Weekly update #113

Welcome to this edition of the weekly newsletter. The idea behind this is to gather all the information in the startup ecosystem in one place, with a special focus on the fintech market and the VC industry.

Builders is still on pause until January, but you can still find all the episodes here on YouTube, or here on Spotify and here on Apple Podcast.

Coming back to us, this is probably the shortest version of the year, as we just came back from Christmas week and me and the vast majority of the fintech ecosystem was on a very well deserved vacation.

This week, instead of reading some reports, I wanted to use this extra time to deep dive on my numbers here on Linkedin, trying to do some proper analytics and collect my thoughts before the beginning of the new year. At the end of the analysis, I thought this could be potentially interesting for many people out there, so here you can find them:

Let’s start from the basics. The number of followers is still the main driver of the content here on Linkedin. The algorithm is pushing your content to first level connections first, so as you probably can guess, the more followers you have the more interactions/impressions you will have. My follower base in this case increased by 48.6%, with two spikes mostly related to posts going viral.

This is where things get interesting. Impressions increased 100.5% to approximately 11.8M, with a huge spike at the end of June/beginning of July, related to a viral post on one of calmest periods of the year. What is very interesting here is the speed, and the average time to get 5M impressions: while the first 5M took approximately 6/7 months, going from 5 to 10 took 3 approximately.

This was mostly related to the change in Linkedin algorithm, that suddenly increased importance for certain kinds of variables such as comments (approximately 70%) and timing (the famous golden hour after publication). This impacted numbers in the community, not always on a positive way, pushing certain kind of content way more than before, while decreasing visibility for oythers.

Here is a clear example of that: 3 posts counting for approximately 800k impressions. Some of them, still making impressions now, 4 months after publication, because the same update of the algorithm also increased the life span of those viral contents. I would be very interested to understand how the platform is taking track of those changes and how this is impacting their main KPI.

And finally, some numbers about this newsletter. 15.3k subscribers here on Linkedin and 1k on Substack, with 6.5k subscribers in the last here, increased by 33.9% so far. Still not where I wanted it to be, but in line with expectations. The graph shows how impressions are strongly linked to the publications, with a spike every Monday where I release the new edition. Impressions are growing at a very fast pace, with a 146.7% increase in 2025.

In this sense, I was offered the possibility to acquire other, well established newsletters in this space recently, but I wasn’t able to finalize the deal. While I still think the best way to grow a community is directly, this is certainly something that I will evaluate again in the future.

Anyway, despite the short week, we saw some very interesting news last week. Coinbase acquired The Clearing Company, while at the same time partnering with Klarna to add USDC as institutional funding strategy. Revolut is closing the accounts of many Ukrainian customers, Mercury applied for a banking license and Omnidocs acquired a majority stake in officeatwork. In the VC ecosystem, lots of new funds! Kevin Costa closed a $20M fund for Belief Capital, KRAFTON Inc. launched a $670M fund India focused, but also Picus Capital and FemHealth Ventures . And finally, some very interesting funding rounds from fintech startups like Nodu, FINNY, Altis and LastWish.

But let’s take a closer look at the main news of the last seven days.

Rounds

• Nodu raises $1.45M Pre-Seed to power stablecoin adoption across Europe
• FINNY raises $17M Series A as RIAs struggle to sustain organic growth
• Altis raises R$50M via FIDC to scale automotive credit infrastructure in Brazil
• LastWish raises R$10M from SRM Ventures to enter probate credit market

VC funds

• Belief Capital’s Kevin Costa closes $20M solo GP fund focused on AI and robotics
• KRAFTON Inc. launches $670M India-focused growth fund with NAVER Corp and Mirae Asset Sharekhan
• Picus Capital secures €150M preferred equity financing from Carlyle AlpInvest
• FemHealth Ventures closes $65M Fund II, reaching $100M in AUM

News on the market

• Klarna partners with Coinbase to add USDC to institutional funding strategy
• Mercury applies for OCC charter to become a national bank for builders
• Omnidocs acquires majority stake in officeatwork to expand DACH footprint
• Coinbase agrees to acquire The Clearing Company to scale prediction markets
• Revolut to close accounts of Ukraine resident customers citing local legislation

Italian market

• -

And here some useful resources for everyone involved in the ecosystem:

Events you don’t want to miss

• FIBE | Berlin - 15th-16th April 2026 (Link here)

You have a cool event you want to mention or to sponsor? Feel free to send me a DM.

New funds

I recently spoke with Marco Scotti from Raspberry Ventures. Thanks to their Y Combinator Alumni network, they unlock access to the top 10% of YC companies for Angel investors. Co-investing up to $3M across 15 - 25 companies in each YC batch, 4 batches a year, before Demo Day; and before the Silicon Valley VCs come in and take allocations in the best companies.

Their next batch YC W26m is closing February 1st, 2026. You can take a look here if you are interested!

Take also a look at the last edition of the newsletter, Weekly update #112.