Meet the fastest growing fintechs in 2022

When we sat down to map out the year’s fastest-growing fintech, we took a look at last year’s list.

Not surprisingly, 60% of the companies on that list failed to make it this year.

After an unprecedented year of growth and fundraising in 2021, last year’s participants were Juni, Uncapped, Wayflyer, Zilch, Primer, Freetrade, Trade Republic and Zego everyone announced layoffs in 2022.

Only time will tell how this year’s cohort fares.

But it’s worth noting that a third of the companies on this list operate in the beleaguered crypto space, which shows no signs of recovering quickly from the FTX saga. Payments make up another third of this list, which is not surprising it has been the best-funded fintech sub-sector for the third consecutive year. But how will the deepening recession weigh on the transaction volumes they depend on next year?

Sifted has analyzed data from LinkedIn and Dealroom to shortlist the fastest-hiring fintechs this year (until 13 December 2022). To avoid the results being skewed by small teams with significant hiring, we’ve focused exclusively on post-seed fintechs that have raised over $50M in total.

1. DNA Payments

Now this is a bit of a mystery company to us, but it has grown at a tremendous rate in 2022. DNA Payments offers payment processing for businesses, both in-person and online – and reached the milestone of 100k card terminals and points of sale in April this year. For context, fellow London-HQ’d competitor SumUp is used by 4 million businesses.

Founded in 2018, the company took its first external funding in July 2021 from private equity firm Alchemy Partners, whose bread and butter is investing in distressed/underperforming or undervalued companies in Europe. The company’s filings show pre-tax losses widened from £2.6m in 2020 to £8.9m in 2021, yet the company has increased its workforce by 313% to 198 this year. It is currently recruiting in the UK for compliance monitoring, legal and transactional fraud roles.

Founded: 2018
HQ: London
Team growth this year: 313% to 198 employees
Total funding: 132 million dollars

2. 5ire

London-headquartered 5ire launched in November 2021 and has already secured a valuation of $1.5 billion. The company is building a sustainable blockchain, with the aim of combating criticism that the industry is too energy intensive.

5ire secured a $100 million Series A round earlier this year from British conglomerate Sram and Mram.

Grounded: 2021
HQ: London
Team growth this year: 300% to 116 employees
Total funding: 121 million dollars

3. Payhawk

Payhawk is an accounting tool for businesses, offering a simple place to manage everything from company cards and expenses to bills and invoices. The startup claims it can save companies from large amounts of manual work and potential errors. It currently operates across 27 countries and is one of only two fintechs to feature on this list in 2021 and 2022. became Bulgaria’s first unicorn in March this year when it raised a $100 million expansion to its $115 million Series B from last November.

Founded: 2018
HQ: London / Sofia
Team growth: 299% to 271 employees
Total funding: 236 million dollars

4. Dune Analytics

Norwegian fintech Dune Analytics provides cryptoanalysis and decodes Ethereum data to produce graphs and analyzes from SQL queries. Does that sound like a mouthful? Essentially, it’s a crowdsourced platform that looks like a dashboard where you can track the huge number of crypto transactions happening across different coins. It became a unicorn in February, when US VC giant Coatue led its $69.4 million Series B, and more interestingly, it also received seed investment from Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-collapsed investment firm Alameda Research in 2020.

Founded: 2018
HQ: Oslo
Team growth: 235% to 57 employees
Total funding: 79.4 million dollars

5. Yokoy

Yokoy sits in the oh-so-popular SME expense management sector with companies such as Pleo, Soldo and Payhawk. The company automates cost management for medium and large enterprises using artificial intelligence, combining expense management, supplier invoice management and smart business cards into one platform. It raised an $80 million Series B in April, led by Sequoia, and plans to expand beyond its current markets of Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Oh, and it brags a female co-founder, Melanie Gabriel.

Founded: 2019
HQ: Zurich
Team growth this year: 228% to 269 employees
Total funding: 108 million dollars

6. Phonoa Technologies

Dublin-based Fonoa calls itself a one-stop shop for corporate tax: it automates tax processes for e-commerce businesses with an API. The likes of Uber and Zoom use Fonoa’s platform to calculate the correct amount of tax to be paid across different tax jurisdictions to meet tax compliance requirements. Like Dune, it also got Coatue as an investor this year, when it raised a Series B round of $60 million in July.

Founded: 2018
HQ: Dublin
Team growth: 224% to 159 employees
Total funding: 85 million dollars

7. Shares

Billing itself as the first “investing made social” app, Paris-based shares closed a $40 million Series A funding round led by Valar Ventures, Peter Thiel’s VC firm, in July this year.

Shares is a mobile app where friends invest and build strategies together, as well as create stock “wishlists” with their friends, share thoughts on financial news and track their friends’ investment activity. Vague celebrity endorsements have gone big this year – Venus and Serena Williams became fintech “ambassadors” in October, and actor Ed Westwick was announced as a “business partner” for the company in the same month.

Founded: 2021
HQ: Paris
Team growth: 223% to 200 employees
Total funding: 90 million dollars

8. Token

Token operates in the open banking space, enabling account-to-account (A2A) payments for payment providers through the API. It is used by customers in 15 countries, which include Mastercard, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Paysafe, Nuvei and Deutsche Payment. Token raised a $40m Series C in May this year from investors including Octopus Ventures and Element Ventures.

Founded: 2015
HQ: London
Team growth: 207% to 89 employees
Total funding: 91.2 million dollars

9. Kevin

Another payments infrastructure startup, Kevin Lithuania’s most valuable fintech, thanks to a $65 million in Series A fundraiser in May led by Accel. It is tackling the payment layer of account to account payments by making these easier to integrate directly with banks. It wants to scale across Europe next year to be available on most electronic sales terminals.

Founded: 2017
HQ: Vilnius
Team growth: 171% to 303 employees
Total funding: 78.7 million dollars

10. Copper

Copper is a London-based startup focused on helping large investors store and manage their cryptocurrency investments, which also boasts Lord Hammond (the former chancellor) as an advisor. The plan is to be a watchdog and regulatory bastion for banks and other large institutions, when they start offering crypto.

Like Payhawk, it was on this list in 2021, and it raised $196 million this year as part of a not-so-secret ongoing Series C funding round rumored to have included a number of big VC names including Accel , SoftBank, Tiger Global and Barclays, as well as Dawn Capital. In other words, there is quite a lot of hard work to finance this growth – despite the current roots of the crypto market.

Founded: 2018
HQ: London
Team growth this year: 166% to 306 employees
Total funding: 281 million dollars

Amy O’Brien is Sifted’s fintech reporter. She tweets from @Amy_EOBrien and writes our fintech newsletter — You can register here.