by Bitpanda, a cryptocurrencies trading platform that raised a $52m Series A. So far, it has been the biggest European Series A funding in 2020, congrats! Second and third are Knoma, a London-based payment solution and marketplace for lifelong learning, and Numbrs, an app where you can log all your bank accounts and crypto wallets.

Geography-wise, 7 countries were represented this week. The UK is still the leader with 4 deals, followed by Italy and France with 3 deals each. There were also 2 deals in Germany, 1 in Switzerland, 1 in Austria and 1 in Ireland.

Sub-category wise, it was a diversified week, dominated by the Wealth Management industry with 4 deals and followed by Banktechs with 3 deals. There were also 2 deals in Payments, 1 in the Investment Banking industry, 3 deals from Insurtechs and 2 from Regtechs.

Let’s dive in:

Made with ❤ by BlackFin Tech

This week on show:

Bitpanda raises a $52m Series A:

• Based in Austria, Bitpanda is a cryptocurrencies and other digital assets trading platform.
• The startup raises a $52m Series A, the biggest European Series A funding in 2020. The round was led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures alongside others investors including Speedinvest.
• It was founded in 2014 and today the platform is already profitable and has more than 1.3m users.
• Bitpanda’s new funding round will be used to recruit 70 new employees, bringing the total number of staff to 300 by the end of 2020. New products will be launched including a completely new and innovative way of stock trading. They also plan to grow more in Europe in 2020 before going on other continents in 2021.

Acin raises a €12m Series A:

• Headquartered in London, Acin provides a system that enables organizations to manage their operational and non-financial risks and controls by using data science.
• The fundraising was led by Notion capital alongside Fitch Ventures. Some business angels also participated, such as Cris Conde, former president & CEO of SunGard, Christopher Carter , Chairman of Artorius Wealth Management and Carlos Gonzales-Cadenas, COO of GoCardless. Other strategic investors are supposed to participate in a second closing.
• The startup was created in 2018 and today it has 14 top tier-1 banks as clients.
• Funds will be used to improve its Cloud terminal by adding features to manage risks and controls, in order to offer a complete front-to-back office solution to evaluate and monitor operational and non-financial risk.

Congratulations also to +Simple, Paraswap, Riskbook, Pynk, Multis, Id-Pal, Quin, Plurima, Criptalia, Growishpay and Finexity.

See you next week!

//And what else?

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