“The market for investment management platforms presents a significant opportunity, driven by increased AuM, regulatory requirements, a rising focus on ESG, and the ongoing digital transformation of the financial industry. 90% of operational processes in European investment firms are expected to be automated by 2028 due to a report of PwC.”
This week we feature a Q&A with Lukas Müller of Layest- an investment management & fund administration platform. Read on for our selection of B2B FinTech financing rounds that financial institutions should have on their radar.
1. Tell us a bit about yourself / your co-founder(s)
I’m Lukas, CEO of Layest and I’m a serial tech founder with +10 years of experience in the fintech sector (previously at Rendity and LIQIMO, among others). My co-founders and I have been working together for many years and we bring a unique combination of deep financial expertise and advanced technical knowhow, ensuring that we understand both the complexities of investment management and the importance of cutting edge technology in driving efficiency and growth.
2. What problem or opportunity do you address, and for which target customers?
Managing client investments involves major complexities: Regulatory requirements, decentralized data, manual workflows, complex and inefficient operations, inflexible deal structures, no single source of truth about sensitive information, lack of integrations with other tools, etc.
Our target customers are companies within the financial industry like investment funds, SPVs, investment clubs, capital brokers, investment advisors and other financial institutions.
3. What is your solution, and who do you compete with?
Layest is a cloud based all-in-one platform for investment management and fund administration. We compete with BlackRock Aladdin or Bloomberg AIM, among others.
4. Relevant industry trends or market shifts to watch, and associated research or articles you can point us to?
The market for investment management platforms presents a significant opportunity, driven by increased AuM, regulatory requirements, a rising focus on ESG, and the ongoing digital transformation of the financial industry. 90% of operational processes in European investment firms are expected to be automated by 2028 due to a report of PwC.
5. What is your company’s current stage and traction?
We have a unique product offering AI agents for the financial industry. We have existing customers. We have a great team with a lot of experience managing investments.
6. Your plans for the next 6-18 months, and how can our network help?
Currently we are structuring our first financing round. We are constantly working on improving our product, adding new features and acquiring new customers. Within the time period of 6-18 months we expand to UK, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein. The Fintech Forum network will help us to build a large company, take advantage of a high-potential B2B SaaS Market and to grow rapidly.
7. What’s on your bookshelf or podcast app? Your favourite place for a coffee or a drink?
We build Layest out of Vienna, famous for our coffee houses like Café Sacher or Café Central. However, next to Café Central there is a small unknown coffee place in the Palais Ferstel called CaffèCouture. Reading old but gold 1984 from George Orwell there!
FINANCING ROUNDS
ORO Labs Raises $1.5M to Bring Gold to the Internet Capital Markets on Solana
ORO Labs secures $1.5M in pre-seed funding round, backed by 468 Capital, to redefine gold markets
For centuries, gold has been the world’s most trusted store of value—yet it has remained underutilized in financial markets. ORO is changing this by making gold more than just a passive investment—it’s now a fully functional, yield-generating financial asset.
The funding round was led by 468 Capital, with participation from Fasset and angel investors from leading Solana projects, including Phantom, Jupiter, Helium, Squads, Sanctum, Anza Labs, Perena, Bonk, and Forma, among others…
“The UAE is a global leader in gold trade, facilitating over $100 billion in gold transactions annually. By establishing itself in the UAE, ORO is able to tap into the region’s gold liquidity, regulatory clarity, and deep-rooted trade networks to offer users a secure, transparent, and scalable way to access and use tokenized gold on a global scale.
In addition to its funding success, ORO also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) at ADGM last month in the presence of HE Dr. Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Trade, and HE Dr. Jörg Kukies, Germany’s Minister of Finance. The MOU outlines ORO’s commitment to expanding tokenized gold adoption across the UAE and beyond, reinforcing its strategic partnerships and regulatory compliance.
https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/104772/oro-labs-raises-15-million-for-tokenized-gold-play
Utila raises $18M to meet demand for its institutional digital asset wallets
Digital asset operations platform startup Utila Inc. announced today that it has raised $18 million in new funding to scale up global operations to meet demand for its institutional multiparty computation wallets and expand its research and development efforts.
Founded in 2022, Utila is an institutional digital asset operations platform that enables organizations to securely manage and build on digital assets. Utila provides enterprise-grade, secure MPC wallets that ensure military-grade security against key mismanagement and potential threats. MPC wallets employ multiparty computation technology or MPC to enhance security by distributing private key operations across multiple parties, ensuring no single entity has complete control.
The Utlia platform offers a robust policy engine for user and transaction management that allows organizations to assign roles and set approval flows based on multiple parameters. Utila supports a wide range of integrations, including anti-money laundering services, banking, liquidity providers, exchanges, decentralized finance platforms, staking and disaster recovery solutions.
Stablecoins have also become a significant focus of the company as their adoption continues to reshape the financial landscape. In 2024, stablecoin transfers surpassed $27.6 trillion, exceeding the combined transaction volume of Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., highlighting their growing role in global payments.
