Weekly update #98

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 back with Season 3! The first guest of the new season was Benjamin Deplus, partner at BREEGA . You can watch the full episode here on YouTube, or listen to it here on Spotify or here on Apple Podcast.

Breega is a Paris based growth VC fund, investing in multiple stages, from seed to series B, in European ventures. Launched in 2015, they already have 700 million in AuM and over 100 portfolio companies, with honorable mentions like Dalma. and Jump .

During this interview, recorded during Money20/20 in Amsterdam, we’ve been talking about his dual experience going from traditional finance to startup founder, until his last VC experience. We also discussed how to choose a great founder, the overall capital fundraising environment in 2025, and his prediction on the fintech market.

Next week I will be in Riyadh for Money20/20 Middle East ! I will be joining Monica Brand Engel, Co-founder at Quona Capital, Ashish Aggarwal, Partner at PayPal Ventures, Rinat Blet, CEO at tiqmo and Umer Sharif, Investment Director at Joa Capital, to talk about investments in cross-border payments in the MENA region.

Happy to meet up if you are around for the event!

Coming back to us, I’ve been reading a very interesting report this week, the “Fintech’s next chapter: scaled winners and emerging disruptors” by Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The report is a comprehensive analysis of the main trends in fintech through 2023, 2024 until recent days, with a focus on emerging technologies and recent winners. Here my main takeaways:

Equity funding for fintechs declined 13% year over year in 2024, a softer contraction compared to the 51% drop seen in 2023. Revenue multiples edged up 3%, reversing the sharp 31% decline of the prior year. Despite this stabilization, the IPO market remained stagnant, with just 28 listings (versus 20 in 2023), none surpassing the $1 billion mark.

The sector also faced regulatory challenges, including fines for Chime ($2.5 million for delays in returning funds) and Block ($86 million for AML failures). The collapse of Synapse in April further shook confidence, leaving as much as $96 million in customer funds at risk.

Still, underlying business performance was strong. Fintech revenues grew 21% year over year—outpacing the 6% growth of traditional financial services—led by challenger banks like Nubank, Revolut, and Monzo Bank in deposits (+23%), trading and investment platforms such as Coinbase (+21%), and insurance providers and brokers (+40%). Momentum carried into 2025, with Q1 equity funding up 34% and revenue multiples rising 10%.

Fintechs made notable progress on profitability in 2024, moving from a “growth at all costs” model to a focus on sustainable performance. Average EBITDA margins rose by 4 percentage points to 16%, representing a 25% improvement. Profitability also became more widespread, with 69% of public fintechs reporting profits compared to fewer than half in 2023. In addition, 35% of public fintechs now exceed the “rule of 40” threshold, combining revenue growth and margins above 40%.

Despite these stronger fundamentals and early optimism for IPO activity in 2025, macroeconomic volatility has delayed several anticipated listings. Many fintechs are waiting for market conditions to stabilize, supported in the meantime by a robust secondaries market. Still, the sector remains well-positioned for a future IPO surge, with 150 fintechs founded before 2016—each raising over $500 million—yet to go public. Among them are major players such as Stripe, Revolut, PhonePe, and Toss.

Scaled fintechs, defined as those generating more than $500 million in annual revenue, produced about $231 billion of the sector’s $378 billion global revenues in 2024—roughly 60%. Yet, out of nearly 37,000 fintechs worldwide, fewer than 100 have reached this scale. With fintechs capturing just 3% of total banking and insurance revenue pools, significant opportunities remain across both verticals and geographies.

So far, success has been concentrated in a few categories. Payments dominate, contributing around 55% (approximately $126 billion) of scaled revenues, led by digital wallets such as PayPal, WeChat, and Apple Pay, as well as payment processors and vertical SaaS players like Stripe, Adyen, Toast, Shopify, and Square. Challenger banks follow with about 15% (~$27 billion), represented by Revolut, Monzo, KakaoBank, Nubank, and Toss. Retail crypto trading and brokerage firms such as Coinbase and Binance account for 7% (~$16 billion).

Onchain finance—financial activity conducted directly on blockchain—has yet to achieve product-market fit at a scale capable of reshaping traditional financial infrastructure. Nonetheless, progress in blockchain scalability and clearer regulation suggest an inflection point may be near. Strategic moves such as Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge and Ripple ’s $1.3 billion purchase of Hidden Road, combined with US ambitions to lead in crypto and Europe’s rollout of the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, reflect growing momentum. The challenge now lies in identifying tipping-point use cases that can drive network effects and broader adoption.

