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Hey everyone, Jordan here.

I’m writing today simply to set the record straight that I biked more than 30 miles this weekend. Speaking of which, if you’re ever in Austin and are looking for an amazing group of people to ride with, look up The Breakfast Club.

Now onto the more important item at hand: Julie has been recording a ton of great podcasts and I can’t wait for you all to hear them when Tux Time returns in a couple weeks. Our dogs love to make appearances in the episodes, so I have one piece of advice when launching a podcast: hire a good producer. Thanks Paul!

Today's Partner, Treasury Prime

Are you scouting out a BaaS provider? Treasury Prime has 10 important questions you should be asking them.

If you’re starting a fintech company, you’re probably looking at Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) providers. But with all the different options, how do you choose the one that’s right for you?

Picking a BaaS partner is one of the most impactful decisions a fintech company makes in its early days, so Treasury Prime put together a new cheat sheet to help you push for transparency and detail.

Check out the Checklist of 10 Questions here!​

Company News

I Guess I’ll Start Learning Some TikTok Dances Now

I think I’m not alone in saying that it was only a matter of time until TikTok expanded into ecommerce. The app, which announced plans to partner with Shopify last October, just announced that it has expanded this partnership and will soon allow those with a TikTok for Business account to add a “Shopping” tab to their profile, effectively creating a mini storefront within the app. Also unsurprising, one of the first to use this feature will be Kylie Jenner, who will market her personal cosmetic brand through the new integration. One of the most exciting features about this new partnership, however, is the ability for Shopify merchants to tag products within their videos, which will bring users right to that merchant’s storefront for checkout. In a statement, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said “by enabling new in-app shopping experiences and product discovery on TikTok for the first time, Shopify is powering the creator economy on one of the fastest-growing social and entertainment platforms in the world. We are excited to help this next generation of entrepreneurs connect with their audiences in more ways—and with TikTok as a visionary partner.” While I’m not a TikTok user, I’m super excited to follow along.

$3.9B in 890 Days

I feel like we have hit a cadence of writing this exact news once every other month. Our friends at Ramp have once again announced a giant new Series C fundraising round of $300M led once again by Founders Fund that brings their valuation to $3.9B, up from a valuation of $1.6B in April. In fact, it seems as though they raised this round so quickly that they did not even have time to take a new photo for the announcement. In a statement, CEO Eric Glyman said “Ramp has only been in business for 890 days but during that time we’ve built a corporate card and software that is actively saving businesses money. Today, I’m proud to say we’re serving fast-growing startups and established businesses across every sector, from healthcare to construction, education, and tech. Customers are saving 3.3% on average when they switch to Ramp, thanks to our 1.5% cashback, savings insights, and real-time spend reporting. This is tangible money saved that customers are reinvesting into activities that actually grow their business.” To learn more about Ramp, check out our deep dive into them.

Funding and Deals

How Bazaar

Everything is Fintech and Fintech is everywhere. One hot area to keep an eye on moving forward is Pakistan. Bazaar, a Pakistani ecommerce startup raised $30M, marking one of the biggest fundraises by an early stage tech company in the country. Bazaar operates a B2B marketplace for grocery stores, effectively allowing them to buy supplies from a single marketplace instead of hundreds of different suppliers that most merchants purchase their goods from. Bloomberg has also reported that Pakistani startups have raised a total of $101M in the first half of 2021, up from $18.9M in all of 2020. As more and more of the world's most populous countries continue moving online, I’d expect that investors will follow suit and rush in.

Fixing the Books

Khatabook, an Indian startup that helps merchants digitize their bookkeeping and accept online payments, announced a Series C of $100M, valuing the company at nearly $600M. Though hundreds ofMs of Indians have moved online over the past decade, many merchants still rely on traditional pencil and paper methods for bookkeeping, a task that I know all too well tends to lead to human error. Khatabook faces stiff competition in its attempt to expand, however, as it is competing with companies like Facebook and Amazon to break into the roughly 60M SMBs throughout India.

Not Even a Texan Summer is Hotter than LatAm

This section of the newsletter always feels incomplete if we fail to mention Tiger Global. Fortunately, this won’t be one of those days. Cora, a Brazilian digital lender to SMBs, has announced a $116M Series B, even though it raised its Series A in April. The company was not actively in the market for a new round, but it was approached by existing and new backers, including Tiger. CEO Igor Senra said that the investors “main goal was they didn’t want us to spend time on fundraising, but instead stay focused on building the company.” With the rate at which we’re seeing capital deployed, I’d expect similar stories to Cora’s in the near future.

Crypto Watch

eToro Crypto Commissions Crush

We’ve already reported on Robinhood’s latest numbers, so I wasn’t totally shocked when I saw eToro’s. A few takeaways on their Q2 reporting:

• Commissions from crypto trading were $264.2M in Q2, compared with $11.2M in Q2 2020
• The share that crypto represented of total trading commissions increased to 73%, compared with just 7% during the same period last year.
• XRP brought in the most commissions out of any crypto assets, while BTC had the most trading volume.
• eToro added 2.6M new clients in the second quarter, a 121% increase from the same period last year but 500K fewer than it added in Q1

Together With fintech_devcon

Wanna hang out with our very own Cokie Hasiotis, Charley Ma and other decision makers from Square, Plaid, Visa, Alloy, Chime and more? From Sept 7-9th, engineers and product leaders will be gathering for fintech_devcon, a jam packed event put on by Moov with workshops from the technical leadership in fintech. Come with an idea for a product or feature and leave with an MVP. Moov is taking a ton of precautions as well so you don't also leave with Covid. There's 4X the needed space for social distancing, requiring masking from all attendees, and added hepa filtration on site in all rooms.
​Sign up here!​

​Principal Blockchain Engineer at Eaze

Eaze is hiring a Principal Blockchain Engineer to serve as the anchor of a cryptocurrency platform that instantly moves funds throughout its supply chain. This is a key leadership position responsible for many important initiatives and an opportunity to work with talented software, security, and infrastructure engineers to drive the vision, architecture and development of several industry defining products.

Eaze is looking to build something completely new to the industry. This is a great chance to leverage your passion and background in crypto to be the technical subject matter expert and driving force for difference-making products.

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Julie VerHage-Greenberg is the co-founder of Fintech Today, where she focuses on editorial content and brand. Prior to joining, she was Bloomberg’s first fintech reporter, covering Robinhood from before it was a billion dollar company, breaking the news that Plaid was acquiring Quovo, and interviewing executives on Bloomberg TV and at several large conferences.

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