Fintech funding round-up: UiPath, Narmi, Balance, GajiGesa, and more

Funding rounds came thick and fast last week

Last week saw a raft of fintech funding rounds from across the world. We’ve collated a handful into one place to give you a roundup of early February’s flurry of VC activity.

The largest raise came for automation firm UiPath, which hauled $750 million in Series F funding.

The firm says it’s on a mission to “unlock human creativity and ingenuity”. Its platform lets clients build, manage, run, engage, measure, and govern automation across different silos.

“Automation has become a strategic imperative that is fundamentally changing the way organisations operate,” says Abhi Arun, managing partner at UiPath investor Alkeon Capital.

Digital banking start-up Narmi raised $20.4 million in a Series A round led by New Enterprise Associates. It also featured Picus Capital, Contour Ventures, and Firebolt Ventures.

The firm offers an application programming interface (API)-based cloud platform allowing new banks to build out critical products and services.

“We started Narmi with the mission to help financial institutions thrive in a digital-first world,” says co-founder Nikhil Lakhanpal.

“We’ve experienced over 100% revenue growth every year, launched four enterprise-grade platforms and helped our partner financial institutions deliver transformational results.”

Balance, a US-based B2B payments firm, raised $5.5 million in seed funding. The company says it uses “state-of-the-art payments and risk-assessment technology” to help online retailers.

PayPal founder Max Levchin is among the investors, which also includes Lightspeed venture Partners, Stripe, and UpWest.

Bar Geron, Balance CEO, says current payments processes can be “incredibly challenging” for firms. He says they often involve” offline quotes and invoices, multiple phone calls and emails, and long payment delays.”

He adds: “Balance manages all of this complexity behind an elegant checkout experience and makes offering flexible payments methods and terms as easy as using a credit card.”

GajiGesa, an Indonesian fintech that offers services for unbanked workers, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Led by Defy.vc and Quest Ventures, the round also saw participation from Alto Partners and Kanmo Group.

The start-up launched in 2020, led by husband-and-wife Vidit Agrawal and Martyna Malinowska. The former was Uber’s first employee in Asia, while the latter led product development for Standard Chartered’s venture fund in the region.

Isreal-based TenureX left stealth mode and announced $1 million raised in funding. Its initial round comes from VentureIsrael, Hack VC, and Plug and Play.

The start-up, which aims to disrupt correspondent banking, wants to turn the network between banks into a parallel of the retail card processing system.

“With the backing of these great partners, we can prove our go-to-market strategy, focused on small financial institutions and B2B fintech companies,” says CEO Izhar Arieli.

Climate-friendly fintech Aquaoso nabbed $2 million to boost its plans of a water risk mitigation tool for agricultural lenders.

The firm says its platform aggregates “thousands of data sets” to help organisations understand water risk in their investments.

It claims the system ensures financial institutions spend “85% less time gathering data and 50% less time closing deals.”

“Water risk is a primary indicator of climate change as we see through intensifying droughts, floods, fires and degrading water quality worldwide,” says CEO Chris Peacock.

“These ultimately translate into investment risk, economic losses, reputational damage and supply chain interruptions.”

Related: US fintechs Albert and Crux Informatics in funding rounds