Fintech funding round-up: 15 August 2016
Let’s put the fun in funding by keeping it mercifully brief. A round-up of some key events.
Finova Financial’s cloud and mobile-based consumer auto title lending platform raised $52.5 million in a combination of equity and a credit facility, one of the “largest initial rounds in fintech industry history”.
The funding round was led by Silicon Valley and international venture capital firms, tech entrepreneurs and others. The funding will be used by Finova to grow the industry’s “first” all-digital lending platform serving the auto title loan marketplace.
Smart money on the SmartCore?
Core banking software start-up Nymbus has completed a $12 million financing round led by the major shareholders of Vensure Enterprises. Nymbus will use the money to “accelerate” product deployment and infrastructure teams to support “pent-up” interest in the company’s SmartCore platform. I’m glad they said interest and not aggression.
Away from funding (for a moment), Nymbus has been very acquisitive. It recently took over fellow vendor, Sharp BancSystems. This is its largest acquisition to date – earlier this year, the company bought R. C. Olmstead and KMR.
Finally, mystery-loving Onfido, a global identity verification and background checking provider, has raised an unspecified amount of funding from Salesforce Ventures, Talis Capital and angel investors to “scale” its machine learning-enabled trust solutions for financial services firms. Onfido will use the funds to further extend its offerings for Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions.
Earlier this year, and in a less secretive announcement, Onfido closed a $25 million Series B funding round. That round drew support from Idinvest Partners, Wellington Partners Venture Capital and Crunchfund. The firm said it will use the funds to “scale” its US operations and to continue developing its machine-learning based technology.
