Indian fintech Jar has turned cash flow positive, an executive at the Tiger Global-backed startup confirmed on Wednesday, as it gears up to deepen its offerings.
The three-year-old startup, which offers its users the ability to start their savings and investment journey, achieved the milestone while still growing by more than 10 times last year, according to an investor note TechCrunch has reviewed.
The profitability push comes as many fast-growing Indian startups are improving their financials and paring down expenses to become IPO-ready.
Jar has expanded its offerings in the past year and a half, adding lending and online jewelry sales to its business. Its jewelry business, called Nek, is doing an annualized sales of about $13 million annually, according to the investor note.
The new offerings come at a time when the Bengaluru-headquartered startup is in talks to raise as much as $50 million in a new round of funding, according to Indian newspaper Economic Times. Jar declined to comment on the fundraising talks.
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Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
This week, we’re looking at just how much fintech startups raised in 2024, a slew of fundraising deals, Plaid’s reported revenue growth last year, and more!
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here.
Global funding to fintech startups continues to decline. According to CB Insights’ State of Fintech 2024 Report, fintech startups globally raised a combined $33.7 billion in funding last year — down 20% from the year before. Deal volume also dropped — by 17% to 3,580. But there are at least a couple of bright spots: The annual decline in funding was fintech’s smallest in three years. Plus, funding rebounded to close the year strong, reaching $8.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 — up 11% compared to the 2024 third quarter. CB Insights also reported a 33% annual increase in median fintech deal size — to $4 million.
LemFi, a London-based financial services platform designed for immigrants, raised $53 million in new funding, which it will use to fuel efforts to acquire more customers and further expand into more countries.
Recharge, a key European player in online prepaid payments, has secured a €45 million debt facility with ABN AMRO to look at rolling up the market with a round of M&A, as well as moving into fintech-style services.
French startup Hyperline wants to build the next-generation Chargebee. It raised an initial €4 million funding round from Index Ventures back in 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). And Index Ventures is doubling down on this investment as it is investing another $10 million in the startup.
Bench, the accounting startup that imploded over the holidays, filed for bankruptcy in Canada on January 7 revealing massive debts, documents seen by TechCrunch show. The filings — one for Bench and another for 10Sheet, Bench’s original name — show that Bench had $2.8 million in cash on hand by the end of its life but $65.4 million in liabilities. Charles Rollet does a deep dive here.
More fintech IPOs?! Trading platform eToro has reportedly filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO that could value the company at over $5 billion. Israel-based eToro, which competes with the likes of Robinhood, told TechCrunch it is “not commenting on IPO rumors.”
Amazon has agreed to acquire Indian buy now, pay later startup Axio, deepening its push into financial services in one of its fastest-growing markets.
Ex-SoftBank veteran Akshay Naheta’s Switzerland-based startup, Distributed Technologies Research (DTR), is attempting to bridge the gap between traditional banking and blockchain technology, joining an army of companies trying to modernize the global payments infrastructure.
Barclays’ Rise is shutting down in 2025.
Synctera has hired its first CFO, Matias Pino.
Mark Fiorentino announced he’s left Index Ventures to join Bain Capital as “the newest partner charged with helping to guide the next generation of growth-stage AI-native, vertical SaaS and fintech startups.”
Last year was a good year for Plaid. Bloomberg reports that revenue at Plaid Inc., which provides infrastructure to connect fintechs and banks, spiked by over 25% last year.
Cryptocurrency-wallet provider Phantom Technologies raised $150 million in a funding round at a $3 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital and Paradigm co-led the round.
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you again next week!
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Fintech giant Stripe is laying off 300 people, according to a leaked memo reported on Tuesday by Business Insider.
The affected employees are “largely in product, engineering, and operations roles,” the memo said. Despite the layoffs, Chief People Officer Rob McIntosh said that Stripe intends to still grow its headcount by 17% “to land at about 10,000” by the end of the year. Doing the math, that means Stripe has about 8,550 employees currently.
McIntosh said the cuts are happening because it “became clear there were several team-level changes needed” to ensure Stripe had “the right people in the right roles and locations to execute against” its plans.
In November 2022, Stripe announced that it was laying off 14% of its workers, impacting around 1,120 of its then 8,000-person workforce.
The company has long been expected to go public but has instead continued to raise funds and conduct tender offers to provide liquidity to employees. It was valued at $70 billion as of last July.
