Fintech Investment Evolves

Dateline: Woking, 30th June 2023.I always thought that “unicorns” was the wrong name for fintechs that reached a billion dollar valuation. After all, unicorns do not exist (sorry kids) but such fintechs do. They are not mythical, but they are rare. What’s more, they seem to be getting rarer. We probably should have called them fintech red wolves or fintech Amur leopards. Are they going extinct though? I think not. Evolutionary PressuresU.S. startup funding sits as $73 billion so far this year, so it’s unlikely that this uyear overall will match last year’s $215 billion (which was itself a big drop from the record year of 2021). Not so good. But while global fintech funding fell by almost a half last year, it was still a fifth of all funding globally, which would seem to indicate that investors in that sector remain positive.Subscribe nowA CB Insights analysis recently found that two of the largest global VC firms (Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz) actually backed more fintech companies in 2022 than any other category, putting around a quarter of the total investments into fintech startups. There are also signs that the fintech market is beginning to stir globally, with Visa buying the Brazilian fintech Pismo for $1 billion in cash and NASDAQ paying an astonishing $10 billion for Thoma Bravo’s Adenza.This does not mean that fintechs are heading for the stratosphere though, and there are signs that some startups may remain overvalued. In recent months, several high-profile fintech companies have seen investors…Fintech Investment Evolves