Layoffs provide opportunity for some fintech startups • TechCrunch

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welcome to The exchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your declaration of confidence. If you are reading this as a post on our site, please register here so that you can receive it directly in the future. Each week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news from the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there, and it’s my job to stay on top of it—and make sense of it—so you can stay up to date. — Mary Ann

Hiring now

Hey Hey! I’m feeling good this week because I finally started something that’s been in the works for a little while: tracking fintech companies that are hiring. It’s no fun covering layoffs, and unfortunately we’ve had too many of them. So I thought that by also spotlighting fintechs that are hiring instead of firing, our coverage would be a bit more balanced and give laid-off workers (and anyone else looking in general!) a way to see what positions are available out there out.

After the article published on February 16, I had several more companies reach out for news of open roles in their companies.

• Kikoff is hiring for 10 roles (a mix of hybrid and external), including senior product manager, associate product manager, senior product designers, engineers and a growth marketing manager. The consumer fintech company is focused on helping people build credit and raised $30 million in June 2021.
• Addepar, which makes software to track investment performance, is also actively hiring with approximately 50 open roles across the US, UK and India (many roles also have remote work opportunities). In June 2021, the company raised $150 million at a valuation of $2.17 billion. Today, it has around 850 customers and over $4 trillion in client assets on its platform.
  
• Nium hires and has a dozen open roles. The B2B payments company raised $200 million at a unicorn valuation in 2021.
• 401(k) provider Human Interest, which recently raised its total funding to $500 million, including an investment from BlackRock, has 23 open roles, including in engineering, product and revenue.
• With offices in six countries, spend optimization company Emburse has just appointed new CXO Johann Wrede and is hiring for nine open roles, including in sales, engineering and customer success.
• Collective, an all-in-one back-office funding platform for self-employed individuals, which has raised over $28 million in funding, is hiring for five roles across engineering, marketing and member services (tax, accounting). Collective raised its last round, a Series A, in May 2021.

And I’m sure there will be more in next week’s edition of The Interchange. Follow along, and feel free to share with anyone looking for a new opportunity!

Image credit: Vicki Been / EyeEm (opens in new window) / Getty Images

Weekly news

TechCrunch’s Tage Kene-Okafor did a fantastic job reporting this story: “Prince Boakye Boampong, founder and CEO of Hyphenwhich provides an alternative payment network of connected wallets that allows interaction between mobile money and bank accounts in Africa, has reportedly been temporarily suspended pending an investigation into financial impropriety, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.”

After Confirm its challenging week, I did a deep dive into the space and discovered that while consumer-focused BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) companies are struggling, a number of B2B-focused companies continue to raise money. Speaking of BNPL, the technology giant apple is apparently moving ahead with its plans to offer its own buy now, pay later service and, according to Bloomberg, “shape rules for how it will approve transactions.”

In this TechCrunch+ piece, Amsterdam-based Grant Easterbrook (fintech consultant and co-founder of Dream Forward) focuses “on fintech ideas that received some initial hype and momentum but ultimately failed to live up to their promise.” He looks at ideas that “failed to go mainstream and change financial services in the way the founders originally intended.” Super interesting read.

On 15 February Lightspeed Venture Partners Ansaf Kareem published a very detailed blog post titled “The Alchemy of Fintech Valuations” in which he summarizes fintech sectors, the closest public companies, the key metrics to consider and where multiples are today. He writes that his hope is that it “gives entrepreneurs a better yardstick to work from as they scale their businesses.” Check it out here.

February 7, Austin-based SMB-focused Sana benefits announced that they were cutting about 19% of their staff. It’s not clear how many people were affected, but as of last summer, when it raised a $60 million Series B, the startup had about 170 employees, according to Austin Inno. TechCrunch had covered $20.8 million in Series A raising back in 2020. In a blog post/letter to employees, CEO and co-founder Will Young wrote that the company’s “focus on accelerating growth and product development came at the expense of higher risk tolerance and higher expenses .” As part of the severance package, the company is allowing its employees to keep their laptops, acknowledging that “having one is critical to job hunting.”

It’s great to see more women in leadership roles in the fintech community. Two examples here:

Former NEA general partner Liza Landsman joined fintech startup Stash, which calls itself the “anti-Robinhood,” as its new CEO. Her appointment took effect on 6 February. Landsman had been an independent director of Stash since mid-2022 and previously served in operations and leadership roles at Jet.com, Citigroup, BlackRock and E-Trade. At NEA, a venture firm with over $25 billion in AUM, she focused on fintech and consumer products. The company has also formed a new B2B business led by Brandon Krieg, former CEO and now head of business development. My good friend and very talented journalist Suman Bhattacharyya covered the moves here. Last October, TechCrunch covered the company’s milestone of passing $125 million in annual revenue and adding a crypto offering.

