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Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
This week, we look at how many fintech startups are raising money in 2024, a series of funding deals, Plaid’s reported revenue growth last year, and more!
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Great story
Global funding for fintech startups continues to decline. according to CB Insights‘ State of Fintech 2024 Reportfintech startups raised $33.7 billion globally last year, down 20% from the previous year. The volume of transactions decreased by 17% to 3580. But there are at least a few bright spots: The year-over-year decline in funding was the smallest for fintech in three years. Moreover, funding rebounded to close the year strongly, reaching $8.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 – an 11% increase over the third quarter of 2024. CB Insights also reported that the average fintech deal size increased 33% year over year to $4 million.
Dollars and cents
LemFia London-based financial services platform for immigrants, collected 53 million dollars the new funding, which it will use to increase its efforts to acquire more customers and expand into more countries.
Refillis a major European player in online prepayments €45 million in debt financing Expanding the market with an M&A round with ABN AMRO, as well as moving into fintech-style services.
French startup Hyperline wants to build the next generation Chargebee. It raised an initial €4 million funding round from Index Ventures 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). And Index Ventures is doubling that investment as it is will invest another 10 million dollars in the beginning.
Benchthat is the beginning of accounting burst on holidaysThe filing for bankruptcy in Canada on January 7th revealed huge debts in documents seen by TechCrunch show. Applications – one for the Bench and other For 10 sheetsBench’s original name — indicates that Bench had $2.8 million in cash on hand at the end of its life, but $65.4 million in liabilities. Charles Rollet takes a deep dive here.
More fintech IPOs? Trading platform eToro reported The US filed for an IPO in secret that could value the company at more than $5 billion. Israel-based eToro, which competes with the likes of Robinhood, told TechCrunch that it “does not comment on IPO rumors.”
Amazon has it agreed to buy India Buy now, get started later Axioboosting financial services in one of its fastest growing markets.
Former SoftBank veteran Akshay Naheta’s Switzerland-based startup, Distributed Technology Research (DTR)does trying to bridge the gap joining the army of companies trying to modernize the global payments infrastructure between traditional banking and blockchain technology.
The rise of Barclays It will be closed in 2025.
People move
Sinker hired the first CFO, Matias Pino.
Mark Fiorentino announced he stayed Index Entities to join Bain Capital as “the newest partner tasked with helping lead the next generation of growth-stage AI-native, vertical SaaS and fintech startups.”
High interest headlines
It was a good year for last year Plaid. Bloomberg reports that it is making a profit Plaid Inc.providing infrastructure to connect fintech and banks, increased by more than 25% last year.
Cryptocurrency wallet provider Phantom Technologies raised $150 million in a funding round It is worth 3 billion dollars. Sequoia Capital and Paradigm co-led the round.
Thank you for reading. See you again next week!
