“Wow, all of this funding, and not a fintech company in sight”—there’s a sentence you won’t be hearing from investors for a good while. There are so many fintech ventures out there, investors are hard-put to choose. This week, they’ve opted for all-female microfinance, German personal shopping platforms, and peer-to-peer lending firms, which leads us to our top five fintech fundraises of the week:
A New Delhi-based microfinance firm, Fusion raised $24 million in a Series D. The company focuses its efforts on “the economically and socially deprived” female entrepreneurs living in rural or semi-urban sections of the country, in order to fulfill the company mission of creating a self-sustainable financial institution that is able to provide not only financial services but financial literary to its clients. This funding round, with a total of four investors led by Creation Investments, brings the microfinance institution’s total funding to $36.8 million in three rounds.
Outfittery is a digital shopping platform designed to “take the pain out of shopping for men.” This will be accomplished by making shopping an online experience, complete with personal shopping and style experts. The German company raised $22 million in a Series D, in a round led by the UK-based Octopus Ventures. The service currently ships potential clothes, free of charge, to clients in eight European countries. Customers pay only for the pieces they’re buying and send the rest back. This latest round brings the ecommerce platform’s total equity to $59.8 million in five rounds, with twelve total investors.
The proud parent of CSTAR (Cyber Security Threat Assessment Report), UpGuard raised $17 million in a Series B, with Pelion Venture Partners and Square Peg Capital tying as the leader investors in the round. UpGuard’s technology is designed to test IT infrastructure externally and internally, in order to better protect against future intrusions, attacks, or outages. The most prominent of UpGuard users include ETrade, ADP, and Cisco Systems, and this latest funding round brings their total equity funding up to $26.97 million, in five rounds with thirteen investors.
DailyPay is New York-based fintech company that empowers users to offer on-demand workers daily payments easily and cost-effectively. DailyPay raised $5 million in a Series A with four total investors. The team’s web and financial engineers work with clients to provide them with next-day payments, and this round brings the service’s total equity funding up to $6.5 million, with a total of five investors.
Based in Haryana, India, this P2P lending company focuses on “eliminating the high margins which intermediaries like banks make on our transactions,” and raised $1.5 million in a Series B, with the lead investor being Brand Capital. Faircent’s P2P lending platform allows “people who have spare money” to lend it directly to those who wish to borrow it, without the overhead that would accompany a similar transaction at a bank or other financial institution. This round brings the platform’s total funding up to $5.75 million, from six investors.
To learn more about fintech startups, join us at Bank Innovation Israel this November 1-3 in Tel Aviv. Learn more and register here.