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Payments and financial solutions are two-a-penny at this point, but mostly for online e-commerce. What about physical stores? In 2023 Qomodo, a Milan-based “all-in-one” payment methods aggregator for physical merchants, came out with a €34.5 million ($36.9 million) pre-seed round (mostly debt), which we covered, to expand the BNPL model into other categories.
It’s now raised €13.5 million ($13.9 million) in a Series A funding. The round was co-led by RTP Global and LMDV Capital, with participation from Proximity Capital, Primo Capital as well as other notable investors including the founders of FACEIT, Fiscozen and Freetrade (the latter through Lumen Ventures). That means it’s now raised €48 million in total ($49.6 million — so, €18 million of equity, €30 million of credit facility).
Founded in 2023 by entrepreneurs Gianluca Cocco and Gaetano de Maio, Qomodo claims to now serve 2,500 physical merchants, mostly in Italy.
The idea is that Qomodo lets small businesses improve their cash flow and increase revenue with a BNPL solution which lets consumers make flexible, interest-free installments on items purchased in-store.
This means retailers are more likely to make sales, while at the same time reducing the credit risk from customers.
Speaking to TechCrunch Gianluca Cocco, CEO and Co-Founder of Qomodo, said: “Our software basically simplifies the merchant transaction to help them reduce payment fees and streamline their operation. You can say that we are digitizing SMBs that have been left behind by FinTech in the physical world.”
“It’s a sort of 360 degrees approach,” he added. “We have a BNPL and POS solution but we are also going to launch other banking products like cards and bank accounts.”
He said they are in a space where FinTech is not that present, or not at all: “Because this is about physical merchants. Usually, financial institutions provide personal loans and traditional lending products, or banking products. So those are our actual main competitors.”
Louis Dussart, VP, Europe, RTP Global, commented in a statement: “Italy has been waiting for a B2B fintech champion and that’s why we are delighted to back Qomodo. There’s a huge opportunity, given Italy’s significant domestic market and standing as the ‘nation of SMBs’, to revolutionize and enhance in-store shopping experiences – for both retailers and consumers.”
Qomodo has already partnered with retailers such as Decathlon, Calzedonia, Moschino, Samsonite, Nike, and Pandora.
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When merchants or companies launch online, they typically start by partnering with one or two payment processors. But as they grow and expand into new regions, they often need to onboard additional payment partners to meet different customer (and sometimes regulatory) needs, a process that comes with some hurdles.
That’s given rise to companies to help manage the process. Egypt’s MoneyHash — which helps merchants across the Middle East and Africa manage complex payment stacks more easily — has raised $5.2 million as it scales to target larger enterprises. The pre-Series A comes around a year after its last funding, when it announced a $4.5 million seed round in February 2024. In total, MoneyHash has raised over $12 million since Nader Abdelrazik and Mustafa Eid launched the Egyptian fintech in early 2021.
The area that MoneyHash works in is classically described as “payment orchestration”, and in the fragmented world of payments — where a business might work with dozens of different providers to take, make and bank payments — its star has risen with the growth of online transactions. Integrating multiple payment stacks can be operationally inefficient and technically complex, often taking in-house tech teams weeks to complete. These challenges are even more apparent across Africa and the Middle East due to the various payment methods and currencies. This is where payment orchestration platforms come in by aggregating and simplifying these payment processes across regions via APIs.
Abdelrazik and Eid founded MoneyHash after years of working in fintech and enterprise software and witnessing first-hand some of the problems. Put simply, payments are (perhaps obviously) the crux of how a business operates, grows and makes a profit. But too often there were instead costly and risky bottleneck, especially for smaller merchants: payment failure rates in the region are three times the global average and cart abandonment is over 20% higher than in developed markets. They saw orchestration as the solution: by their thinking, merchants without payment orchestration platforms are at the mercy of high operational costs, revenue leakage and will find it hard to scale across regions.
“The opportunity to solve this is immense,” said CEO Abdelrazik. “In emerging markets, digital payments represent only a fraction of total transaction volume, suggesting massive growth potential in the coming decade. We’ve built MoneyHash specifically to help merchants overcome these complex challenges and turn payments from a liability into a strategic advantage.”
MoneyHash integrates with a merchant’s payment providers to give its customers a simplified way of working across that stack. It offers features like a unified API for pay-in and pay-out operations, customizable checkout, advanced transaction routing with fraud prevention, failure rate optimization, and detailed reporting tools. The company also supports recurring payments, virtual wallets, subscription management, and payment links, delivering an “all-in-one solution” for merchants, it said.
