Fintech funding round-up: 29 January 2018
Four firms share the glory this time. This fintech funding round-up features Tender Armor, OpenDoor, Duco and Sancus Finance.
US-based Tender Armor, a fraud prevention payments technology provider, has closed a Series A investment led by private investors Aubrey Strul and Barry Beck, with additional funding through Strul Logistics & Technology. Financial details were not disclosed, but Tender Armor says the money will be used to expand its workforce and promote its CVV+ solution.
This CVV+ solution is aimed at the card-not-present (CNP) fraud market. The firm says fraudulent CNP charges “cause undue stress to cardholders while burdening them with repairing the damage” and “results in significant losses for financial institutions such as replacement card costs, countless lost purchase dollars, and perhaps most painful, customer attrition”. CVV+ works to “prevent fraud from occurring before it happens”. Tender Armor was founded by Madeline K. Aufseeser (CEO) and Robert J. Steinman (COO).
Also in the US – New Jersey-headquartered OpenDoor, a marketplace for illiquid US treasuries, has completed a third $10 million investment round. The funds will be used for additional sales and marketing executives and introducing a series of enhancements to its platform.
According to the company, eight dealers are trading on its platform for their own accounts, along with financial institutions representing $7.3 trillion in assets under management, an 84% increase since the platform’s launch in late April 2017. In the nine months since launch, OpenDoor says it has facilitated over $275 billion in orders, with matched trading volume reaching $10 billion, $1 billion in the first week of January 2018 alone.
Duco, a London-headquartered data engineering technology company, has completed a $28 million investment round by Insight Venture Partners, NEX Opportunities and Eight Roads Ventures. The round also includes an investment by former CEO of SunGard (now FIS), Cristóbal Conde.
The firm says its technology enables banks, brokers, asset managers and exchanges to “normalise, validate and reconcile any type of data” in its cloud. Duco will use the investment to recruit more staff in Europe and the US, launch an Asia office and an expand its product set. It also has offices in New York and Luxembourg.
In Jersey (the UK one), Sancus Finance, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sancus BMS Group, says it has now provided over £200 million of funding to UK businesses. The firm targets the alternative finance market and says this sector showed growth of 43% year-on-year in 2016, from £3.2 billion to £4.6 billion.
The firm specialises in supply chain finance and invoice trading. It also offers two specialist solutions – Education Finance, designed for educational institutions and a Vendor Partner Programme for SMEs. With the recent addition of Sancus Funding, the group adds that it has extended its offering to property finance for bridging and development projects.
