BlackFin Tech Weekly — September 21st
Hi Fintech folks!
Are there some TikTok users here? It’s been quite a week for the Chinese social media company: in the beginning of the week, Donald Trump announced that the app would be totally banned in the US before agreeing on a solution in the end of week. Ultimately, two American companies, Oracle and Walmart, will together have a 20% share in TikTok.
Before looking deeper into last week’s fundraising, let’s speak about Klarna’s mega-round. The “buy-now-pay-later” fintech closed a $650m round this week! This Series E deal was led by Silver Lake alongside Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Blackrock. It follows the $460m funding of August 2019. Klarna’s valuation has doubled since then, going from $5.5bn to $10.6bn. The Swedish decacorn benefited from the increasing online shopping trend during the pandemic.
Lets’ go back to European Fintech deals: €600m were raised last week across 11 deals. This week was very international, with deals from 6 different countries: the UK led the ranking with 3 deals. Germany, France and Spain all had two deals. The Netherlands and Sweden had one each.
Subsectorwise, Banktech was the most represented with 5 deals out of 11. There were also two Wealth Management companies, two in Payments, one Regtech and one in Investment Banking.
Let’s dive in:
This week on show:
Chip raises £10.7m:
- The UK-based fintech offers an automatic saving app with “market-leading” returns. Prior to this investment round, Chip had 280 000 registered users and processed over £165m in savings.
- Chip managed to raise a total amount of £10.7m from private investors with a £-to-£ match from the government-backed Future Fund. The company managed to raise the largest convertible round in UK crowdfunding history.
- The funding will be used to improve its product to give access to more deposits, launch their premium account and include investment funds in their offer.
Swan raises €5m:
- The French fintech was founded in 2019 within the startup studio eFounders. The banking-as-a-service platform allows other companies to offer financial services such as branded accounts, cards and IBANs.
- Customers can customize the branding of the financial services they propose and have the possibility to issue virtual and physical credit cards. They have to pay $900 per month and a flat monthly fee for each account and card issued.
- This Seed round was led by Creandum with Bpifrance’s Digital Venture also participating.
- The funds will be used for European expansion.
Fintel closes a €1.2m Seed fundraising:
- The French fintech, founded in 2019 and based in Marseille, provides online lending solutions for online merchants and financial institutions.
- It offers 2 main products: a “Credit-as-a-payment” module that can be integrated in any e-commerce checkout page and a “Credit Scoring” solution for banks and brokers.
- The round was led by OneRagtime, alongside Business Angels.
Congratulations also to Optiopay, Factris, Nemuru, Kodypay, Inbestme, Konsentus and Betterfront!
See you next week!
//And what else?
- Have a look on our medium article about our investment in Descartes!
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- Stay safe, stay masked!
