Politics and regulation- The VC world is waiting to see how the SEC intends to regulate the industry, thanks to more money flowing into VC and a ‘Fried’ crypto exchange as it seeks to protect investors. Along with pending regulation, a proposed rule would make it easier for investors to sue VCs (stay tuned), with the associated costs likely passing on to investors and startups. How’s that for a markup?
Some notable trends this week:
- Significant blockchain and payments funding week over week, banks are trying to get in on the action.
- Middle East and African startups are solving worldwide problems with cutting edge technology and less red tape- two regions attracting VC inflows from around the world; a sample in our #3.
- Note this week’s #4, Monad Labs – Apps for blockchain developers; scale with less cost and a shorter timeline to revenue (simply brilliant). I get by ‘With A Little Help From My Friends (developer friends).
Without further ado, here are this week’s Top 5 VC Deal…
1PhonePe
$100M, Capital | Equity | India | Payments | Rabbit Capital, Tiger Global, TVS Capital| https://www.phonepe.com/
LinkedIn Overview:
“PhonePe is a mobile payments app that allows you to transfer money instantly to anyone, by using just their mobile number. Our goal is to make digital payments so easy, safe & universally accepted that people never feel the need to carry cash or cards again.”
2Taurus
$65M, Series B, Capital | Equity | Switzerland| Blockchain | Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Pictet Group, Cedar Mundi Ventures, Arab Bank Switzerland, Investis| https://www.taurushq.com/
LinkedIn Overview:
“Taurus is a global-leader in enterprise-grade digital asset infrastructure with roots in Switzerland. Taurus has >50% market share in its home market in Switzerland, the most competitive in the world. Globally, Taurus is entrusted by the full spectrum of financial institutions – systemic banks, investment banks, crypto banks…”
3Smile Identity
$20M, Series B, Capital | Equity | Nigeria | FinTech | Costanoa, Norrsken22, Commerce Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Two Culture Capital, Valuestream Ventures, Intercept Ventures, Latitude, Future Africa, 500 Fintech | https://smileidentity.com/
LinkedIn Overview:
“Smile Identity provides the best Africa-focused solutions for real time Digital KYC, Identity Verification, User Onboarding, Document Verification, Liveness Checks, Face Verification, Anti-fraud, Know your Business (KYB), and Identity Data Deduplication across Africa…”
4Monad Labs
$19M, Seed | Equity | Chicago | Blockchain | Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, Naval Ravikant, Cobie, Hasu | https://www.monad.xyz/
LinkedIn Overview:
“We are a tech startup using low-latency programming, compiler optimization, and multithreaded computing to build an ultra-high-performance smart contract platform. We are on a mission to enable the next generation of decentralized apps for the next generation of blockchain users—more complex apps requiring higher compute budgets, providing services to many more people.”
5Shift
$18.5M, Series C, Capital| Equity | Australia | Payments | Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia| https://www.shift.com.au/
Website Overview:
“Enabled by streaming data, Shift provides a real time view of the financial position of a business. This enables dynamic limit setting and enhanced credit modelling. For a business, this means they don’t have to put up with lengthy approval processes…”
