The largest this week
🇬🇧 Payment provider Checkout.com has more than doubled its valuation to $40 billion with a new $1B financing. The funding will be used to launch products and further its involvement in the so-called Web3 space. It aims to build the payment infrastructure for merchants to settle digital transactions.
🇺🇸 Sequoia and Paradigm Invest $1.15B in Citadel Securities, as it looks to further scale its business and expand into new markets, especially crypto. Citadel offers equity and fixed income products to central banks, financial institutions, government agencies, corporations, insurers and sovereign wealth funds. So far, the company did not get involved in crypto products due to regulatory uncertainty, but the investors in this round speak loudly, Paradigm recently raised the biggest crypto-focused fund of $2.5B and Sequoia recently signalled its crypto interest.
🇫🇷 Payfit, the payroll and HR software-as-a-service platform, closed a new €254 million Series E round at a valuation of €1.82 billion. The current focus is geographical (80% of its clients are still based in France) and product expansion through 3rd-party offering integration to cover the whole employer-employee relation.
🇮🇩 KoinWorks, a Jakarta-based fintech platform, raised a $108M Series C mixed of equity and debt. Koinworks describes itself as a financial superapp offering services for small business owners and freelancers. It operates a marketplace of integrated applications such as Accounting Software, POS, e-Commerce, HRMS for SME, a Budgeting app alongside KoinWorks staple products such as working capital, invoice factoring, early wage access and treasury management.
🇺🇸 Novo, the Miami-based SMB banking startup, has closed a $90 million Series B at a $700M valuation. The startup chose to build its own infrastructure from the ground up from the underlying core banking processor to the front-end.
Other notable fintech deals from around the globe:
🇺🇸 DeFi startup Goldfinch, has raised a $25M Series A led by a16z. Goldfinch is one of the still rare cases bridging DeFi and real-world assets. It operates as an open marketplace for loans without collateral using a decentralized loan underwriting process. The Goldfinch protocol extends credit lines to lending businesses, which can draw stablecoins from the Goldfinch pool and then deploy the capital to local borrowers. Goldfinch capital is being used for a wide range of uses, including motorcycle taxis in Kenya and small businesses in Brazil.
🇻🇳 Timo, Vietnam's first digital challenger bank, has raised $20M to bring greater financial inclusion and accessibility to the large majority of the population which remains unbanked.
Read up on all the latest fintech deals in Dealroom.co
Notable exits:
🇺🇸 Los Angeles-based banking app Dave began trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday, closing one of the first SPAC mergers of 2022. The challenger bank is designed to avoid many of the pitfalls of traditional banking, such as overdraft fees. The company says it has helped millions of customers avoid overdraft fees through its ExtraCash feature, and helped gig workers earn hundreds of millions of dollars from side hustles through its sharing-economy job board, Side Hustle. It also offers On-demand pay for gig workers.
