Fintech funding roundup: Investors explain best practices for pitching and getting funds

Fintech momentum is getting much attention as investors move towards sustainable funding rounds to boost the startups. Investors' surveys play a vital role for startups in FinTech, EdTech, and similar sectors. As new companies need early funding, investors are looking to grab the opportunities by investing in the deserving ones.

It is pleasing to say that fintech executives are open to discussing what helps in pitching. So, the information can be very informative if you have a company barely surviving or just getting started.

Fintech is early on artificial intelligence (AI) adaptation, with chatbots, customer service queries, and many security features. All these new features require new hardware, which translates to funding. Investors in the US seem happy to invest outside the continent, and they are also targeting SE Asia, Europe, and Africa. Crypto embedded fintech infrastructure is coming up more and more on the news as some of the top firms are giving FinTech firms a helping hand in this section.

Last week, Better Tomorrow Ventures announced a $225 million fund. It is triple the size of their previous funding round, which gives FinTech hope of a sustainable economy. BTV is interested in investing in the early stages of companies. Early-stage has two seed types. That is pre-seed and seed. Each one is more important than the other when the firms need the most support.

$150 million funding is allocated to pre-seed and seed investment to help companies' rapid growth. Another $75 million is reserved by BTF for follow-up investments. Jake Gibson and Sheel Mohnot founded better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) in February 2019 and since then helped many started to get the initial boost.

According to BTV, organisations and firms can get quickly funded, but that is a requirement. A stellar revenue sheet promises investors their capability to give back the funds. But it is much tougher on the seed level as it is hard to evaluate, and their funding requirements may seem unethical. Mohnot said, "We take a comprehensive view on fintech and think we are in the early innings here."

BTV has plans to make around 30 investments from the new funds, where checks range between $500,000 to $3 million. 22 out of these 30 are already led by BTV, where ten others require "non-lead checks." They also talked about being founders themselves and think they can have "the most impact at the seed stage."

Stitch raised $21 million for its API infrastructure improvement and embedded finance platform in South Africa. Another one that made the headlines is the Nigerian FinTech Flutterwave, raising $250 million in a Series D funding round. Just one investment grew company valuation by over $3 billion. It only took 12 months for a smaller company to be evaluated in billions. Early seed certainly helps.

The Swedish startup Intergiro received much-expected funding on the European side. According to news reports, the startup was in stealth mode, and for the last five years, no significant headlines had a slot for it. But after calling itself "a financial cloud" that can benefit banks and similar services, it received $20 million Series A funding. The Bank of America and France's Edenred Capital Partners planned to fund the much-needed startup. Areas Group, a Denmark-based startup, received $34 million in funding to "fuel expansion" last week.

On the other hand, Asia has quite a different scenario, and why should it not be? Financial stability and equity margin are all different from Europe and its neighbours. Funding of $144 million was raised for Catherine Shu's Funding Societies. The fundraiser was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It is truly a fascinating time for FinTech to get funds and expand services.