Fintech funding round-up: 15 May 2017
Brevity and celerity. It’s our latest fintech funding round-up for a quick fix – featuring Axoni, Citi, MarketInvoice, Banco BNI Europa, Alibaba and Qupital.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) provider Axoni has revealed that Citi has joined its Series A funding round, bringing the total amount raised to over $20 million. Citi joins a group of Series A investors, including Wells Fargo, NEX Group, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Thomson Reuters.
Axoni and Citi have collaborated on a number of DLT deployments for data synchronisation, automation, and auditability to market participants. Projects to date include post-trade data management for credit default swaps and equity swaps, as well as management of reference data among industry participants. Citi continues to be engaged in various live projects with Axoni, including the “replatforming” of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) Trade Information Warehouse, to automate derivatives processing across the financial services industry.
MarketInvoice, a peer-to-peer online invoice finance marketplace, has signed an agreement with Banco BNI Europa (BNI) to provide £45 million in funding annually to fund working capital solutions for businesses across the UK. BNI trialled an investment last year (£28.3 million) and has now upped the ante.
According to MarketInvoice, it has funded over 70,000 invoices worth more than £1.2 billion (to date); and “effectively supports” over 18,700 jobs in the UK across the businesses it serves. The new funding will be used to scale up.
Forbes has revealed that Alibaba has “expanded its investment portfolio in Hong Kong and has chosen Qupital to be its first fintech investment in the city”. As its name suggests, Qupital offers quick access to capital – especially for SMEs and start-ups.
The $2 million seed investment round was led by Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund and MindWorks Ventures. The money will be used to improve its tech platform and expand in the region. Qupital was founded in 2016 by two twenty-somethings – Andy Chan and Winston Wong. On its website, Qupital says it is an online invoice trading platform and can “help businesses raise funding against their unpaid invoices in 24 hours or less”.
