Fintech funding round-up: 10 April 2018
Following last week’s fintech funding round-up, the action fires up yet again. Features JP Morgan, Access Fintech, SenseTime, Alibaba, Kaleidofin and CloudMargin.
JP Morgan has become an investor in the series A round of risk and exception management service provider Access Fintech. Financial terms were not disclosed. The money will be used for expanding account coverage and product development.
In addition to the investment, Access Fintech has also joined JP Morgan’s In-Residence programme – designed to help emerging fintech companies in deploying their solutions at an enterprise level. Access Fintech is headquartered in New York and was founded in 2016. It is led by entrepreneurs Roy Saadon and Steve Fazio.
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) platform provider SenseTime has raised $600 million in its Series C round of funding, led by Alibaba. The company is raking in the money, as last July it got $410 million in its series B round. The latest cash injection will be used to “widen the scope for more industrial application of AI”.
SenseTime says its “deep learning supercomputing” platform has over 8,000 GPUs. The firm is not limited to fintech as it works in the fields of facial and image recognition, autonomous driving, medical imaging and hardware optimisation. Last year, it revealed a partnership with Qualcomm for an “algorithm + chip” collaboration for smartphones and other devices.
Over in India, start-up Kaleidofin has raised $2.8 million as a part of its seed round led by Silicon Valley-based Omidyar Network, along with participation from Blume Ventures. Kaleidofin is targeting the underbanked market with its platform and financial solutions.
According to the firm, the funds will be used for customer acquisition, expanding its network of partners, and investments in technology and analytics. On its website, Kaleidofin says it uses the IndiaStack, data analytics, and structuring to design solutions – such as for credit, investment, insurance, and savings products.
And finally, over to the cloud where London-based CloudMargin, a collateral and margin management solution provider, has completed a new round of investment totalling $10 million. The new investors are LVC, the venture investing arm of Leucadia National Corporation, the publicly traded investment holding company and parent of Jefferies, the global investment banking firm; and IHS Markit.
In addition, CloudMargin says it has “significantly” expanded the scope of its commercial alliance with IHS Markit announced last June. According to CloudMargin, it has more than doubled its client base over the past 12 months, and has “received commitments” from its first two investment banks and expects both to be live by the end of the calendar year.