Stablecoins illustrate both the promise and limits of current applications. While initially tied to crypto trading and decentralized finance, usage is expanding, particularly as a store of value in high-inflation markets where access to US dollars is constrained. Dollar-pegged stablecoins—over 98% of the market—enable consumers and SMEs to tap into global liquidity. Turkey offers a striking example, with stablecoin purchases representing 4.3% of GDP in the year to March 2024. Yet sustainability is uncertain, as central banks like India’s resist potential currency substitution. With high-inflation economies accounting for just over 7% of global GDP, this use case, while important, may not alone be sufficient to trigger mass adoption.

Anyway we saw a lot of interesting news this week. Klarna made its debut as public company at $40 per share, Scalable Capital obtained a full banking license in EU, Lloyd Group acquired UK fintech Curve for $120 million. But also, BBVA made a first takeover bid for Banco Sabadell, Revolut obtained an in-principle license in the UAE, and easyJet launched easyBitcoin, a crypto app. In the VC industry, we saw Vireo Ventures closing a first $50 million electrification fund. A lot of movement in the Italian market! With Tot raising a $7 million round and Bending Spoons acquiring Vimeo for $1.38 billion. And finally, some very interesting funding rounds from fintech startups like Dispatch, Rainforest, Factris, Lead Bank, Kashimi, Mazlo and many others.

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

Closed deals

• Lead Bank raises $70M Series B at $1.47B Valuation to scale BaaS growth
• Dispatch raises $18M Series A to power AI-driven WealthTech data
• Accion Ventures raises $61.6M to back early-stage fintech globally
• DataCrunch.io raises €55M to challenge US hyperscalers in AI Cloud
• Rainforest raises $29M Series B to challenge Stripe in embedded payments
• Etherealize raises $40M to bring Wall Street onto Ethereum
• Factris secures €100M facility to scale SME financing across Europe
• Eloquent AI secures $7.4M to transform banking customer operations
• Orbii | أوربي raises $3.6M to transform SME lending in MENA with AI-powered infrastructure
• Kashimi secures $1.36M to scale open banking payment infrastructure
• Mazlo emerges from stealth with $4.6M to build fintech for nonprofits
• Marloo raises AUD$4.2M to build AI assistant for financial advisers
• Aven raises $110M Series E at $2.2B valuation to scale “machine banking” platform

Insights on the VC industry

• Vireo Ventures closes €50M electrification Fund I to back Europe’s energy transition

News on the market

• Lloyds Banking Group acquires Curve in £120M deal!
• Cross-border payments firms are betting big on Premier League sponsorships
• Balderton Capital nets massive profit from early Revolut bet
• easyJet founder launches easyBitcoin app for mass-market crypto trading
• Revolut gains in-principle approval for UAE payments licence
• Just in: Nasdaq invests $50M in Gemini ahead of IPO in the US
• DKB | Deutsche Kreditbank AG partners with Upvest to modernize securities trading for 5.9M customers
• ElevenLabs let employees sell $100M worth of stocks as valuation surges to $6.6B
• CoinShares to go public in $1.2B U.S. listing
• Scalable Capital becomes a fully licensed European bank
• Starling Bank prepares £4bn secondary share sale as it eyes US expansion
• Klarna debuts at $15.2B valuation as IPO prices at $40 per share
• Nasdaq pushes Security Exchange Commission for approval to trade tokenized stocks alongside traditional equities
• BBVA launches €14.8B takeover bid for Banco Sabadell amid merger freeze
• finmid expands to 30 markets to close Europe’s €400B SME financing gap
• Revolut launches Pay by Bank to accelerate open banking payments across Europe
• Uber partners with Pipe to deliver embedded capital for small businesses
• Coinbase acquires Sensible founding team to advance onchain consumer strategy
• Chime launches new cash back card to expand fee-free banking offering
• Robinhood enters copy trading with launch of Robinhood Social
• Perplexity is reported raising $200M at $20B valuation as AI search challenger scales

A special look in the Italian market

• Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo in $1.38B all-cash deal
• Tot secures €7M pre-Series A to scale SME-focused fintech platform

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

Events you don’t want to miss

• Money 20/20 - Riyadh | 15-17.09.2025 (link to event)
• Italian Tech Week - Turin | 1-3.10.2025 (link to 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

• 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 #97