Just as you have a16z-backed Payrails, Spreedly, Zooz and Primer in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, MoneyHash serves customers across the Middle East and Africa. Abdelrazik said that’s what sets MoneyHash apart: its focus on emerging markets and its vast integration network, which includes over 300 pre-integrated APIs (with local and international processors and gateways like Adyen, Amazon Pay, Checkout, Fawry, Mono, Stripe, Tabby, and ValU) covering 100+ markets. QED-backed Precium, a South African upstart, provides similar services in the region.
MoneyHash initially focused on small merchants but began targeting larger enterprises in early 2024 with the launch of its enterprise suite, a move that has allowed the company to achieve notable scale.
“Without us, you can still do a lot of performance enhancements that will take years of work and studying. But when you add our software, all performance metrics across the payment get to the highest level possible. We’re talking about the authorization, conversion, and fraud rates. And we’re pretty comprehensive,” remarked CEO Abdelrazik.
“We’re not focusing on only one performance metric to try to fix all the problems across the entire payment chain life cycle, which is what enterprises need. Enterprise doesn’t want to solve one problem. They’ll search for other problems. They want a comprehensive solution across the payment cycle, and that’s what we do.”
Enterprises across industries like consumer fintech, hospitality, e-commerce, and gaming now make up 35% of MoneyHash’s clientele, a threefold increase in 2024. Key customers include BNPL unicorn Tamara, cloud kitchen leader Kitopi, and e-commerce platform Brands For Less.
According to the head of payments at Tamara, MoneyHash stands out in the region by “building an important point of difference,” likely referring to its claims to help clients achieve a 10–20% increase in revenue generation while cutting go-to-market and development costs by 90%.
Meanwhile, Abdelrazik credits his startup’s enterprise pipeline and long-term contracts helped in raising the pre-Series A funding. He said these customers fueled a 4x increase in processing volume and a 3x revenue increase over the past year, though specific figures remain undisclosed.
Global fintech investor Flourish Ventures led the round. Other investors include Saudi’s Vision Ventures, Arab Bank’s Xelerate and Emurp Kepple Ventures. The round also welcomed participation from Jason Gardner, founder and former CEO of Marqeta (his first check in the region), and existing investors Github founder Tom Preston-Werner and COTU Ventures.
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French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch.
It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup. Financière Arbevel and Bpifrance are complementing the round with some debt.
The startup isn’t the only company operating in this space that could be described as instant financing for SMEs. French competitors include Silvr, Defacto, Unlimitd and Hero.
The reason revenue-based financing has become a hot vertical is because banks and traditional financial institutions struggle to address SMEs at scale. It’s a highly fragmented market with small margins. That’s why tech startups are trying to fill that financing gap with a data-driven approach.
Today’s news comes just a few months after Karmen secured a €100 million debt vehicle that serves as the basis for the company’s short-term loans. Six months later, it seems like quite a few companies are now relying on Karmen to fix their cashflow issues.
Around 600 companies have used Karmen to buy inventory, pay suppliers, finance paid acquisition campaigns and more. Loans range from €20,000 to €3 million, from 2 months to 24 months.
On average, the typical Karmen client borrows €200,000 with a six-month term. But as you can see, there’s a wide diversity of financing options. Similarly, the smallest customers generate only €300,000 in annual turnover (those are most likely one-person businesses), while Karmen’s largest customer generates €160 million in revenue per year.
More importantly, Karmen has attracted some loyal customers, as 80% of the startup’s customers contact Karmen several times per year to unlock a new debt line. Clients include Maison Kitsuné, Balibaris, Les Raffineurs and Almé.
While most companies contact Karmen directly, the startup has a hybrid distribution strategy. It partners with other fintech companies so that they can offer Karmen financing products to their own clients. Some ERPs, e-commerce marketplaces and business banks like Qonto already integrate with Karmen.
This embedded financing strategy represents 40% of Karmen’s clients right now. But the company says that it hopes it can raise that metric to 75% of new clients by the end of 2025.
While most companies repay their loans without any issue, companies can sometimes struggle to repay what they owe.
“This is part of our job as a lender. But we limit these risks through our data-driven approach, which allows us to have very granular visibility into the financial and operational performance of our clients,” Karmen co-founder and CEO Gabriel Thierry said.
“In addition, we are investing heavily in our risk assessment technology tool (thanks to AI) to strengthen this approach,” he added. Hence, today’s funding round.
Karmen currently uses around 60 different financial metrics to score loan applications in near real-time. Its embedded strategy can also be leveraged to make smarter decisions — bank accounts, accounting software, ERPs and invoicing tools hold valuable data on a company’s overall performance.
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