1. PayWallet closes $8.83 million Series A

Paywallet LLC, a payroll-linked verification and remittance ecosystem announced it has attracted $14 million to date in funding including a recently closed $8.82 million Series A funding round. The Series A funding round has been led by a new investor Pasaca Capital Inc., a private equity investment firm based in Pasadena, CA. Investors in the previous rounds, PruVista Capital LLC, a Jacksonville, FL-based specialty finance investment company and Arcadia Funds LLC, a Burlington, MA-based fintech-focused investment manager also participated in this Series A funding round.

2. Nanonets raises $10 million from Elevation Capital to help global enterprises automate their document workflows using AI 

Nanonets, an AI-based document workflow automation platform, announced a successful raise of $10M Series A investment round, led by Elevation Capital. The funds will be used to expand Nanonets’ engineering and AI/ML teams as well as hyper-scale its operations and go-to-market teams in new geographies. Nanonets has grown its revenue over 10x in the past 18 months due to high demand from customers which include Global Fortune 500 companies.

Sarthak Jain and Prathamesh Juvatkar founded Nanonets with the mission of leveraging AI to make workflow automation easier for businesses. Seventy percent of organizations still have paper-dependent processes today, from parsing millions of contracts to manually matching invoices to purchase orders. Current legacy systems and processes require employees to review each document and manually enter data into CRMs, ERPs, or Excel files.

3. Tilled takes a new approach to Payfac-as-a-Service, Banks $11 million Series A

Payment facilitation startup Tilled closed on $11 million in Series A funding to enable software companies to monetize payments. The round was led by Canvas Ventures’ Rebecca Lynn, who was joined by Abhinav Tiwari and Henry Ward, as well as existing investors, including Abstract Ventures, Peterson Ventures, and Clocktower Technology Group. The new funding gives Tilled a total of $13.15 million in funding since the company was founded in 2019, which included a $2.15 million seed round last November, according to Caleb Avery, founder, and CEO of Tilled.

4. Haptic Touch specialist Aito raises a further €1 million investment from Rabobank

Leading Dutch technology start-up Aito announces a further investment – this time from the start-up and scale-up team of leading Dutch banking giant Rabobank. The additional funding, following the Spring 2021 raise of €4 million, provides the company with further finance to accelerate the growth and extend its award-winning finger sensing and haptic feedback solution to more tier-one consumer technology brands.

5. Funding Societies raises $294 million to fuel expansion plans in Southeast Asia

Funding Societies (which goes by Modalku in Indonesia), Southeast Asia’s largest SME digital financing platform, announced that it has raised US$144 million in an oversubscribed Series C+ equity round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with new investors notably Vietnamese tech giant VNG Corporation, Rapyd Ventures, Asia-based global investor EDBI, Indies Capital, K3 Ventures, and Ascend Vietnam Ventures. The company also received US$150 million in debt lines from institutional lenders across Europe, the United States, and Asia, some of which have been drawn down since 2021. This comes on the back of its US$45 million Series C raised between 2020 and 2021.

6. Trace Finance announces $4.3 million seed investment to disrupt global banking from Latin American startups 

Trace Finance, a Brazilian fintech startup that enables faster and more streamlined cross-border banking for startups, has announced a $4.3 million seed funding round. The investment was led by HOF Capital (investors in Dapper Labs, Terra, Flutterwave, and SpaceX) with participation from Circle Ventures (the company behind USDC - a leading USD-pegged stable coin with a $50 billion fully diluted market cap), The Chainsmokers (via their fund Mantis VC), and others. Seed funds will be used to expand the company's seamless global banking solution for startups, beginning with the US and Brazil.

7. TransferGo welcomes new investors as rapid expansion continues 

TransferGo, one of the world’s fastest-growing money transfer companies, has announced the sale of secondary shares, valued at €6million. This transaction closely follows TransferGo’s $50m Series C fundraise in September 2021 and reinforces its ambitious commitment to grow 5x in the next 3-4 years within a global remittance market estimated to be worth over $500 billion according to the World Bank, and at the same time expand its product offering to go after the digital wallet opportunity. 

The secondary transaction is led by Nordic Secondary Fund (N2F), a specialist Nordic fund focused on start-ups with a proven and scalable business model. N2F is also accompanied by Siena Secondary Fund, and together they will support TransferGo to scale its workforce, open new offices, launch new send and receive markets, and build new pay-out options so it can continue to champion fairer, more accessible global payments for migrants.

8. Cynergy Bank reaches £3 lending milestone 

Cynergy Bank has reached a lending milestone having grown to £3bn by continuing to support SME’s, property entrepreneurs, and homeowners. Cynergy Bank, the human digital bank, reached the milestone figure at the beginning of 2022 against a backdrop of two years of economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

The lending figure includes over £317m lent to SMEs through the British Business Bank’s Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) which supported businesses across the UK including many in the property, hospitality, and healthcare sectors.  During the period, Cynergy Bank also developed an Asset Based Lending offering for SME businesses that want to scale up and grow to provide between £200,000 and £20,000,000 to businesses. The Bank opened an office in Scotland to increase its regional footprint that includes London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Southern England.  

9. Flutterwave closes $250 million in Series D funding, valuation rises to over $3 billion

Flutterwave, a leading technology company, announced that it has raised USD $250 million in Series D funding, valuing the company at over $3 billion as the brand continues to transform the way Africans transact on the continent and worldwide. Flutterwave has become the highest valued African start-up with this investment. It is a validation of African talent, innovation, and its young inspiring people. It is also a huge endorsement in the growth of the business, innovation, and technology landscape in Africa.

10. Atom bank raises more than £75 million to fuel growth as it heads toward IPO

Atom, the UK’s first app-based bank has raised more than £75m in new equity priced at 70p per share as it continues to grow its profitability and drive to IPO. The raise will be led by BBVA and by Toscafund with co-investors Infinity Investment Partners and is now being opened to other existing shareholders. Today’s announcement follows a £40m raise in April 2021.  The Durham-based digital lender has now raised more than £115m in the last 12 months.

Atom’s focus on lending has really come to fruition in the last 9 months, with both mortgage and business loans have grown by 30%. In 2021 Atom passed £3bn of mortgage completions, with applications for its multi-award-winning digital loans peaking at £315m in Q3.  Atom’s on-balance sheet lending to small businesses also surpassed £1bn during 2021.

11. Banked Ltd announces $20 million Series A funding round led by Bank of America

Banked Ltd (“Banked”), provider of a new payment method enabling consumers to pay from their existing mobile banking app, announced the completion of a $20 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Bank of America and Edenred Capital Partners. Existing investors Acrew, Force Over Mass, Firestartr, OM2, Love Ventures Kuvi Capital and Paul Forster (founder of Indeed.com) have participated again. New investors include Sidekick Partners, 9Yards, and Huey Lin (ex-PayPal). This brings the total investment raised to date to over $30 million and the participation of new US-based investors supports the company’s plans for U.S. expansion.