Vesey Ventures’ Investment in Grain

We’re excited to announce our follow-on investment in Grain’s Series A, building on our early support in their Seed round. With this latest funding, Grain has now raised over $50M in total. Founded in 2022 in Israel, Grain is an embedded AI-driven foreign exchange optimization and hedging platform. Grain enables hedging at a single micro-transaction level in real-time, helping platforms boost sales conversions, while protecting their customers from FX volatility. Their founding team is made up of brilliant entrepreneurs from Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Blue Orca Capital, Melio, and other top fintech startups. Their wealth of talent and extensive expertise in hedge funds, trading, FX, and financial services operations makes them the dream team to build such a complex product, and we’re thrilled to continue our partnership with them.

Why We Believe in Grain’s Mission

In the mid-1800s in Chicago, the world saw its first hedge — with farmers leading the charge. These farmers committed a locked-in price point for dealers to buy their grains at to ensure price stability.

As the world has become more globalized, certainty in currency exchange rates has only become more complex to navigate and essential to get right. On the enterprise level, currency hedging is a valuable tool employed by just about every treasury team. Yet, SMEs, which make up 99.9% of businesses in the U.S., are left behind as they generally don’t have the expertise or resources to hedge currencies. When it is available to them, it comes at a significantly higher cost. Ultimately, a strategy created by modest farmers 200 years ago has evolved into an exclusive tool reserved for large enterprises, excluding the small and medium-sized business owners who could benefit most from these protections.

Enter Grain.

Grain aggregates demand across many units, and employs novel API-based data gathering and underwriting techniques, which enables the company to drastically reduce the fees and collateral typically required from a business to engage in currency hedging. Grain embeds its solution in the software platforms its prospective customers are already transacting on — travel intermediary platforms, payments software, and AP/AR platforms — via an API. For the end customers, this looks like a simple “lock my rate” button.

As decades-long fintech investors, we’ve met dozens of embedded payments, embedded lending, and embedded insurance offerings. But embedded currency hedging? Now that’s something new and it immediately piqued our interest. Grain is pioneering a new category of embedded hedging that not only provides predictability and seamless transactions for business, but also creates an entirely new revenue stream for platforms.

We believe in Grain’s mission to democratize currency hedging, empowering every marketplace and software platform to offer this essential service, and we’re excited to double down.

We raised $78 million for our inaugural fund to invest in early-stage fintech and enabling technology companies. As longtime fintech investors with years of business development experience, we believe the next generation of great fintech startups will be built in partnership with financial incumbents. We founded Vesey Ventures to give our portfolio companies an early competitive edge by providing them with both capital and business development strategies.

We see ourselves as a founder’s first business development team. Meet Vesey.

Our Road to Vesey

The three of us met ten years ago on Vesey Street at AMEX Ventures and have been investing together ever since. We built a leading fintech corporate venture fund and developed complementary areas of expertise along the way — consumer fintech (Julia), B2B fintech (Lindsay), and enabling technology (Dana). We invested in category-defining startups like Melio, Plaid, Stripe, and Trulioo and engineered more than 100 partnerships between fintech startups and financial services institutions. A few examples:

• Airbase teams up with Amex on corporate spend
• Amex taps startup BodesWell for expansion into financial planning
• Accertify And Signifyd Announce Partnership

It was on Vesey Street — working between “incumbents” and “startups” — that the core insight for Vesey Ventures was born: better business development strategies lead to better outcomes for fintech startups. In financial services, incumbents still own the crucial pieces of infrastructure fintechs need to scale — data, capital, licenses, and customers. We’ve seen firsthand how partnership with incumbents can be an accelerant for building winning products, achieving product-market fit and driving efficient customer adoption in fintech. Likewise, financial incumbents need access to new technologies to advance their own innovation agendas.

We saw an opportunity to build a new type of venture firm that combines our experience as industry insiders and early-stage investors to bridge the gap between the companies in need of new technologies and those building them.

The First Business Development VC in Fintech

Vesey Ventures is designed to help founders accelerate their growth through targeted business development. Our edge lies in our ability to identify actionable partnership opportunities for our startups and unlock the right access points within the financial services industry to actually make them happen.

So how do we do it? Alongside every Term Sheet, we issue a bespoke ‘Strategy Sheet’, outlining how we will tap into our network and experience to accelerate the company’s success. And we put it on paper because we deliver.

Thanks to our extensive network of strategic investors and advisors, our model allows us to expand our network effect. Vesey Ventures’ portfolio companies will have access to a broad group of leading financial institutions and executives. They’ve entrusted us with their partnership because we’ve been in their shoes. We spend a lot of time with our network to make sure that when we make connections, we are delivering the needle, and not the whole haystack.

Lastly, we’re excited to be part of Israel’s increasingly active fintech and cybersecurity scene. Tel Aviv continues to be one of the fastest growing tech hubs in the world and serves as a critical market for a number of our focus areas including early-stage fintech, enterprise software, cybersecurity and data. With an office in Tel Aviv, we’re well positioned to help local startups partner, expand and commercialize in the US.

Accelerating the Future of Financial Services

There are still trillions of dollars of value yet to be created in the financial services industry.

But we’re no longer in an “either or” environment — it’s no longer innovators versus incumbents. It’s innovators and incumbents working together to transform financial services. The next decade will be defined by these partnerships and we’re excited to be part of it.

We look forward to meeting with new fintech founders and industry innovators. If you’re building, investing in, or partnering with fintech startups, we’d love to hear from you! Send us a note at hello@vesey.vc, or on LinkedIn. We read them.

We’re excited for the road ahead and will always be grateful to Vesey Street for bringing us together!