• Earned wage access platform Rain has raised $116 million in Series A funding.
• The round consisted of $66 million in equity and $50 million in debt financing.
• Rain has disbursed more than $150 million in earned wages to its users, and grown its user and client base by 20% in the past 30 months.

Rain, an earned wage access platform, has secured $116 million in combined equity and debt funding. The Series A round consisted of $66 million in equity financing and $50 million in debt, and was led by QED Investors and Invus Opportunities.

“We built Rain to empower people, especially hourly workers, to take control of their finances and eliminate the need for predatory loans,” Rain CEO Alex Bradford said. “With this investment, we will continue to improve our platform and deliver a powerful employee benefit that improves individual financial wellbeing and boosts morale while giving employers a valuable tool for recruiting and retaining workers during a tight labor market.”

Also participating in the Series A were WndrCo, Tribe Capital, and Dreamers VC. The debt facility was provided by Sound Point Capital Management. Rain will use the funding to fuel expansion in the U.S., as well as make investments in technology, infrastructure, marketing, and employee and employer experience.

Rain’s platform enables employers to offer workers on-demand pay or access to earned wages. The company refers to the benefit as “income streaming,” and allows employees to receive their pay after completing a shift rather than waiting for a payday that may be weeks away. Workers are charged a small fee which Rain equates to an “ATM charge” when withdrawing earned wages. Additionally, workers cannot withdraw more than 50% of their gross earned wages per pay period. Earned wage access has emerged as a alternative to payday loans, which often charge exorbitant rates of up to 400% APR. Rain noted that employers using its app have experienced a reduction in employee turnover of up to 80%.

Founded in 2019, Rain is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. The company launched its Instant Pay app in 2020, and has grown its user and client base by more than 20% over the past 30 months. Rain has disbursed more than $150 million in earned wages to its users, helping them avoid “tens of millions in predatory fees” the company noted in a statement.

Photo by Pew Nguyen

• PhonePe raised $200 million from Walmart.
• With this latest tranche, the India-based company maintains its $12 billion valuation.
• The new investment brings PhonePe’s total funding to $650 million.

Just one month after raising $100 million, India-based PhonePe announced it closed a $200 million investment. With the new round, PhonePe’s pre-money valuation remains flat at $12 billion.

Today’s investment boosts the payments application expert’s total funding to $650 million, placing it more than halfway to reaching its $1 billion capital raise target. In its announcement today, PhonePe noted that it is expecting further progress toward the $1 billion goal, saying it is expecting more funding “in due course.”

PhonePe will use today’s funds to build and scale new businesses including insurance, wealth management, lending, stockbroking, Open Network for Digital Commerce-based shopping, and account aggregators. The investment will also help PhonePe grow UPI payments in India, including UPI lite and Credit on UPI. “We are excited about the next phase of our growth as we build new offerings for Indian consumers and merchants, along with enabling financial inclusion across the nation,” said PhonePe Founder and CEO Sameer Nigam.

“We are excited about PhonePe’s future and have confidence in how it continues to expand its offerings and provide access to financial services for Indians at scale,” said Walmart International President and CEO Judith McKenna. “India is one of the world’s most digital, dynamic and fastest growing economies, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to continue to support PhonePe.”

PhonePe was founded in 2015 and was acquired by Walmart-owned Flipkart in 2016. The company counts around 450 million registered users, a total that accounts for nearly one in three adult Indians. In 2017, PhonePe began offering investing tools, mutual fund products, and insurance tools.

• Stripe received $6.5 billion in Series I funding, along with an updated valuation of $50 billion.
• The $50 billion valuation is almost half of the company’s peak valuation of $95 billion received in 2021.
• Today’s investment will not be used to fuel company growth, but will instead be used to provide liquidity to employees and address employee equity awards withholding tax obligations.

Stripe announced a $6.5 billion Series I funding round today. Alongside the financing round, the payments processing company also unveiled an updated valuation.

The investment comes from existing Stripe shareholders– including Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, MSD Partners, and Thrive Capital. New investors GIC, Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management, and Temasek also contributed to the round, which boosts Stripe’s total funding to $8.7 billion.

Stripe also unveiled that it is now valued at $50 billion. This number is notably lower than the company’s peak. Stripe’s valuation rose to $95 billion in March of 2021, making it the most valuable U.S. startup. In July of 2022, the company’s valuation began tipping downward to $74 billion, and earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Stripe was valued at $63 billion.

