The global economy was represented in fintech investments with international investors spreading money to startups aimed at bringing the world into the digital economy, boosting efficiencies and automation.
Aspire Bank
In the biggest funding news this week, Singapore-based Aspire Bank raised a total of $158 million — $58 million in a series B funding round and $100 million in equity, led by an undisclosed equity firm together with DST Global Partners, CE Innovation Fund, B Capital Partners and global hedge fund Fasanara Capital. Existing investors include AFG, Hummingbird Ventures, U.S.-based Mass Mutual Ventures and Picus Capital.
Aspire, founded in 2018, aims to build an end-to-end ecosystem. The challenger bank is working to build its payroll system and add more features to its invoice management tool to make reconciling payments with account balances easier.
“We see a world dominated by integrated platforms across various business functions such as Salesforce for sales or Slack for communication. We believe the same is happening for finance and we are here to build the operating system for the Southeast Asia digital economy,” Andrea Baronchelli, CEO and co-founder of Aspire said in a release. “We build value for our customers by saving time, saving money and boosting their growth.”
Alloy
Software developer Alloy raised $100 million in a series C funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Avid Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Canapi Ventures and Felicis Ventures.
This new round of funding brings the New York-based bank’s valuation to $1.35 billion and total amount raised to more than $150 million, the company said in a release. Alloy plans to use the funding to expand product offerings.
Founded in 2015, Alloy developed an identity verification platform that is used to detect fraud and make identity management effective and simple for banks. Alloy raised $40 million last year in a series B funding round and $12 million in 2019 in a series A funding round.
“We want to make building a fintech product as easy as building an ecommerce product, and we’re thrilled to have Lightspeed on board to help us do that,” co-founder and CEO Tommy Nicholas, said in a release. “Identity and its associated risk isn’t something businesses should be figuring out, it should just be something they install. As Alloy grows into a multi-product platform for the full customer identity lifecycle, we can not only help make risk easier to understand, but also further industry innovation by making fintech products easier to build.”
“We’re thrilled to put our support behind the Alloy team as their product and mission fits squarely within our thesis that the proliferation of fintech, financial services and embedded fintech companies is driving increasing demand for tools like Alloy,” said Justin Overdorff, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Alloy takes the risk off their client’s plate while maintaining operational efficiency throughout the customer lifecycle, making Alloy a crucial piece of the fintech infrastructure stack.”
Alloy currently services more than 200 clients, including Ally Bank, HMBradley, Gemini, Ramp and Evolve Bank & Trust.
Rize
Virginia-based startup Rize secured $11.4 million in a series A funding round led by California-based Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures this week.
Existing backers include Raptor Group, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Third Prime, Red & Blue Ventures, Graham Holdings, Walkabout Ventures and Rucker Park Capital.
The fintech-as-a-service provider was founded in 2015 by Justin Howell, Kirk Voltz, Mizel Djukic and Rishi Kumar “originally as a business to company fintech company because consumer pain points about money were our expertise, but we discovered that building intuitive financial user experiences wasn’t merely a UI/UX problem — you couldn’t achieve “simple and intuitive” without first rebuilding much of the underlying financial infrastructure from the ground up,” the company said in its blog post.
Rize said it plans to invest part of that funding in core products to further support the needs of builder customers, such as its recently launched developer toolkit that allows users to build a full banking application in under 30 minutes.
ForMotiv
ForMotiv, a digital behavior analysis startup, raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Massachusetts-based Vestigo Ventures, California’s Plug & Play Ventures and New York’s Dreamit Ventures.
“The pandemic expedited digital transformation for several industries – insurance being one of them. With enterprises seeking solutions to better understand digital behaviors and improve customer experience, ForMotiv thrived and remained profitable,” said Bill Conners, CEO at ForMotiv, said in a release.
The Philadelphia-based ForMotiv, founded in 2017, plans to use the new funding to hire senior roles across tech, product and sales. The company also has an office Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
ForMotiv provides companies real-time information on customer intent as users engage with applications and forms without needing personal identifiable information (PII), such as full name or social security number. Its software analyzes hundreds of unique behavioral data points (digital body language), according to a release.
ForMotiv has analyzed more than 300 million applications for customers, including State Auto, iPipeline, Unqork, HealthGorilla and FTI Consulting.
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