🌊The Fintech Wave #56
Hi all,
we have great news - we are just 100 subscribers from 4000. If you like the newsletter, help us by sharing it with your friends so we can hit 4000 subscribers this week🚀
It is not a fintech product, but we still need to share this with you. It is called ChatGPT - an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. You can ask it anything and you will get better answers than if you would google it. Withing seconds.
It can literally write essays. You can access it here.
European News and Funding
European fintechs are on 🔥 this week - 5 of them raised money
Keyrock $72M; crypto liquidity provider
Bumper $26.1M; BNPL for car repairs
Treecard $23M; digital bank
Kiln €17M; staking services for crypto
Finery Markets $5.5M; price discovery for digital assets
Fintech startup Roqqett acquired🤝
Equals Group acquired payment startup Roqqett for £2.25M. Roqqett’s main product is a fast checkout button for e-commerce. Customers can connect their banking app with Roqqett, so anytime they buy something from the website that supports Roqqett pay purchase is done with just one click, without the need to fill in info or card numbers to type in.
What makes this acquisition even better is that Roqqett is a less than 2-year-old startup and it was sold for a relatively small amount. Probably the startup didn’t have many users, but the technology behind is good. That is good news for all indie hackers or small teams that are working on something new - even if your startup doesn’t grow super fast you can still get acquired and have a nice exit.
Every time you swipe a card, this neobank plant a tree🌲
Fintech startup Treecard raises $23M Series A for its wooden debit card solution. Interestingly, Treecard was born in the UK, but it is currently available only for USA customers. 80% of the merchant fees will go to reforestation. Every $50 spent plants a real tree. This is great news for the environment, but this cannot be a sustainable business model for neobank with the increased interest rates. I hope the team has some other revenue streams in the plan.
Their goal is to plant a billion trees by 2026.
Americas News and Funding
Credit card startup X1 raised $15M💳
X1 claims that it is the smartest credit card ever made and wants to reinvent the credit card experience starting with a pretty cool card design - 17g of Stainless Steel card with no annual fees.
An especially good feature is an option to create disposable cards - for example, if you want to try some software or stream service, you can create a card that will auto-cancel in 24 hours. The startup claims it is doing $3M of revenue each month.
Crypto ₿ites
Coinbase is suspending support for some cryptocurrencies
Nothing can go unnoticed by the revenue team at Apple🍏
If you are not familiar, there is something called Apple tax - Apple is taking 30% of every purchase in every app in the App Store. This thing is non-negotiable; if you don’t agree, Apple will just block the app. This just happened to Coinbase Wallet. Apple wants to want 30% of the crypto gas fee. Not sure how would that even work, but it looks like users will have to pay 130% of gas fees so Apple can take 30%.
Tweets and Threads of the Week
Bookmark these websites👇
Nobody offered better benefits👇
Shopify's growth in processed amounts over the years👇
Worth to read if you are looking for a startup co-founder👇
