Fintech

Oh, how the tables have turned. It used to be that if you were a fintech startup or, for lack of a better term, a digitally native financial services business, you might be eyeing an acquisition from an incumbent in the industry. But lately, fintech upstarts are the ones doing the a

A short decade after software started eating the world, along came headlines about every company becoming a fintech thanks to innovation and growth in embedded finance business models. This narrative oversimplifies the evolution that's happening in the financial services sector. Storing and mov

As fintech Acorns plans to go public later this year, it has named former Twitter and DreamWorks animation exec Rich Sullivan to serve as its new chief financial officer. Irvine, California-based Acorns announced in May its intent to go public by merging with publicly traded special purpose acquisi

PayPal-owned Venmo is expanding its support for cryptocurrency with today’s launch of a new feature that will allow users to automatically buy cryptocurrency using the cash back they earned from their Venmo credit card purchases. Unlike when buying cryptocurrency directly, these automated pur

U.K.-based open banking bulk payment startup Comma has raised £4.34 million ($6 million) in a seed round of funding led by Octopus Ventures and Connect Ventures. They were joined by investors Village Global, and the founders of Wagestream, Peter Briffett and Portman Wills. The company says it enab

More than 40 African startups from a handful of countries have gone through YC over the past decade. Zambia joins that list today, and its entrant, Union54, is a worthy first entry. Union54 (54 is a nod to the number of African countries) is a fintech company founded by Perseus Mlambo and Alessandr

South African insurtech platform Naked has raised $11 million in a Naspers-led round. Existing investors Yellowwoods and Hollard also participated in the funding round. This comes barely two weeks after Naspers, via its early-stage tech investment vehicle Naspers Foundry, invested in another South

Indian fintech startup BharatPe has raised $370 million in a new round of financing as it looks to aggressively scale its business in the next two years. It’s the nineteenth Indian startup to become a unicorn this year (up from 11 last year) as several high-profile global investors double dow

Sunday was a big day in fintech: Afterpay has agreed to merge with Square. This agreement sets two of the most admired financial technology companies in recent history on a path to becoming one. Afterpay and Square have the potential to build one of the world's most important payments networks.

La Haus, which has developed an online real estate marketplace operating in Mexico and Colombia, has secured $100 million in additional funding, including $50 million in equity and $50 million in debt financing. The new capital was obtained as an extension to the company's Series B, the first t

There are over 1 billion mobile money accounts globally. Africa leads the way in transaction value and volume thanks to M-Pesa, largely used in East Africa. Other regions across the continent are also growing fast. In 2019, West Africa reported the most live mobile money services in any region, wit

Another excellent quarter for Apple, as the company posted $81.4 billion in revenue. That's a 36% year-over-year jump for the company, besting Wall Street estimates of $73.3 billion by a considerable margin. “Our record June quarter operating performance included new revenue records in each o

Homeownership is one of the key components to building intergenerational wealth, and Landis is working to make that a reality for renters. U.S. homeownership rates in 2020 were about 65.8% according to Statista. The rate reached its peak of 69.2% in 2004 before falling sharply due to the economic r

Embedded finance — the process by which some of the more complicated, but also commoditized, aspects of financial services are built and wrapped in an API for anyone else to implement in their own products for end users — has become a huge cornerstone of how fintech is built today. Now,