New Look, Big Rounds, Growing Team

You may notice we look a bit different here and on our website, however, we still have the same wonderful quarterly news and insights for you.

We start the year with some good news. Not only has CB Insights ranked us as one of the ten most active Fintech VCs last year, but our team is growing as well! 🎉

We are extremely happy to welcome Olga Shikhantsova who joins us as a Principal from Target Global, bringing a wealth of strong investment experience with her. We are also excited to announce the promotions of Gunita to Associate and Charlie to Senior Associate.

👛 Curve secured $95m in its latest Series C round to fuel its expansion into the US and launch a new credit product. Investors include IDC Ventures, Fuel Venture Capital and Vulcan Capital.

🐝 Bukukas raised a $10m Series A, led by Sequoia while acquiring 1.8m MAUs and processing $17.4 billion in annualized transactions, a new record! We are excited to support them in their next phase of growth. 

🏠 Luko closed its €50m Series B, led by EQT Ventures. The company plans to scale its offering across Europe and replicate the strategy that rocketed its growth in France. 

💳 Primer secured a £14m Series A, led by Accel (without any pitch deck). They are well equipped to take advantage of the growing opportunity and we are excited to support them. 

🛍️ ShopUp raised a massive $22.5m Series A from Sequoia in October 2020. Their brilliant execution propelled them to become the #1 last-mile logistics provider in the country. 

✈️ We are excited to announce the successful exit of Koalaboox to Cegid, a leading company for POS software owned by Silverlake. Here’s the announcement.

📈 Plural.Ai won the COVID-19 funding competition from the UK government to get support in their R&D efforts.

📲 Bnext launched premium cards on top of their new core banking system. You can read more about their new perks and benefits here.

🐼 Bitpanda launched their debit card, allowing you to use your investment account as a spending account. Read all about it here

👛 Curve has been recognized for its leading role in payments tech during this year’s UK FinTech Awards. 

🤝 FairMoney, our Nigerian neobank, announced their expansion to India and we are excited to support them in this new chapter of growth!

🐝 Bukukas celebrated their 1st anniversary with a huge client base of 2m micro, small and medium enterprises that have used the application within the past year.  

🤳🏻 Billie has been chosen by Sifted as one of the German startups to keep an eye on in 2021. 

🍬 Candis was recognized by Sifted as one of the most exciting startups of 2021. 

🏭 Factris made it to the list of the Soonicorn Club of Top Tech Startups by Tracxn in 2020. 

📱 Tide won the “Best Fintech Partnership” award alongside Clear Bank at the Banking Tech Awards.

🍋 Lemonway was mentioned by Les Echos amongst the five most innovative companies and by Daily Finance as one of the Top Fintechs in France. 

💳 Primer is featured in Otta’s Rocket list of the 50 fastest-growing companies to accelerate your career in London for 2021.

🏘️ EstateGuru funded more than €300m peer-to-peer loans and won the people’s choice award by alt-fi. Marek, its co-founder, wrote a blog on their main achievements of 2020.

🏠 Luko, our Parisian Insurtech, got mentioned by Sifted as one of the hottest startups to watch in France for 2021. 

🦊 Wefox was the subject of an MTV episode about sustainable and profitable growth. You can watch it here. 

➕ +Simple was included in New Alpha’s annual mapping of the French Fintech landscape.

🛫 Buckle your seatbelts as some funds like a16z make some bold predictions about the big ideas Fintech will tackle this year. More here. 

💸 We are witnessing some moves from the SEC to regulate the crypto space. 

📟 Dive into how Google Pay is slowly becoming a financial super app as it expands its offering with tap-to-pay, P2P payments and more.

💳 Revolut makes a move to compete with Stripe by launching a new payment service for businesses. 

🏦 In the meantime, Stripe launches Stripe Treasury to let any platform or marketplace embed financial services into their offerings.

🌊 SPACs are making waves on Wall Street and here’s a report on their inner workings.

🌏 Stefan spoke about Europe’s leading Insurtech space alongside Julian Teicke, Co-Founder of Wefox at the Singapore Fintech Festival, the world’s largest Fintech event. Feel free to watch the panel here.

❄️ Continuing to grow our presence in the Nordics, Gunita judged Finnish Fintech startups at Santa’s Christmas Pitch by ArcticStartup.

👩 Join Gunita Bhasin and Deepali Nangia for this one-hour panel with three exceptional women from our Fintech portfolio - Camille Rougie from Plural AI, Nathalie Oestmann from Curve, and Aiga Senftleben from Billie. Sign up here.

🛒 Enrique wrote about our recent investment in Wayflyer, the company financing the internet entrepreneurs of tomorrow. 

🐝 Our Emerging Markets team wrote about our investment in Bukukas and talk about the company’s crazy growth. 

📚 If you are interested in embedded finance, we’d recommend you check out this simple and digestible article by Gunita. 

We will be back with our Q1 edition in May. In the meantime, we wish you a great year ahead. Stay safe everyone! 

Speedinvest Fintech team

From wefox to Bitpanda, Luko, Curve and Tide, the Speedinvest Fintech team has a portfolio spanning from Europe to emerging markets and partner with the most innovative tech startups driving this disruption. Whether reinventing payments or embedded finance, our sector expertise, strong industry networks, and in-house operational support help founders unleash their full potential.