Fintech funding round-up: 21 March 2018
Five go funding in our latest round-up. Features M-BIRR, Funding Xchange, MarketInvoice, Digital Reasoning and Enforcd.
South Africa’s Standard Bank has acted as “exclusive” financial adviser to Ethiopia-based mobile money service M-BIRR which recently completed an equity raise of €8 million.
According to the bank, the equity provides M-BIRR with the financing to roll out its growth plans across Ethiopia. M-BIRR says by providing a platform that allows foreign aid to be transferred digitally, rather than physically moving it via road haulage vehicles, it has reduced the security risk and chance of logistical failure of moving cash in transit to remote areas. To date, aid is delivered to two million people via its platform.
Quote comparison site Funding Xchange (FXE) has raised £1.5 million in Series A funding, led by Calibrate Management and Kimera. FXE says it integrates data made available through open banking and cloud accounting to offer “one-click” funding applications to banks, alternative lenders and specialist financing providers.
The investment will be used to continue its development of cloud-based automated decisioning technology and the incorporation of live transactional data sources, enabling digitalisation and automatic underwriting. FXE adds that as part of its mandatory referral process, the UK’s HM Treasury has designated it to work with nine of the UK’s “leading banks” to help small businesses secure funding. No names were provided.
This time MarketInvoice is giving the funding and reveals it has reached a £2 billion milestone of providing invoice finance and business loans to UK companies.
Launched in 2011, the firm says over 90,000 invoices have been funded to 93 countries. The first £1 billion was achieved after five years of trading and the second £1 billion took 14 months to reach. During this second period, two new products were launched (confidential invoice discounting and business loans).
Digital Reasoning, an artificial intelligence (AI) solutions provider, has raised $30 million in new funding. BNP Paribas led the round. Barclays, Square Capital also joined the round, as well as previous investors Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, Lemhi Ventures, HCA, and the Partnership Fund for New York City.
Brett Jackson, CEO of Digital Reasoning, says its AI system “transforms large quantities of structured and unstructured data about employees, clients, and competitors into valuable human-centric business insights”. This new funding will be used to expand its product portfolio for capital markets and wealth management use cases.
Seismic Foundry has closed its second (undisclosed) investment, acting as lead investor in regtech bouncer Enforcd.
Its flagship product is EDB, the Enforcement Database, which uses global regulatory enforcement data, related news and insights to “help firms to identify, manage and mitigate the conduct risks they face”. Jane Walshe, co-founder and CEO of Enforcd, says “Seismic’s input on our strategy and model will help us to scale effectively”.
