Hi all, Julie here.
Just got back to Austin, and I'm pretty sure I was everyone’s favorite guest on the airplane since I had a cute puppy with me. If you’re going to the Green Dot event here in Austin next week or attending my webinar with Matt Harris and Stephanie Kirkpatrick, you’ll get to meet the little one too :)
Lastly, my Tux Time episode with Maia Bittner is out! Highly recommend checking out this episode with a fintech legend.
Sponsored By, Laika
Moving up-market is complex and challenging, but can also transform businesses. We see startups hit roadblocks when they begin sales conversations with enterprise buyers. These companies want to work with innovative new technology, but lack of data security and privacy can leave you underprepared to meet enterprise needs.
With Laika’s planning and compliance platform to guide you through the process, founders and businesses complete compliance audits in 3-4 weeks. The team has a deep understanding of the procurement process--their experts used to sit on that side of the table--and they guide you through answering extensive security questionnaires from banks, healthcarez facilities, and enterprises. The platform automation helps meet aggressive timelines when working through stalled deals.
The News
Robinhood Adds IPO Access
And then, a bunch of companies started offering access to IPOs. I’d love to learn more about how Robinhood, SoFi and others are doing these deals. Offering access to IPOs at the listing price isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Obviously this is something that is pretty enticing since recent IPOs have typically opened far higher than their listing price. If you have more details, ping me!
Privacy.com Is Now Lithic
Our friends at Privacy.com are changing their name to Lithic and announcing a new $43M round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Founded in 2014, the company started letting consumers generate virtual and disposable card numbers for free. More than 10M virtual card numbers have been issued to date. The company now also allows others to use its API to create cards for their own customers, adding in a B2B focus on top of the B2C strategy it started out with.
Marcus Partners with C2FO
Fintech upstart C2FO and Goldman’s Marcus announced a new partnership this week to provide unsecured financing to select businesses on C2FO’s platform. As of this summer, these businesses using C2FO will be invited to apply for financing of $10K to $1M. C2FO says it’s the world's largest platform for working capital, serving more than 1M businesses representing $10.5 trillion in annual sales across more than 180 countries. I’ve met the CEO before too, and he’s the complete opposite of the typical Silicon Valley founder (he was the board chairman of Agriculture Future of America). Awesome guy.
Figure’s $3.2B Valuation
Mike Cagney’s Figure Technologies announced a $200M funding round and a $3.2B valuation (which I think is around the same valuation SoFi had before Cagney left). His new venture is aiming to leverage blockchain to transform how the financial services industry operates (specifically lending, cap table management, payments and more).
Speaking of Matt Harris, congrats to Bain Capital on raising a new fund!
And congrats to Mark Goldberg of Index on the birth of his second child! He’s precious.
Julie VerHage-Greenberg is the co-founder of Fintech Today, where she focuses on editorial content and brand. Prior to joining, she was Bloomberg’s first fintech reporter, covering Robinhood from before it was a billion dollar company, breaking the news that Plaid was acquiring Quovo, and interviewing executives on Bloomberg TV and at several large conferences.
