BlackFin Tech Weekly — October 7th, 2019
It seems that rain & cold are now back in our offices in Paris, and that’s winter is sadly coming. It didn’t freeze at all the ecosystem though, as some interesting deals showed up and here are the fintech deals we picked for you.
We can see that UK is definitely back, led by the huge round of a new-born unicorn Rapyd! Danemark, Spain, Germany, Malta & Gibraltar were also represented in this week’s fundings. Overall, Fintech & InsurTech raised €175m+ in 10 rounds. Payment deals are leading the game with 4 announcements, whereas BankTech scores 2, ex aequo with Wealth Management, and Investment Banking + Insurtech score 1 each.
A first highlight to the biggest deal of the week, as a unicorn is born: Congrats to Rapyd’s CEO Arik Shtilman and team for this milestone! Focused on digital payments markets, Rapyd has a unique value proposition: combining all payments services into one single API (not only payments but also checkout, funds collections, compliance-as-a-service, etc.). Rapyd is tackling growing complexities in the payments market, driven by increasing regulatory requirements in each region of the world. It enables for example businesses to accept several means of payments in more than 100 countries. The company previously raised $40m in February and is experimenting a tremendous growth: the total payments volume on the platform has been multiplied by 5 this year (yes, x5! it’s very “rapide”, isn’t it?), with a run rate forecasted to triple. Last but on least regarding this, spotlights on its investors: some of the biggest names in the US like General Catalyst or Target Global but also the Fintech Giant Stripe, which announced a $250m round in September, as a strategic investor. Decacorns ahead!
Apart from Rapyd’s one, we thought the following deals were particularly relevant to be described:
- Grover, the German electronics subscription service, raised a pre-Series B of €41m, in a round led by Augmentum. With more than 300k users registered on the platform, and an innovative monthly rentals business model, Grover is quickly expanding, congrats!
- Another 300k ish users fintech is BNext, the Spanish B2C neobank, which just announced its €22m Series A, gathering DN Capital, Redalpine & Speedinvest, Mexican investors, Founders Future, few Seed funds, and Business Angels. It’s an E-NOR-MOUS Series A, especially for the Spanish landscape. The team is very strong and totally obsessed with customer acquisition. With its marketplace business model enabling the integration of local financial products offers, the Spanish Neobank plans to spread its pink card to Latam, beginning with Mexico. Processing now more than €100m monthly, BNext has big ambitions. Let’s see what will happen regarding this market segment as monthly cash-burn is very high and the next fundraising steps may remain challenging for all the players such as Revolut, etc.
- Last but not least, the ‘freaky marketing’ award of the week goes to DeadHappy, a UK insurtech talking about what’s next after Death…
Congrats also Upodi, Rosecut, Bricklane, VEGA, FoundersBank Project, and Cledara!
Life at BlackFin Tech this week has been… :
- // our beloved Descartes Underwriting won the award of the Best insurtech of the year in Paris //& our precious London-based Ravelin’s CTO shared insights about data science team growth //
- //we traveled to Cologne for EXEC Insurtech and won the award of the Insurance Shaper of the year (yeah!!) //& to Madrid for the South Summit (for 1:1 meetings, a fintech panel and a fintech jury, … hum… as well as for tapas, por supuesto!)//
Wish you all a good week!
