BlackFin Tech weekly — June 5th, 2023
Every Monday, we publish a short digest which sums up last week's fintech activity.
Dear Fintech Enthusiasts, we trust you had a delightful week, soaking up the sunshine. As our beloved Monday ritual, let's kickstart our journey by diving into the latest news and trends from the world of fintech.
Last week we spotted 10 deals for a total amount of €115.5m raised, with 2 deals in France and 1 in each of Italy, Spain, Poland, Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria.
Congratulations to Nomupay, the unified payment platform, on its €49.2m Series A, followed by Fabrick, which secured a €40m Corporate Round. Finally, E-Farm, the trading platform for agricultural machinery raised a €11m Series B Round.
Let’s dive in:
Nomupay, has raised $53.6m. The round was co-led by Finch Capital and Outpost Ventures, an investment platform of Neuberger Berman, with participation from Business Angels. It is an end-to-end payment platform. NomuPay’s Unified Payments (uP) Platform provides omnichannel payments acceptance and payout disbursements through a single API integration. It was engineered to simplify cross-border payment infrastructures throughout Southeast Asia, Europe and Turkey.
NomuPay has successfully started to onboard new clients as of Q4 2022, and are now actively scaling the business in their core markets. The team continues to add new markets to the uP Platform, as well as continuing to invest in product development.
Milan-HQ’d Fabrick has raised €40m from Mastercard and other unnamed investors. Mastercard and the other investors are gaining a minority stake in the business according to Sifted. Until now, the company’s main shareholders have been Sella Group and Fabrick's two cofounders.
Mastercard and Fabrick have been working together since 2019 and announced that they’d “expanded” their partnership on Wednesday. Fabrick provides the API for companies across different sectors to integrate payments, banking and insurance services without having to build their own infrastructure. Current clients include food giant Nestlé, telecom TIM and French bank Crédit du Nord. The new partnership with Mastercard represents an important doubling down on its payment offering.
E-farm, a digital trading platform for used agricultural machinery, has received €11m in a Series B financing round. Participants include Swedish investment firm byWiT, Munich-based Amathaon Capital, and agricultural machinery manufacturer Claas, which has been supporting the startup for several years.
The company’s CEO created the start up because he felt that the existing options for buying and selling such products were characterized by non-transparent prices, defects, trading difficulties and, in some cases, even fraud. As an alternative, he aimed for a business model with personal service, payment and transport security and cost efficiency
Congrats also to Eniblock, Klearly, Riverse, Pyrpose, Froots, Fazil Neobank and Finteq for their fundraisings!
In addition to this week’s fundraising activity, we also observed the following M&A deals:
· Regnology, a leading software provider for regulatory reporting solutions, has acquired Invoke, a provider of reporting solutions for supervisory authorities and reporting entities. On completion of the agreement, the deal would mark the fifth acquisition in less than a year for Regnology and will complement its existing technology stack and strengthen its presence in France and Luxembourg.
· SEB Greentech VC has acquired a part-owner stake in Esforin, the algorithmic trading provider for energy flexibility markets. The German company’s technology is thought to have helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 363,000 tonnes last year.
· Woflow, the data infrastructure company for digital commerce, has acquired Xtreme AI, a document digitisation and data structuring platform for the restaurant industry. This strategic move enables Woflow to extend its reach across Europe and incorporate new AI technology into its product offerings.
And finally, here are the news that caught our eye last week:
· Monneo has entered special administration. The firm was instructed to halt all payment services due to the concerns that it was not meeting the conditions of authorization.
· Checkout.com cuts internal valuation by another 15%. The strike price had been reduced to $55 a share, down from $65 a share at the last downgrade which implies a new internal valuation of around $9.35bn for the company.
· Stripe announced a new charge card program. It helped companies such as Shopify and Ramp issue more than 100 million cards in the U.S., U.K. and E.U.
· Binance will soon withdrawing 12 privacy tokens from its platform in four European countries. Privacy tokens have come under fire because their networks could harbor transactions linked to illegal activities or money laundering.
Have a great week & see you next week!