Fintech funding round-up: 17 May 2017
Quickly following on from the cash flow glow of 15 May, here’s another fintech funding round-up. Features Additiv, BZ Bank, Symphony, BNP Parabis and IOTA.
Zurich-based digital finance provider Additiv knows how to stay healthy as it has secured its first capital investment funding round of CHF 21 million ($21.3 million). The round was headed by Switzerland-based BZ Bank, and the money will be used for expansion and recruitment.
Keen to stress success, Additiv cites some of its recent deals – including the launch of Natwest‘s new robo-advice offering for the UK savings and investments market using its Digital Finance Suite (DFS); and similar projects with private bank Coutts and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
Instant messaging service Symphony has orchestrated the raising of $63 million in new capital for more platform innovation and expansion. BNP Paribas led the round, along with additional investment by a majority of Symphony’s existing shareholders. Symphony previously raised a total of $170 million from financial firms, venture capital firms and Google.
Symphony says enterprise customers can centralise all workflow in a single platform, using its service as a replacement for traditional email and voice systems to communicate with internal and external teams, share documents and content, and conduct meetings with conferencing and screen-sharing. It was founded in October 2014 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It also has offices in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and London.
This is not a very small amount and it’s funding with a twist. IOTA, a firm offering a new transactional settlement and data transfer layer for the internet of things (IoT), has launched its IOTA Ecosystem Fund. Valued above $2 million, the fund will be used for use cases, libraries and tools, as well as hackathons.
The fund is for developers who want to contribute and be part of IOTA’s distributed ledger technology (DLT). The company says “rather than attempting to create an ‘all in one’ universal solution, IOTA intends to instead keep the underlying ledger protocol as basic and efficient as possible and to extend its utility through the IOTA eXtension Interface(IXI)”. Its website says it much better – it wants to be “the backbone of IoT”.
