BlackFin Tech Weekly — September 7th
Dear Fintech Friends,
We hope you’re all adjusting to the new normal at work and not finding it too hard to communicate through masks.
Before looking at last week’s fundraising, we’d like to highlight Auxmoney’s $150m round! Auxmoney is a German fintech operating the largest credit marketplace in the eurozone. The round (combination of primary and secondary) was led by Centerbridge Partners, taking a majority stake in the German company. As it implies a change of control, we considered it as a PE deal and did not include the $150m in the fundraising statistics.
Last week European fintechs gathered €35m+ across 10 deals, including one of our own: Hypatos is an AI engine for the processing of semi-structured documents (e.g.: invoices, receipts, orders, payslips…) to automate back and middle-office tasks of finance and purchasing departments. UVC and Grazia Equity also participated in this Seed round! Congratulations to the whole team! Do not hesitate to read this article about the deal!
Geography wise, this week is very international, with deals from 7 countries: Germany, the UK, and France all had two deals. Switzerland, Denmark, Estonia and Spain had one each.
Subsectorwise, Banktechs were the most present with 6 deals out of the 10. There were also two Insurtechs, one from the Payments Industry and Storm2 at the intersection of HRtech and fintech.
Let’s dive in:
This week on show:
Zilch raised $10m
- Based in London, the fintech was founded in 2018.
- It provides customers with a Buy Now Pay Later solution. It allows its customers to shop wherever Mastercard is accepted and spread the payments over 6 weeks with 0 fees.
- To this day, the startup has over 5,000 retail partners, with customers also having the possibility to pay online on Amazon or eBay.
- The company’s targeted market consists of millennials and Gen Z.
- Over 15.000 people sign up for Zilch every month.
- The funds will be used to accelerate the product roll out.
Cachet raised a €1.1m Seed round
- The Insurtech based in Talinn was founded in 2018.
- The start-up provides on-demand motor insurance for gig-economy workers. This service is already used by Uber and Bolt drivers in Estonia and Latvia. 25% of drivers on ride-hailing platforms in these two countries have signed up for insurance through Cachet.
- The round was led by Icebreaker.vc, and included historical investors such as Techstars, Barclays, Lemonade Stand and angel investors.
- The new funding will be used to expand across the Nordics, the UK and Poland.
Neon raised $5.5m
- Neon is a swiss challenger bank, issuing a swiss IBAN. One year after its launch, more than 30,000 customers are using the firm’s banking app.
- Participating in the round were QoQa, TX Group, Backbone Ventures, The Innovation Foundation of the Schwyz Cantonal Bank, Business Angels, and Helvetia Venture Fund, making its first fintech investment.
- Helvetia Venture Fund and Neon had a previous agreement to create a mobile bank-insurance product.
Congratulation also to 2021.Ai, SmartPush, ProntoPiso, Garantme and TraFinScout!
//And what else?
- Have a look on our medium article about our investment in Ravelin!
- Have a look at our Linkedin page to have some insights about our portfolio their recruitment, our events and the activity of the team!
- And if you wish to receive BlackFin Tech posts straight into your inbox and stay updated, click here and if you just want to browse our website to get to know us better, head over to blackfin-tech.com!
- Stay safe, stay masked!
