Weekly update #77

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.

No episode of Builders has been released this week, but you can always recover the last episode where I sit down with Scarlett Sieber , Chief Strategy Officer at Money20/20.

With her, we talk about the difficulty of doing products for an event company, the expansion of the brand globally, but also the impact of Covid in 2020 and the differences in events in different parts of the world. You can find the full episode here on YouTube, or you can listen to it here on Spotify or here on Apple Podcast.

Scarlett has one of the most interesting and varied profiles in the fintech market. She comes from a financial background, with experiences at BBVA and Opus Bank , but then she went full startups. She co-founded Infomous , a data visualization startup, she acted as contributor to the Huffington Post, Forbes, WeWork, and many others. More recently, she took over a very interesting challenge: driving the strategy for Money 20/20, maybe the most well known fintech event globally.

Builders will be back next week with one of the most active and interesting fintech CEO and founders in Europe!

Coming back to us, I’ve been reading a very interesting report this week, the “Venture capital report - Italy Q1-25” from Italian Tech Alliance and Growth Capital. The report is a complete overview of the VC ecosystem in Italy, including deals and trends in the last quarters on Italian startups. Here my main takeaways:

Let’s start high level, with an European perspective. Venture capital activity in Europe is showing signs of renewed momentum. In Q1 2025, European startups raised €17B across 2,433 funding rounds, already reaching 28% of 2024’s total amount (€60B) with stability in round volume. Mega rounds accounted for €8B, nearly half of the total. This comes after a progressive market adjustment from the peak in 2021, when investment hit €106B across 15,131 rounds. Despite declining deal counts since then, the average deal size is increasing again: the mean round in Q1 2025 rose to €9.8M, with a median of €2.2M—both the highest figures over the past five years.

Coming back to national level, Italy’s VC ecosystem in Q1 2025 remained stable, with €270M raised across 88 rounds, closely aligned with the quarterly average of the past two years both in deal count and capital excluding mega rounds (€261M). This follows a peak in 2022 when investments reached €1.87B over 339 rounds, with €722M coming from mega rounds. After a dip in 2023 (€1.17B), the market rebounded modestly in 2024 to €1.49B. Despite fluctuations, median round size in Q1 2025 held at €0.8M, while the mean reached €3.7M and the adjusted mean (excluding mega rounds) remained at €2.9M—indicating a consistent early-stage investment trend.

VC activity in Italy closed Q1 2025 with €270M raised, in line with the quarterly average of 2024 (€279M), despite a 24% drop compared to Q4 2024 (€355M). The quarter lacked large deals—only one round surpassed €15M, and none exceeded €25M—marking a continued trend of reduced mega rounds. The post-2021 correction is evident: after the peak in Q3 2021 with €562M (including €391M from mega rounds), quarterly figures stabilized. The highest recent activity occurred in Q3 2024 (€536M), but the ecosystem now reflects healthier distribution with more early-stage capital and fewer outsized deals.

Finally, a very interesting overview of new Italian VC funds. The landscape continues to gain momentum with three new funds launched in Q1 2025, collectively raising €145M. This follows a record year in 2024, which saw 15 new funds announced and €1.4B raised. The most active quarter was Q4 2024, accounting for €807M and six new funds, including 360 Capital’s “Digitaly LIFE II” and CDP’s “Fondo AI.” Notable new entries in Q1 2025 include Vento (backed by Exor Ventures), Algebris Investments’ Climatech fund, and Vertis SGR’s VV7 Digital Puglia. The trend underscores growing diversification and regional spread in Italy’s early-stage investment infrastructure.

Anyway we saw some very interesting news in the market this week. Crazy news in the payment sector, where Global Payments Inc. acquires Worldpay. But we saw many aggregations this week, with Banked : acquiring VibePay, Pliant acquiring hi.health and Lyft acquiring FREENOW. Revolut moves into rewards credit cards, while Bleap partners with Mastercard. In the VC ecosystem, General Catalyst wants to invest $1 billion in Europe, but also many new funds from abcIMPACT, Founders Fund and 11 Tribes Ventures. In the Italian ecosystem, Tundr raised a staggering €7.2 million seed round. And finally, some very interesting funding rounds from fintech startups like Stitch, BKN301, Plum, Crux, Belvo, Toku, Tapcheck and many others.

