If you’ve been too busy watching your bitcoin this year, you might have missed the insanity around early-stage fintech funding. The funding amounts and sheer number of new companies launching makes it nearly impossible for folks to track what’s happening. We’re here to help.

Over the next few issues, we’re going to highlight a few interesting startups that are worth taking a closer look at.

FINTECH MANIA:

CB Insights released its most recent list of private companies valued over $1B, demonstrating that Fintech dominates the unicorn club.

• CB Insights: The Complete List of Unicorn Companies 

CB Insights also found that funding into fintech startups is increasing at an unprecedented rate.  

• CB Insights: State Of Fintech Q2’21 Report: Investment & Sector Trends To Watch

TRACKING STARTUPS:

“Because Stampli’s core product focused on the context of individual transactions, it plays well with its payments product. For example, folks who pay through ACH (which comes at a low, flat cost) usually suffer from the fact that the payment method likes to group multiple transactions into a single sum, which removes context.” 

• TechCrunch: Stampli raises $50 million in Series C to help companies intelligently manage invoices

• TechCrunch: Stampli, an invoice management software startup, launches a payments product

Spenmo: “Right now companies don’t have that one source of truth. They use a tool for expense management, which is a silo, something else for vendor payments, something else for payroll and all these bank accounts they have to manage.”

• TechCrunch: Insight Partners leads $34M round in Singapore-based fintech Spenmo

Balance: “By leveraging payments and risk-assessment technology, any B2B company that sells goods online can now offer their buyers a wide range of payment methods (ACH, Card, Wire, and Checks) and flexible payment terms, and get paid instantly — all in one place.

• FINSMEs: Balance Raises $25M in Series A Funding

Unit makes it as easy for developers to add banking services as it is for them to integrate payments with Stripe or messaging with Twilio. Unit’s economics and features set an impressive standard for banking-as-a-service vendors.

• NotBoring: Absolute Unit

Ocrolus helps fintech and bank lenders make “faster, data-driven decisions with technology that automatically scans, categorizes and analyzes financial documents, capture key data fields, detect fraud and analyze cash flows

• TechCrunch: Ocrolus lands $80M at a $500M+ valuation to automate document processing for fintechs and banks

If you have thoughts or questions to share on this series, please leave a comment.

These musings on the developments in data-rich payments are assembled by the team at 20022 Labs. See more issues and subscribe to get updates in your inbox.