Unlike most venture funding rounds, however, today’s investment will not be used to fuel company growth. Instead, as Stripe notes in its announcement, “The funds raised will be used to provide liquidity to current and former employees and address employee withholding tax obligations related to equity awards.” This liquidity will offset the issuance of today’s round’s new shares, and therefore will not result in a reduction of the percentage of ownership that current investors hold in the company.

Founded in 2010, Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars each year and offers a range of products– including a suite of global payments solutions, banking-as-a-service offerings, and revenue and financial management tools.

Photo by Jonathan Borba

• Payments platform for digital worlds, Tilia, has raised $22 million.
• The funds come from South Korea-based Dunamu and J.P. Morgan Payments.
• Tilia offers a compliant way for digital content creators to receive micropayments and mints fiat-pegged currency that can be used in virtual economies.

Tilia, a digital payments platform for games and virtual worlds, announced this week it received $22 million in funding.

Today’s funds come from South Korea-based Dunamu. Combined with the funds that existing investor J.P. Morgan Payments invested in Tilia in October of 2022, the venture round boosts the company’s total raised to $22 million. Tilia will use today’s round to scale its platform and address the demand for payments in digital economies.

Originally founded in 2019, Tilia was spun out of Second Life creator Linden Lab in 2022. The California-based company’s payments platform is the backbone for online economies such as those found in online games, creator platforms, social commerce, and other digital worlds. Tilia enables creators to receive direct payouts by processing user-generated content transactions and microtransactions, allowing them to monetize their operations. For games and virtual worlds, the company mints branded tokens that are compliant in the U.S. and have a fixed conversion rate to fiat currency.

Along with today’s news, Tilia also announced two new appointments. The company brought on Brad Oberwager as CEO and Catherine Porter as Chief Business Officer. Oberwager has served as Executive Chair at Tilia for the past two years.

“Today’s payments infrastructure was built for traditional commerce – it hasn’t caught up with the new way of living and working in a digital, creator-driven economy,” said Oberwager. “At Tilia, we have a massive opportunity to unlock new revenue streams for both online creators and the platforms they build in, whether they are gaming worlds, social platforms, or next generation marketplaces. As I take the helm at Tilia, my focus will be on providing a payments system that enables these expanding digital economies.”

Photo by RODNAE Productions

• Regtech Droit raised $23 million in Series B funding in a round led by Pivot Investment Partners and UBS’ venture and innovation unit UBS Next.
• The New York-based company will use the capital to support its expansion into wealth management, as well as to develop new products.
• Droit’s signature offering Adept is a platform that helps keep businesses compliant by operationalizing laws, rules, and policies within existing systems.

In a round led by Pivot Investment Partners and UBS – via its venture and innovation unit UBS Next – U.S.-based regtech Droit has raised $23 million in Series B funding. The new capital takes the company’s total equity funding to $39 million, according to Crunchbase. Also participating in the financing was existing investor Goldman Sachs.

Droit will use the investment to support its expansion into wealth management and develop new products including Position Reporting, Transaction Reporting, and new cloud-based services. The company specializes in global regulatory compliance in the capital markets industry, and its flagship offering, Adept, is used by many of the largest financial institutions in the world for pre- and post-trade decision-making and auditability.

More specifically, Adept helps support compliance efforts by operationalizing laws, rules, and policies within existing systems. Droit continuously monitors regulatory and policy changes in order to update its platform as new rules, as well as new interpretations of old rules, are issued. The platform enables users to see exactly how rules and regulations are applied and uses a logic model with traceable pathways to the original source text to verify decisions. This provides for greater clarity, enhanced operational efficiency, and a process that is repeatable and defendable.

“This year marketed Droit’s 10-year anniversary and we greatly appreciate the support from our investors and their confidence in our future success,” Droit founder and CEO Brock Arnason said. “This funding will enable us to accelerate the innovation of our new product lines. We are also excited to join UBS Next’s portfolio of fintech companies and look forward to partnering with them on building out our wealth management capabilities.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in New York, Droit is a specialist in computational law and regulation. The company expects to leverage its Adept platform to bring its transparent decision-making infrastructure – currently applied to capital markets – to the world of wealth management. UBS Chief Digital and Information Officer Mike Dargan underscored this in a statement, saying that UBS “look(s) forward to extending our relationship with them across our wealth management business.”