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

Closed deals

• South African fintech Stitch secures $55 million to enhance payment solutions across Africa
• BaaS platform BKN301 completes a £18.6 million series B
• Plum secures £15m in debt financing from BBVA
• Tapcheck raises a $25 million series A extension and a $200 million credit facility
• Marshmallow secures a $90 million round at a $2 billion valuation
• Friday Harbor secures a $6 million round for its AI powered mortgage originator
• Crux closes a $50 million series B to build the central capital markets platform for clean economy
• nettle secures £1.45M in Pre-Seed funding to address delays in risk engineering
• Spanish proptech Inversiva raises €1.2 million for its passive real estate investment platform
• Mexico based open finance platform Belvo secures a $15 million round
• Luma Financial Technologies closes a $63 million series C round
• Dublin based Assiduous raises $1 million to simplify corporate finance for SMEs
• Polish fintech BidFinance raises €1.6 million for its debt portfolio trading platform
• Inicio AI secures £2.6m in seed funding led by Morgan Stanley
• Latam fintech Toku announces a $48 million series A

Insights on the VC industry

• General Catalyst will invest $1 billion in European champions
• abcIMPACT closes a $600 million impact fund
• Arthur Ventures closes a sixth flagship fund at $395 million
• Founders Fund raises nearly $4.6 billion for its late stage venture fund
• 11 Tribes Ventures closes a second fund at $46 million

News on the market

• Revolut moves into rewards credit cards in a potential move to take over American Express
• Paysend partners with Tink for faster and seamless cross borders transfers
• Kraken Digital Asset Exchange launches US stocks and ETF trading
• Banked : acquires the P2P payment platform VibePay in all-shares deal
• Prepaid payments lader Recharge leaps into B2B with UK Giftcloud acquisition
• KKR acquires OSTTRA, the post-trade infrastructure formed by S&P Global and CME Group, for $3.1 billion
• bunq completes first phase of US banking license filing
• eBay announces global payment acquiring partnership with Checkout.com
• Bleap partners with Mastercard in latest push to take stablecoins mainstream
• PayPal teams up with TerraPay to boost real time cross borders payments in Middle East and Africa
• Indian fintech unicorn CRED is looking to raise $200 million with a steep cut in valuation
• Strava acquires popular running app Runna
• Crazy news in the payments industry: Global Payments Inc. announces the acquisition of payment provider Worldpay
• Stripe partners with Tencent to make WeChat Pay available in 20 countries
• Lyft acquires taxi app FREENOW in a $175 million deal
• Pliant acquires Austrian insurtech startuphi.health
• Bolt launches a financial super-app combining one-click crypto and everyday payments

A special look in the Italian market

• Italian fintech Tundr closes a €7,2 million round to simplify corporate welfare

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

Events you don’t want to miss

• EU startup summit | 24-25.04.2025 (Link to the event)

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

Startups raising funds

• Loyyal - Loyalty platform from the MENA region, with entities in the US and South East Asia, provides a B2B2C platform to handle multiple loyalty programs and earn rewards all over the world. Raising a $6M Series A
• Freedhome - Proptech and fintech platform, enabling people to be able to gain profit from real estate by renting them to intermediaries. Raising a $1M seed round

• Tutornow - Edtech that provides an online tutoring platform for students with learning disorders. Raising $500k to $1M.
• Weagle - B2B Tech startup that provides the very first browser designed for company, with total security for sensitive data. Raising $6 millions for their seed round.

• Shoppy Code:Gift card platform that offers a points based loyalty program. They share part of the profits coming from marketing budgets with their customers. Raising $500k.

Take also a look at the last edition of the newsletter, Weekly update #76