It’s a good time to be looking for a Series B raise, apparently.
Our last top 5 fintech rounds toured fintech’s human touch — firms working to improve the human condition through healthcare, technological interfaces, and the like.
This week’s funding news spans the globe, from the U.S., to Latin America, all the way across the Pacific to Saigon — a.k.a. Ho Chi Minh City, a rapidly exploding city in fintech. From P2P to investor data, the companies below earned their funds entirely in Series B rounds. How curious. Check with Mattermark (#5 below) for more on that story.
1. Momo is first on our list of Fintech Venture Rounds. Based out of Ho Chi Minh City’s District 7, Momo is a new digital wallet and payments app allowing users to transfer money and make payments to one another digitally. At some stores, the app can also be used for cashless payments (although banh mi and pho carts probably won’t catch on for a while). The online payments app raised $28 million in a Series B round on March 17. Though the exponential growth of both Vietnamese and expat-founded entrepreneurial ventures makes a local digital wallet service all but a necessity, there is definitely some branding confusion in store for the startup, as a stock investment management service app of the same name is primed for greater use on Wall Street, a somewhat more noteworthy location in the fintech world.
2. Next is Usermind, an infrastructure services company offering unified platforms for organizing business operations (a.k.a. BizOps). The app allows companies to automate and define all aspects of their customer lifecycles to enhance retention, revenue and profitability. It raised $14.5 million in a series B round on March 16th, 2016. By using Usermind, users can connect SaaS apps, CRM, databases, and other systems. With this abundance of data, users can quickly and efficiently map and define key business entities (e.g. customers) across all systems. Its four-tier method of operations are “Connect, Automate, Analyze and Optimize.”
3. Handshake greets us at third place. As a B2B Commerce platform servicing manufacturers and distributors seeking growth, this New York City headquartered company raised $14 million in a Series B round on March 17. By eliminating paper order writing, reducing order processing costs, Handshake aims to be the lever the application of force to which will hasten process and ship orders for businesses.
4. Following is Afluenta, from Buenos Aires. As the self-proclaimed largest peer-to-peer lending company in Latin America, Afluenta’s credit and investment opportunities can overcome the competition from other investors and borrowers. Racking in $8 million in a Series B round last week, the simple website design (in Spanish, obv.) won Argentina’s “Ganador eCommerce Award.”
5. Finally we land on the data platform for venture capital companies, Mattermark. Based in San Francisco, it quantifies the multi-sector implications for growth of potentially lucrative start-ups, to foster smart investing habits. As the website details, over 500 companies use Mattermark to “discover high quality leads, prioritize prospects, and better track [investors’] customers.” Mattermark raised $7.3 million in a Series B round announced this weekend. As the final entry to this week’s top 5 fintech, it seems fitting to select a company that specializes in connecting investors to the best startups.