🌊The Fintech Wave(#17)
Let’s start Monday with The Fintech Wave and a few updates from the fintech world. TLDR; Mortgage company raised $750M and laid off 900 people. Republic acquired Seeders. Finance app for kids. Check the Tweets of the week to find out how 2-people business is making $25M/year👇
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Europe News and Funding
Seeders acquired🤝by Republic
US investment platform Republic just acquire UK crowdfunding platform Seeders for $100M. Just a few weeks ago Republic raised $150M Series B, so they were pretty fast spending the money on the acquisition.
Seedrs was the first regulated securities crowdfunding platform in the world and has seen nearly £1.5B invested on its platform to date. Seedrs was always focused on the EU market, so this was a great move by Republic to enter the EU. This will create the first global private investment marketplace with offerings across North America and Europe.
Republic allows anybody to invest in startups, real estate, video games, and crypto projects. Also, Republic curates private investing opportunities so less than 5% of applied projects (startups) will be offered to potential investors. Over $700M is already invested via Republic.
Americas News and Funding
Better.com raises $750M and laid off 900 people😔
Better.com is a mortgage lending company that is trying to move all home-ownership services online - mortgage, real estate, title, and homeowners insurance. The company just raised $750M from Softbank.
Only one day after the funding, Better.com laid off around 900 people. CEO set up a 3-minute webinar where he invited 900 people and told them they are laid off effective immediately. Once the meeting ended their computers automatically shut down. Layoffs are part of the business, but I never heard anything like this. You can even see the layoff video here. A few of the employee comments are below👇
The company is planning to go public through a SPAC merger with Aurora Acquisition Corp., to raise an additional $1B. With this CEO, no way I would invest in it.
Financial education platform for kids🧒🧒
A lot of people think that financial education should be the subject in elementary school. Until that becomes reality, there is an app to help with that - Goalsetter just raised $15M.
The app allows kids to receive money from parents, friends, and family. Kids also get a debit card so they can spend the money, while parents can track the spending. But here is the catch - to “unlock” the funds, kids need to take fun financial literacy quizzes, with the difficulty of questions tailored to the kid’s age. Pretty cool feature, to differentiate from similar apps.
Crypto ₿ites
Blockchain.com launched🖼️NFT marketplace
One of the biggest crypto exchanges, Blockchain.com, just announced its NFT marketplace. This comes a few months after Coinbase announced it is entering NFTs. I expect a similar announcement from the other crypto exchanges since everybody wants a piece of the $10B NFT markets.
Blockchain.com was launched in 2011 and it has more than 70 million users. Buying NFT is still a fairly complicated process - you cannot buy NFT and pay with a credit card, so many people don’t want to go through the hustle of buying NFT. Blockchain.com wants to make NFT as easy as accessing the crypto market.
You can sign up on the waitlist here.
Tweets of the Week
