🌊The Fintech Wave(#12)
Hi Friends, Happy Monday, hope you had a great weekend. Here are a few updates in the fintech world to kick off the week. TLDR; New crypto-focused venture fund. The fintech scene in Italy is growing. Lemonade acquired Metromile. Make sure to check the Twitter conversation between Elon Musk and Bernie Sanders at the end of the newsletter.
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Europe News and Funding
The Italian fintech scene is expanding
Another week, another Italian fintech company raised money - Tot raised €2 million to develop financial management platform for small businesses and freelancers. Idea is to give users an all-in-one solution to track revenue, expenses, taxes, and accounting. Their target market looks pretty solid - around 800K of small businesses and 5 million freelancers in Italy. The product is still under development and the startup hopes to get the first version out in early 2022.
Americas News and Funding
Lemonade🍋 acquired Metromile
One of the most well-known insrutech companies in the world, Lemonade, acquired Metromile for $500M in an all-stock deal. Lemonade started with renters insurance and quickly take over a nice market share. In NYC they captured more than 4% of the market in just a few months. After renters insurance, they expand into pet and life insurance.
Recently they announced expansions into car insurance and this is where the acquisition of Metromile makes sense. Metromile is a data science company focused on auto insurance - for its insurers, Metromile offers devices that track their driving and can lower the insurance. Over the years the company captured billions of miles and which were cross referenced with actual claims data, yielding precise predictions for losses per mile driven. Since Lemonade is heavily relying on AI this will help to better assess the risks and give customized quotes for each customer. Hopefully, that will mean lower prices for us as customers.
Crypto ₿ites
New crypto-focused venture capital fund
Circle is a Boston-based crypto company that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments. Also, they create USD Coin (USDC), the fastest-growing, regulated, fully-reserved stablecoin, which now stands at a 3+ billion market cap and is adding more than 100 million net new digital dollars in circulation every week.
This week the company announced its Crypto-focused venture capital fund. If you have any crypto ideas you can apply here.
Tweets of the Week
