🌊The Fintech Wave(#19)

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Dec 20, 2021

Welcome to the 19th edition of The Fintech Wave. Last week investors put a few billion into Fintech startups and some huge things are happening in the NFT space. So, we curated the most interesting ones. Also, this will be our last edition this year. Merry Christmas🎄and Happy Holidays🎅

TLDR; Nike acquired NFT company. BNPL for car repairs. Revenue-based financing for German startups. Social media platform for investors. BTC company raised $1B.

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Europe News and Funding

BNPL for car🚗repairs

Probably every day “Buy Now Pay Later” is finding a new use case. This time it is about car repairs. As we all know car repairs are usually pretty expensive, so Bumper is trying to help customers to pay for repairs in a few installments.

The company raised $12M with a plan to expand on every EU market by the end of 2022. It works very simply for the customer. Bumper is partnering with more than 3000 garages and dealerships where customers can bring the car for repair. It takes less than 1 minute to apply. Customers can apply for up to £3,000 of credit with a maximum of 6 repayments with 0 interest. This is definitely a good BNPL use case.

The revenue-based financing market is on 🔥🔥

In the last few months couple of revenue-based financing startups from all over Europe raised money - Viceversa (Italy), RITMO (Spain), Require (Netherlands). This week it’s time for German startup - re:cap raised $111.5M in the Seed round. Probably the biggest Seed round in the EU this year.

In case you are not familiar with revenue-based financing, it’s pretty simple: companies with stable ARR can convert this ARR into upfront cash. This is great for the founders because they don’t need to give % of the company to the investors if they need cash. re:cap offers up to 50% of ARR in upfront cash. After re:cap got access to the books, it will approve or decline request within 48h.

Americas News and Funding

MoneyLion🦁acquired Even Financial

MoneyLion, a digital financial platform (online bank), acquired Even Financial for $440M. The interesting thing in the transaction is that only $15M is paid in cash, the rest are in shares. Also, it’s somehow unusual that an online bank is acquiring a fintech infrastructure company. Even Financial is an embedded finance marketplace where businesses can find the best financial products to offer to their customers.

Currently, the embedded finance industry is worth $230B. There is almost unlimited opportunity for growth because eventually, every business will offer some kind of fintech product.

Social media network for investors📈

Social investing platforms are already a trend for the last few years, and the pandemic just increased that interest among people. Many people went into day trading and short-term trading (funded with stimulus and pandemic unemployment assistance). Others joined in on the fun because they were bored. Also, people like to talk about investments (especially if their investment is growing), so I’m really bullish on social inventing platforms. My favorite one is Stocktwits which just raised $30M.

The great thing about Stocktwits is that investors can monetize their knowledge by creating paid rooms on Stocktwits where they share their trading ideas and discuss them with the audience. Most of the rooms are priced around $30/month.

The platform now has more than 5M monthly active users. If you are a daily trader this app is a must. Even paying to access some of the rooms is probably a good investment.

Crypto ₿ites

$1B💰for Bitcoin infrastructure startup

New York Digital Investment Group is valued at $7B after this round of funding. NYDIG is a financial institution specializing in Bitcoin financial services such as savings accounts, trading brokerages, 401(k)s, etc.

Also, NYDIG is very popular among institutional investors - Stone Ridge (asset management company) bought 10.000 BTCs via NYDIG. Also, in October, NYDIG facilitated a Bitcoin investment for Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund, a public pension. More and more institutions are adopting bitcoins, so we are very bullish on NYDIG; even IPO could come soon

Nike ✓ acquired NFT🖼️ company

This is huge. Nike just acquired RTFKT - a metaverse company known to be creating viral sneaker designs, memes, and collectible exclusives. The company was founded in 2020 and it grew its community super-fast (more than 300K Instagram followers).

Virtual sneakers from RTFKT will now probably become even more valuable. Looks like soon we will be paying more for virtual shoes than for one in real life. It would be interesting to see how much Nike paid for this acquisition, but unfortunately, the terms of the transaction were not disclosed.