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Hi all, Julie here.

Last week, I sat down with Jason Gardner for his first post-Marqeta IPO interview. Take a listen here! Otherwise, not too eventful of a weekend. On Saturday I got to meet more of the cycling instructors at Equinox, and then on Sunday, we got brunch and listened to my New York Church's sermon on YouTube. It was a great message that I'm actually going to use as a bouncing off point for tomorrow's premium newsletter :) Otherwise, I just want to conclude my intro today by thanking Robinhood for going public the day before we close on our house rather than the two days we are taking off for it.

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Company News

Robinhood Roadshow

In case you missed it, Robinhood streamed their roadshow on Saturday. There wasn’t anything too surprising, though the team did say that retirement and more passive investing options are on their roadmap. I don’t find this surprising, but I did find it surprising how convinced people are that customers will use Robinhood as more than a brokerage. Would you use Robinhood as your bank, credit card company, lender? Let me know.

Funding/M&A

Europe Banks On Embedded

Berlin-based Solarisbank has raised €190M, valuing the company at €1.4B. The company is in the embedded fintech space, providing nearly 200 APIs that help other companies build consumer facing products like banking, lending and payments. On top of the funding round, it announced that it had also acquired a competitor, Contis, and that it might go public in 2022. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while or follow the fintech community on Twitter, you’re very aware that embedded finance is all the rage right now. SolarisBank, for instance, counts Trade Republic, American Express, BP, and Samsung among its customers, with consumers continuing to use non-banks for banking services.

Sila’s New Round

More fundraising for APIs! Sila announced it’s raised $13M in funding for its banking and payment platform. The company helps others create digital wallets, which means it’s easier to move money and make payments, and handles the compliance as well. It has partnerships with several companies we know well here: Plaid, Alloy, and Lithic.

Starling Does Some M&A

Starling announced a £50M acquisition of specialist buy-to-let mortgage lender Fleet Mortgages, which has c.£1.75B worth of mortgages under management. Starling’s CEO and Founder Anne Boden said that this is just the start of the company’s move into the mortgage space, as well as other lending partnerships.

Crypto Watch

Tether Troubles

Tether is no stranger to being in the crosshairs and this time, it involves bank fraud. According to Bloomberg, a U.S. probe into Tether is homing in on whether executives behind the digital token committed bank fraud. Specifically, federal prosecutors are scrutinizing whether Tether concealed from banks that transactions were linked to crypto, according to the story. For those that don’t follow crypto that closely, Tether is by far the most popular stablecoin. Tethers in circulation are worth about $62B and they underpin more than half of all Bitcoin trades.

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