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Hey friends! Parker here.

Julie is on her well-deserved honeymoon this week, so I'm taking over the newsletter. We have some exciting news and community spotlights today, so let's dive right in!

Today's Partner, Kunai

Kunai has been on the forefront of Digital and Financial Services for years, and believes customers want what they want, when and how they want it. It exists to cut through the noise and consider how FinTech and FinServ are delivering for customers.

Today, Kunai partners with leading companies including Mastercard and Visa to build seamless customer experiences that unite digital products with FinTech. It promises to deliver digital experiences your customers will love while reducing time to value through Kunai’s implementation knowledge and IP. Interested in partnering with Kunai? Get in touch!​

Company News

Ant’s predator? The CCP

Chinese regulators have had their eyes out for Jack Ma for a while now. Halting Ant’s 2020 IPO, set to be the world’s largest initial public offering ever, fining Alibaba for the “healthy development of China’s internet economy”, and more recently, ordering Ant group to divorce its two lending products from the main business. Now, government officials want to create an app for those two lending products, forcing Ant to turn over all user data accrued on those apps to a state-owned joint venture, according to two people familiar with the process. Read more here.

Pagaya SPAC

On Wednesday, U.S - Israeli fintech Pagaya announced its plans to go public via a SPAC merger with EJF Acquisition Corp. The deal holds an enterprise value of $8.5B. Founded in 2016, Pagaya uses AI to enable financial services providers to grow their businesses and reach more customers.

Capital One Goes BNPL

"We will be testing a beta version of our own 'buy now, pay later' product," announced Capital One’s CEO, Richard Fairbank, at an investor conference on Monday. The move comes as competition for the consumer loans space continues to grow in the fintech space. Funny how Capital One wants to get on-trend in one area and not another.

Funding and Deals

Tigers, Unicorns, and Xendit

We just can’t keep Tiger’s name out of our mouths. Yesterday, Indonesian fintech Xendit rocketed into unicorn land after receiving $150M in Series C. The funding was led by Tiger Global with participation from returning investors Accel and Amasia and Goat Capital. The Southeast Asian startup is best known for its digital payment infrastructure and received $64.6M in Series B funding- led by Accel- just six months ago.

Goldman Sachs Acquires BNPL

Goldman Sachs announced today plans to acquire BNPL fintech lender GreenSky for $2.24B. The all-stock deal is expected to close by the first quarter of 2022, jumping 44% in premarket trading before they were halted. This acquisition allows Goldman to take advantage of the opportunity to expand further into consumer finance, after adding automated investing and personal finance offerings to its customers.

SpotOn: $300M Series E And An Acquisition

Payments & software startup SpotOn raised a $300M Series E this week at a $3.15B valuation. The valuation is 5x higher than it was a year ago when SpotOn raised a $60M Series C, when the company was valued at $625M. It was only three and a half months ago that SpotOn raised a $125M Series D. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), who led both the Series D and E rounds, says the company has seen 100% growth YoY and a tripling revenue over the past 18 months. Existing investors DST Global 01 Advisors, Dragoneer Investment Group, and others also joined this round. The fresh funding is being used to finance the acquisition of Appetize, a digital and mobile commerce payments platform for venues like sports, entertainment, theme parks, and zoos.

Crypto Watch

Coinbase Upsizes Debt Offering To $2B

Crypto exchange Coinbase announced on Tuesday an increased debt size offering to $2B from a previously announced $1.5B, citing market interest. According to the company, the offering will be used to invest in product development and potential M&A activity. The updated offering comes less than a week after CB said the SEC would sue the exchange if it moves forward with plans to launch a new product for digital asset lending.

Solana’s 18h Outage

The Solana blockchain, a platform for decentralized apps with the fastest transaction-per-second rate in the space, faced an 18-hour outage on Tuesday. The Solana Foundation cited a “denial of service” attack as the reason for the crash, calling the downtime a period of “intermittent instability”. This is the second period of intermittent instability the blockchain has experienced in the past 12 days. The network is back up, and despite the sudden crash, SOL (Solana’s coin) continues to rally (at the time of writing).

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Together With Fintech Meetup

Meet startups like Alloy, Bill360, Digital Onboarding, SigFig and Treasury Prime; Banks like Goldman Sachs or HSBC; and Community Banks, Credit Unions, CUSOs, Investors, Networks and Processors. Fintech Meetup makes it easy to meet decision-makers and create opportunities at the organizations you’re targeting.

Join 30,000+ 15-minute meetings with 4,000 participants from 2,000 organizations--you’ll get 3 months worth of meetings in just 3 half days!

Qualifying Startups get special startup rate tickets, qualifying Banks & Credit Unions eligible for FREE tickets. GET YOUR TICKET!​

We just dropped dozens of amazing roles on our job board from companies such as Truework, Alloy, Coinbase, Affirm, Klarna, Chime and many others! If you’ve had luck landing a job or have roles that you would like to highlight, we want to hear from you!

Congratulations to our community member Frank Rotman, co-founder of QED Investors! QED Investors just closed a $1.05 Billion Fund VII to invest in early and growth-stage fintech businesses across the U.S., the U.K., Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The fund was significantly oversubscribed and consists of a $550 million early-stage fund and a $500 million growth-stage fund.

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​And congratulations to Andrew Wynn, co-founder of insurance payments platform Ascend! Ascend just raised a $5.5M Seed round to provide a BNPL option for commercial insurance. The round was led by First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, and FirstMark Capital, and more!

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​Parker Jay-Pachirat is Chief of Staff at Fintech Today. Before FTT, she worked in product management for three years across several companies, also gaining experience in venture working for Unovis Asset Management and Impulsum Venture CoLab. Parker graduated from Occidental College in May of 2021 with a specialized focus on brain-machine-interfaces. Her senior thesis interrogated the way in which commercialized brain-machine-interfaces will disrupt society's prevailing models of ability and disability. In her free time, Parker enjoys reading, skiing, and techno.

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