Overview: This week I am featuring 11 early stage transactions involving fund raises sponsored by Venture Capital firms, Growth Equity firms, Accelerators, Angel Investors and Corporate Sponsors. In total this week saw US$96ml of new financing raised across pre-seed to Series C funding rounds, with 3 deals representing known 1st raises by these companies through the equity funding model. The largest deal of the week announced was a US$19ml Series A for Chocolate Finance in Singapore, a new venture from the founder of Singlife (who merged his company successfully with Aviva Singapore) which is very new and still in stealth. The second largest was a further funding for Kasisto, which has now raised over US$80ml to bring their AI Digital Virtual Assistant into a broader number of markets and both consumer and business banking areas.
Deals
Here are brief highlights around the 11 deals themselves. The table is shown below as per usual initally drawn from Crunchbase.
1) Wombat — Wombatinvest.com, UK, Growing Low cost retail investing platform that offers a global stocks and etf platform and fractional ownership, and increasingly focusing on education.
2) Blossom Social — investblossom.ca, USA, Very early stage social investing platform following the same path as others but with a focus on mobile, and a slick solution for exchanging ideas and mimicing portfolios from friends and other traders
3) Kasisto www.kasisto.com, USA, A growth company developing its conversational AI platform in order to offer the Best in class Digital AI Virtual Assistant for consumer and business banking
4) Deposits.com deposits.com/, USA An early stage scale-up, Launching an embedded finance, e-money and virtual card platform for fintechs, banks and other players that want to provide a range of secure financial services
5) Hello Clever helloclever.co, Australia, A scale-up creating for digital e-commerce SMEs, and on-line consumers an Payment & Rewards Payment Platform which allows for inclusion of instant cashback earnings.
6) Highline Technologies highline.co/, USA, A scale up building an integrated bill payments and payroll service that can be rolled out to employers in the workplace as part of a financial wellbeing program.
7) HazelTree hazeltree.com, USA, a scale-up cloud based SAAS provider of treasury management solutions to a range of buy-side firms including alternative fund managers, and limited partners
8) Nivaura www.nivaura.com/, UK, A capital markets technology vendor that is working with investment banks, universal banks and exchanges on digital issuance, leveraging automation and digital workflows to build a more streamlined and transparent process
9) DebtBook www.debtbook.com/, USA, A cloud based SAAS scale-up that is working with the finance depts of local govt, not for profits and educational institutions helping them manage their debt and leasing situations in a more optimal, and efficient manner
10) Chocolate Finance chocolatefinance.com/, Singapore, A start-up that is aiming to provide consumers with a better set of options for managing their cash
11) Finexos www.finexos.co.uk/, UK, a scale up firm that is targeting to provide traditional and alternative lenders with an AI empowered credit decision & customer engagement engine that leverages open banking
