Fintech funding round-up: 14 February 2018
For the third day in a row fintech firms get more love with a bouquet and a box of funding. Check out 12 February and 13 February for more money matters. This latest one stars Middleton Enterprises, Oradian, IdentityMind Global and Payworks.
We’ll start in the UK, and with Middleton Enterprises, an investment firm in the northeast of England. The Newcastle-based firm has invested £100,000 in Oradian, which provides banking software for microfinance in developing countries.
Oradian, a five-year-old company, “which boast a 100% client retention rate”, provides a finance management platform for personal banking. The Croatia-based firm originally focused in Nigeria, where it grew its customer base to 24 microfinance institutes (MFIs) with 489,000 end users. With support from the Philippine Central Bank, the company had a roll-out in the Philippines last year, where it works with 18 MFIs, contributing 66% of Oradian’s annual recurring revenue. This move puts the total number of end users at 847,000.
Digital identities firm IdentityMind Global has closed a $10 million Series C round of financing. In addition to all existing investors, the round was co-led by Benhamou Global Ventures and Eastern Link Capital and included Hanna Ventures, Overstock, and Zanadu Capital Partners. According to Garrett Gafke, president and CEO, IdentityMind Global, the new funds will be used to drive expansion within international markets (Asia, Latin America and Europe), sales, marketing, and the company’s new business unit specifically dedicated to providing know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions to address the regulatory and compliance requirements of the rapidly growing initial coin offering (ICO) and cryptocurrency markets. Good to see some details.
IdentityMind says it provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that builds, maintains and analyses digital identities, allowing companies to perform identity proofing, risk-based authentication, regulatory identification, and to detect and prevent identity fraud. As reported a week ago, the firm unveiled its KYC Plug-in for ICOs.
Payments company, Payworks, has completed a $14.5 million Series B financing round. CommerzVentures and Visa, among other investors, participated in this round. This brings its total funding to $19 million. It plans to use the new funds to drive “growth and scale”, focusing on increasing its R&D and product teams across offices in Munich, New York, London and Barcelona.
Founded in 2012, Payworks has developed a payment gateway technology, operated in the cloud and provided in a SaaS model. It also offers a suite of developer tools and integrations into systems such as loyalty programmes and CRM.