And

Fintech-focused QED investors recently announced the hiring of Melissa Ho as a principal focused on cross-stage fintech investments in Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on early-stage companies. She is QED’s first employee in Singapore. Previously, she led the investment team at Wavemaker Partners, a Southeast Asian VC fund that invests in enterprises, deep technology companies and sustainability companies. There she was responsible for the Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh markets, plus the primary verticals of SaaS, B2B marketplaces, proptech, edtech, commerce and consumer internet. In August last year, the firm made its first investment in Africa. It is also quite bullish on LatAm fintech.

ICYMI: From Natasha Mascarenhas: “Tube, an alternative financing platform that was last privately valued by investors at $2 billion, announced its new CEO, an appointment that comes months after the company’s three co-founders stepped down from their positions in a stunning, unusual shakeup. The new CEO, Luke Voiles, joins Pipe after working as General Manager of Square Banking at Block, formerly Square. He was also CEO and President of QuickBooks Capital. Voile’s role begins on February 20.” More here.

On the property front, Open door and Zillow has teamed up to offer Atlanta and Raleigh homeowners a new way to explore more home selling options when they visit Zillow. Customers “starting their selling journey” with Zillow can now simultaneously request both a cash offer from Opendoor and an estimate of what their home could sell for on the market with a local Zillow Premier Agent partner. A seller who decides to accept the Opendoor offer will be able to sell their home on their own timeline using the Opendoor platform. Sellers who choose to sell their home on the Marketplace will be paired with a local Zillow Premier Agent partner.

Fintech for good

I recently caught up with Adam Nash, who has a few positions under his belt. He is an investor in and board member of companies such as Acorns, Figma and Kabbage. He has also held senior and technical roles at Dropbox, LinkedIn, eBay and Apple. On the fintech front, he is also the former CEO of Wealthfront and more recently co-founded it Daffy. As TC’s Connie Loizos wrote last year: “Daffy provides access to what it claims is the lowest-cost, lowest-friction method for setting up and using a donor-advised fund (DAF), a kind of 401(k) for charitable giving. With DAFs, you donate some money (or stocks, or even cryptocurrency), receive a tax deduction at the time of the contribution, and move that donation into a managed investment account, where it hopefully grows over time. At a later stage, the donor directs the funds to the charity or charities of their choice.”

He told me that since its inception in 2020 and launching in late 2021, the nonprofit has amassed nearly 10,000 members and raised close to $30 million for charities. Account sizes range from as little as $10 to more than $2 million.

Nash added: “Many of our members use Daffy to donate $10 a week or $100 a month to charity. Other Daffy members contribute tens of thousands and even millions when they have a financial unpredictability such as a bonus, company exit, or stock performance, for example… Most donor-advised funds out there are partnered with investment management firms and make their money by charging a percentage of assets. And then they don’t really want small accounts. They want people who can put hundreds of thousands of dollars aside for charity, but it’s not even a 1% thing. It’s like a 0.1% ability. So we are very excited about Daffy.”

Daffy is free for those members who are just starting out and have an account balance under $100. Despite the downturn and higher inflation, Nash says Daffy saw an all-time high of donations in Q4 2022 — 3x as much as Q4 2021. Members contribute in a variety of ways: 20% cash (ACH, debit/credit cards), 20% stocks/ETFs, 20% crypto and 40% DAF ( donor-advised fund) transfers. Despite all the crypto and stock market reversals in 2022, Nash said Daffy saw crypto contributions increase by 100% and stock and ETF contributions increase by over 128% in Q4 2022 compared to Q4 2021.

Financing and M&A

See TechCrunch

Puzzle builds a modern accounting package for today’s API-enabled startups

Tiger Global and Ribbit invest an additional $100 million in PhonePe

Ledge aims to build automation tools for finance teams

IFC leads a $17 million investment in South African insurtech Naked

Kenya’s fintech Power set to scale after $3M seed round

Singapore-based neobank Aspire raises $100 million from Lightspeed and Sequoia SEA

Andreessen Horowitz backs ModernFi’s deposit marketplace for banks

Neobank Vexi raises millions to offer young Mexicans lower-interest credit cards

a16z, GV supports Thatch in its efforts to simplify health benefits for startups and their employees

How a Brazilian startup’s pivot to corporate cards has paid off

And other places

Goose, an insurance “super app,” closes $4M Series A funding round

Vaas starts with $5 million for its debt management platform

Latino-first neobank Comun raises $4.5 million in seed funding

Hala acquires UAE-based startup Paymennt.com to expand its operations in the SME sector

Fintech AdalFi raises money in sign of life for Pakistan VC market

That was it for now. For those of you in the US, I hope you’re enjoying the long weekend, and happy President’s Day! To everyone else, I hope you have a great weekend and wish you all a great week ahead. Thanks again for the support, and oh, if you want something fun to listen to, check out the Equity podcast, featuring myself, Natasha Mascarenhas, and Rebecca Szkutak!