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Hi all, Julie here.

Second to last Summer Friday! I'm very excited for some announcements and interviews we have coming up in September. Stay tuned :)

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Company News

Brex Launches Venture Debt

Corporate finance startup Brex announced its venture debt product yesterday after months in beta. The new product allows venture-backed technology companies in the Brex ecosystem to get access to capital with less dilution. Some folks in our community tested it out and said it was a compelling, all digital offer. They mentioned that there are competitors out there like Pipe, ClearCo, and others, but that the speed of capital deployment has never been more important, allowing founders/startups to focus on building rather than fundraising.

Toast IPO

After Charley’s great piece on fintech IPOs yesterday, we have another filing, Toast! Here’s a quick look at some of the numbers, and the full filing is here. And a great Twitter thread from Community member Jareau of Finix.

Funding and Deals

Nubank’s New Valuation

Now the company is supposedly close to a $55B valuation in a new round. This comes after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire invested in the company a couple of months ago at a $30B valuation. Can’t wait for Christmas when Nubank has raised 3 more rounds and is worth $200B!

YC

Get ready for a slew of fintech funding out of YC. More than 60 companies in the Summer session are in the fintech category.

PawaPay’s African Bet

UK based PawaPay, which spun off last year from online sports betting company betPawa, announced $9M in seed funding. The company is aiming to help people send and receive money internationally using mobile money. The market is huge, with the World Bank estimating in 2015 that there are over 350M unbanked individuals in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet many of them have cell phones, which means mobile money is one of the only ways they can send and receive money quickly. Some estimates say that up to $500B flows through the mobile money market in sub-Saharan Africa yearly via the accounts of nearly 300M active monthly users. PawaPay wants to position itself as a market leader in high-volume mobile money payments while delivering reliability and transparency for merchants. Its API allows these merchants to access telecom operators’ mobile money systems to receive and send payments to millions of mobile money accounts. The company also takes care of local operations, compliance, regulatory cover and bank accounts, making it simple to receive payments in a new market.

Funding Tuna

LatAm’s Tuna has announced two seed rounds totaling $3M. Founded in 2019, Tuna is a payment product that enables merchants to use A/B testing of credit card processors and anti-fraud providers to optimize their payments processing with one integration and a no-code interface. The market is still super young here as well, with the share of e-commerce in overall retail sitting at less than 10% in Latin America. However, the pandemic has obviously started a massive move towards digital. In Brazil alone, e-commerce sales grew 74% in 2020.

Crypto Watch

Musical NFTs

Congrats to my friends JD and Scott on their new company, Royal! Scott was telling me about it a bit at our housewarming party a couple of weekends ago and I’m very excited to see where this thing goes. We’ve all known for a long time that musical artists get screwed when it comes to getting paid. While other types of artists have been able to find new ways to get paid recently, that hasn’t been the case in the music industry. Royal is aiming to change that by wedding music rights with NFTs, allowing users to buy shares of songs through the company’s marketplace, earning royalties as the music they’ve invested in gains popularity.

Record Month For NFTs

So much for a summer slowdown. Almost $900M has been spent on them over the past 30 days, according to data from the tracking portal Nonfungible. That’s more than 3x the previous best month for NFT sales (May with $255M).

Together With Financial Venture Studio

What pairs well with your Saturday brunch plans? Coffee, tea, mimosa? Nope! It’s applying for Financial Venture Studio’s next cohort starting this Fall. Just 10 minutes to apply and it could be the game changer for your early-stage start up. Then celebrate with a mimosa after — it is the weekend after all. Apply now! ​

If you’re interested in breaking into fintech or looking for a fresh start, our job board has over 80 curated roles from some of the best companies in the industry including Alloy, Truework, Rize, Eco, Stir and many others!

If you’re looking to hire from within the best network in fintech, reach out to us!​

Congrats to our friends and community members at Astra! Quite the year you’ve had already :)

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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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