Fintech funding round-up: 19 July 2017
Following on from yesterday’s fintech funding fun, here’s our latest round-up. Features Finstar Financial Group, Adjoint, Karmic and Trupay.
Finstar Financial Group will invest $150 million into new start-ups over the next five years, Oleg Boyko, the chairman of Finstar, has confirmed. The money will also be used for research and development (R&D) within the group’s portfolio companies. Boyko says as far as start-ups are concerned, it is “targeting three to six deals per year, in the seed to Series A rounds”, typically ranging from $500,000 to $30 million.
Over the past two years, Finstar has started co-operating with European fintech companies, such as Spotcap, Euroloan, Viventor and Rocket10. It also expanded its collaboration with entrepreneurs through its corporate venture arm FinstarLabs. In 2015, Finstar launched its own portfolio company, Digital Finance International, for consumer lending.
Blockchain start-up Adjoint has announced the first close, at $1.05 million, of a pre-seed round, with participation from Fintech Angels, venture funds including Chicago Trading Company (CTC) Ventures, Danhua Capital, Kluz Ventures, and angels from the US, UK, and Japan.
Adjoint says it is developing a full-stack platform that includes all stages of the smart contract lifecycle from conception to deployment for financial services clients. Its solution is built from the ground up to “meet the needs of institutions for privacy, security, and scalability”. Founded in 2016, the company has offices in Boston and London.
Karmic, a payment cards and mobile software firm, has raised $17.2 million in a Series B round of financing. Alsop Louie Partners, Arbor Ventures, Greycroft, Marketplace Funds, Startup Capital Ventures and others participated in this stage. Mario Furgiuele, CEO of Karmic, says it continues to build out its proprietary technology solutions to “support payment and expense management products for small- and medium-sized businesses, increasing their access to the growing purchasing card market”.
The firm was founded in 2013. It provides a product, called Dash, which is a business expense management platform for people with MasterCard prepaid cards.
Last and least (as in the financial amount). India’s Protinus Infotech, which operates payment platform Trupay, has raised about $700,000 from various investors, including Kae Capital. According to Trupay, last year it raised around $396,000 from unnamed angel investors.
Trupay was founded in 2015. According to its website, it lets merchants request, and consumers approve, payments directly using their respective bank accounts, and their mobile number, as identifiers.
