Three fintechs that raised money in January and were able to hire in February

2022 was the start of the big reset for fintech companies. Yesterday’s high valuations came crashing back down to earth, and the firms that were massively overhiring were painfully downsizing.

At the start of 2023, confidence is low and funding is the same. However, some brave fintechs are still out there, raising money for the future, and if you want to work in fintech they are probably the most receptive to your CV.

Tranch begins its American expansion

We said in our 2022 fintech roundup that London was the place to be if you’re a smaller fintech, and one non-unicorn fintech doing well there is Tranch.

Tranch offers BNPL (buy now pay later) services on a B2B basis and raised $100 million in January. Most of this was the result of debt funding, although it also received a pre-seed funding round of $5m, over double their £2m ($2.47m) pre-seed round in May in a much warmer climate .

Success in the BNPL space is hard to come by these days as firms like Klarna have massively cut valuations. Venture capitalist Shmuel Chafets, CEO of VC Firm Targets Global, spoke about BNPL at the London School of Economics Alternate Investments Conference. He said, “as a trend it just doesn’t make sense” and asked “is there fundamental value in this model for everyone involved?”

Tranch can use its new funds to hire across the Atlantic. CEO Phillip Kelvin said Tranch is “well positioned to continue our growth in the US market from our New York office.” At the moment there is only one job advert, but expect these numbers to increase.

The fintech that raised the most was founded by a Goldman Sachs MD

Raising money in the hundreds of millions was a very difficult task this month. The only firm based in the US or Europe to raise over a quarter of a million dollars was Dailypay, whose funding increased by $260 million.

The firm offers an on-demand payments platform and was founded by Jason Lee, who spent over 16 years at Goldman Sachs and was latterly the firm’s global head of structured equity.

DailyPay has 16 roles open, 10 of which are based in New York. Few are in engineering, but there are director positions in both channel partnerships and enterprise sales that can earn you over $179k base salary.

Blockstream: crypto unicorn no more?

If funding for fintech in general was low, funding for crypto was even lower. Nevertheless, Blockstream, which was previously valued at $4 billion, has raised new funds in a new way.

The Canadian firm raised $125 million via a convertible note. These are more common among early-stage companies, rather than a multibillion-dollar company founded nearly a decade ago.

However, there have been reports that in their next seed funding round, Blockstream will operate under a significantly lower labor value which will cause them to lose their unicorn status.

Blockstream is looking to build its crypto mining division and is currently hiring both a Lead Engineer and a Project Manager for external roles within that division.

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