Droit’s latest funding arrives after two years of “strong growth” for the company. Over this time, Droit commercialized four new products lines, and grew its team by nearly 70% including making key leadership hires in business development and technology. The company also has expanded geographically, opening offices in Singapore to help take advantage of opportunities in the region.

Photo by Pixabay

• U.K.-based Ramp raised $5 million in Seed funding for its business forecasting tools.
• This marks the company’s first round of funding.
• The round was led by AlbionVC and Eurazeo with participation from Triple Point Ventures and a group of Angel Investors.

Business forecasting company Ramp (not to be confused with business finance automation startup Ramp) raised $5 million in Seed funding this week. The round was led by AlbionVC and Eurazeo with participation from Triple Point Ventures and a handful of Angel Investors.

Ramp, which plans to use the funds to streamline and scale client onboarding, offers businesses forecasting tools to help finance teams enhance revenue predictions. The company aims to replace the Excel spreadsheets many businesses use for revenue forecasting with a more sophisticated tool. Ramp’s technology enables businesses to run scenarios and forecast in a matter of minutes and predict customer behavior, future revenue, and annual growth.

“Our platform dramatically increases the accuracy of revenue forecasting in a fraction of time it would take in spreadsheets,” said Ramp Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Angus Lovitt. “What took us all a day in terms of number crunching we can now do in minutes. Yet what really excites me about the platform are the strategic decisions we empower businesses to make.”

Lovitt brings his experience from the computer gaming world to Ramp. He helped scale the popular Candy Crush game during his tenure at King Digital Entertainment. Lovitt also carries over his connections to the gaming community. He has brought on a handful of gaming clients– including Space Ape Games, FRVR, Pixel United, and Netspeak Games– to Ramp.

U.K.-based Ramp was founded in 2018 and specializes in cohort-based forecasting. With an ambition to become a tech unicorn, today was Ramp’s first round of funding. “Our long term goal is to position Ramp as a single source of truth for the future of businesses, from which prescriptive and proactive analytics services can stem,” said company CEO Dan Marcus. “We’re at the forefront of this new product category and it’s great to have such renowned investors believe in this vision and join us on this journey.” Marcus described the VC funding process in a recent blog post.

Photo by Sujira Su

• Payment intelligence company Pagos has raised $34 million in Series A funding.
• The capital, which takes the company’s total equity funding to $44 million, will be used to expand the company’s engineering team and advance Pagos’ enterprise product suite.
• Pagos was founded in 2021 by veterans of Braintree, Venmo, PayPal, Stripe, eBanx, Klarna, and Apple.

In a round led by Arbor Ventures, payment intelligence company Pagos has secured $34 million in Series A funding. The oversubscribed round also featured participation from Point 72 Ventures, Infinity Ventures, and Underscore VC. The investment will enable the company to grow its engineering team and advance Pago’s enterprise product suite.

“Our platform helps companies understand and act on the data that already exists within their payments environment, allowing them to better support changing consumer behavior and demands, reduce their operating costs, increase their revenue, and mitigate unnecessary customer friction — all without having to change their current payments infrastructure,” Pagos co-founder and CEO Klas Bäck explained in a statement.

Pagos’ total funding now stands at $44 million, according to Crunchbase. The Wilmington, Delaware-based company raised $10 million in seed funding in October 2021.

Many of the largest online brands in the world – including Adobe, GoFundMe, and Eventbrite – rely on Pagos’ platform. The company’s technology analyzes more than one billion transactions a year, providing real-time payment transaction monitoring to help companies detect potential issues, trends, and opportunities – all without having to change their existing payment stack. Via solutions like Peacock, Pagos provides businesses with a dashboard that provides full visibility into payments data across vendors, channels, and markets. This enables them to build a flywheel of payments optimization which leads to improved customer conversions and identification of optimal payment methods, as well as the ability to conduct A/B testing and more.

“Payment processing is fundamental to customer relationships, revenue, and a business’s bottom line, but most companies don’t have the data, knowledge, or tools to develop and execute on a best-in-class payments performance strategy,” Bäck said. “Even the small number of companies that do have those resources are leaving money on the table.”

Founded in 2021 by former Braintree, Venmo, PayPal, Stripe, eBanx, Klarna, and Apple veterans, Pagos began 2023 with news that the company had crossed the one billion transaction events threshold for the first time.

Photo by NAUSHIL | SKYHAWK. ASIA