ICYMI funding round-up: Trade Ledger, Mesh, Safepay, Globacap & more
With the fast-paced nature of the fintech world sometimes it’s easy for announcements to slip by. Here at FinTech Futures we’ve put together a “In Case You Missed It” (ICYMI) list of our funding picks this week.
The largest under-the-radar raise this week came from UK-based Trade Ledger. It nabbed £13.5 million in a round led by Point72 Ventures.
Trade Ledger exists to enable lenders to provide credit to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It says its platform puts customer experience “at the heart of the process” and “expands credit distribution without increasing risk”.
With the new funding, Trade Ledger will grow out its sales, marketing and customer delivery teams.
“This new investment will enable us to triple our customer base during 2021,” says CEO, Martin McCann.
“Adoption of our technology is critical for the post-pandemic recapitalisation of the economy and we are driving growth as fast as our capital allows.”
Corporate payments company Mesh Payments raised $13 million in a Series A round featuring Meron Capital, R-Squared Ventures, and a collection of other angels.
Mesh promises to embed a cardless payments solution into “the day-to-day organisational flow” of a company.
Mesh co-founders, CEO Oded Zehavi (left) and CTO Eran Katoni (right)
The firm says it enables “full control and real-time visibility” for corporate finance teams and “streamlines payment activities across multiple department processes”.
The funding will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts. It also plans to “accelerate the establishment of strategic partnerships with leading management platforms”.
Oded Zehavi, CEO of Mesh Payments, says his firm views the challenge as a corporate payment problem and not a corporate card problem.
“This has impacted how we built our solution [which] perfectly positions Mesh to continue capturing larger pieces of the corporate payments market.”
Karachi-headquartered fintech Safepay raised an undisclosed seven-figure seed round with the help of Stripe, MENAbytes reports.
The round follows Safepay’s graduation from Y Combinator’s 2020 batch last summer. Co-founders Ziyad Parekh and Raza Naqvi have set out to build digital payments solutions for Pakistani merchants.
They launched Safepay’s beta back in 2019. Today, the start-up boasts more than 300 merchant customers in Pakistan.
“We want to work in improving digital payment infrastructure in Pakistan to decrease the reliance on cash and other OTC transactions,” Parekh tells MENAbytes.
Naqvi adds: “Backing from Stripe, in particular, will provide us with unique guidance towards becoming a leading technology provider, building world-class products in the context of local payments and commerce.”
Kristy Kim, TomoCredit’s CEO
TomoCredit is a US start-up which has designed a credit card to help first-time borrowers flesh out their credit history. It raised $7 million in a seed funding round which saw participation from major UK high street bank Barclays.
The firm has also appointed LendingClub senior executive Chaomei Chen as its acting chief risk officer (CRO).
UNIPaaS, an Israeli fintech and payments solution provider, landed $10 million in seed funding led by TPY Capital.
The start-up says it will use the funds to develop its solution for businesses to offer their own payments services.
“We have designed an embedded payment stack, built from the ground up to facilitate complex multi-vendor models,” says David Avgi, CEO and on of four UNIPaaS co-founders.
Capital markets fintech Globacap has raised $9 million in an extended Series A round led by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
The firm aims to digitise private shares and debt instruments. This provides “efficient administration, a more robust audit trail, greater security, and near real-time secondary transferability”.
Globacap claims $3 billion of private shares and debt instruments are digitally administered on its platform. It counts 60 companies and over 8,000 shareholders and debt investors on its books.
It plans to use its new capital to assist in the rollout of its platform. “Our tech has brought private capital markets into the digital era,” says Myles Milston, CEO.
“This is not only transformational, it’s also a trillion-dollar market opportunity. The involvement of this calibre of investors showcases the appetite for digitisation, and the belief in our platform.”
Longevity intends to expand internationally by 2022
UK-based Longevity Card, a challenger bank dedicated to consumers trying to cultivate healthy lifestyles, is going crowdfunding via the Seedrs platform.
At the time of writing the firm has raised £256,000 from 50 investors, and it aiming to hit £415,000.
“Health is the new wealth,” says CEO and co-founder, Sergey Balasanyan. “It is quite clear that this global crisis will have long-lasting effects. The concept of health and longevity will receive greater attention and will be rightly considered as a tangible and precious asset of equal standing to financial health.”
Backed by Hong Kong-based venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures, the banking challenger intends to expand across Europe, Singapore, Japan and the US by 2022.
Fellow UK-based Islamic and ethical banking alternative, Kestrl, raised £195,000 in a Seedrs crowdfunding campaign this week.
Over a course of eight weeks, the start-up – whose product is already live – raised 121% of its target from a total of 226 investors.
FinTech Futures spoke to Kestrl last May. Founder and CEO Areeb Siddiqui said Kestrl is, though sharia-compliant, an ethical banking alternative for all, rather than just for one specific group.
Kestrl has no intention of applying for a UK banking licence. “We never intend on becoming a full bank, we don’t need to,” Siddiqui said last year. “We’ll never touch users’ money, it will sit in a non-interest gathering account with the Bank of England.”
Related: Fintech funding round-up: UiPath, Narmi, Balance, GajiGesa, and more