As the industry shifts from speculative trading to real-world financial applications, Utila is positioning itself to meet the increasing demand for secure and efficient stablecoin infrastructure.
Nyca Partners LP led Utila’s Series A round with participation from seed investors Wing Venture Capital and NFX Guild Management, as well as funds including Haymaker Ventures, Gaingels and Cerca Partners. Including the new funding, Utila has raised $35 million to date, including a round of $11.5 million in March 2024.
Blockchain payments company Halliday raises $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz
Halliday, a startup that helps financial institutions automate services with blockchain and AI technology, has raised $20 million from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz.
The company works with charter banks, payment service providers and other financial institutions that are interested in blockchain technology to help accelerate their entrance into the space by making it easier to design financial workflows, CEO and co-founder of Halliday Griffin Dunaif told Fortune.
Financial workflows—an organized sequence of steps required to move funds from one place to another—are integral to any company that handles money for their clients. In the crypto world, establishing these workflows requires engineers to program smart contracts, which can be a slow and arduous process, Dunaif said.
With Halliday’s Agentic Workflow Protocol, companies can easily connect services like verifying a transaction or issuing a payment, into one cohesive workflow. “It’s an engine that lets you stitch together services into workflows so that they can be automated,” Dunaif said.
Additionally, developers can implement agentic AI—a type of AI model that can solve problems and execute actions with limited supervision—within their workflows to automate decision-making. “We want to bring blockchain up to the agentic era, because no software will not be agentic as these technologies mature,” he said.
Other crypto companies also work with financial institutions to make their payment systems more efficient. Consensys, a blockchain company founded in 2014, has a product called the CodeFi Blockchain Application Suite, which includes a service that helps financial institutions automate workflows.
Other investors in this latest round included Avalanche Blizzard Fund, Credibly Neutral, and Alt Layer. Halliday previously raised $6 million from Andreessen Horowitz in 2022.
Mortgage as an employee benefit? Kleiner Perkins leads $23.5M Series A for Multiply Mortgage
After hitting record lows at the start of the pandemic, mortgage rates began to climb in 2022 and haven’t come down significantly since.
With 30-year mortgage rates hovering at over 6.5% today (they were as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply not that attainable for many people.
One Denver-based startup is out to help change that. Founded in 2022, Multiply Mortgage originally set out to help tech employees access some of the value of their equity compensation while their employers were still private.
But interestingly, the founders, Michael White and Gautam Gupta — alums of Square, Opendoor, DoorDash, and Uber — observed that most of the employees were using their liquidity offerings for home purchases and related expenses.
“Homeownership has become increasingly out of reach for many Americans, and we don’t expect interest rates to fall to the levels we saw in 2020 ever again,” White told TechCrunch.
So in July 2024, the startup altered course to offer a mortgage benefit program that helps employees of its partner companies, which include the likes of Anduril and Ramp, navigate a home purchase.
Today, Multiply offers employees 1:1s with mortgage advisors, employee education sessions around the home purchase and financing process as well as mortgage interest rate discounts of up to .75%. The startup works with a network of 15-20 lenders to access discounted interest rates.
Multiply is not the only company that aggregates potential lenders. Others such as LendingTree do as well. But White asserts that the biggest difference between Multiply and LendingTree is the latter is more of a self-serve marketplace to find lenders and compare them. Multiply’s model is more of a concierge one that is also paired with reduced interest rates, he added.
…Multiply makes money by earning commission on mortgage originations.
Crossmint Raises $23.6M, led by Ribbit Capital
To bring every business and AI agent onchain
16 years in the making, blockchains are ready for scale. Stablecoins will transform commerce, every asset will be tokenized, and every business will move onchain, just as they moved online in the 2000s.
AI agents are a massive new class of user that will gravitate to wallets and stablecoins as they facilitate an increasing portion of e-commerce spending, and take over the economy.
However, for this transformation to happen, building and using onchain applications must become radically simpler—a core belief that drives everything we do at Crossmint.
Today, we’re announcing $23.6M in funding, led by Ribbit Capital, to help move every business – and AI agent – onchain, with an all-in-one platform that supports any use case.
Building onchain is hard. To build a single application, companies must hire a costly team of blockchain engineers.
From there, they need to tape together anywhere from 5-10 vendors (RPCs, indexers, wallet infra, treasury management, tokenization, crypto accounting, security plug-ins, and more). Onboarding takes months.
Companies then must build internal processes for adding crypto to their balance sheet, managing a treasury, paying for gas—all while keeping private keys secure and staying on top of an ever-changing regulatory environment.
Even after overcoming these hurdles, the end-user experience remains frustratingly complex. Passphrases, transaction approval prompts, and gas fees make adoption difficult to achieve.
Crossmint makes it easy. We transform the cumbersome process of building onchain through a suite of low-code APIs—for wallets, stablecoins, onramps, tokenization, and credentials—that can be combined to create any use case.
Our APIs don’t require extensive expertise to integrate. Companies can work with a single vendor. We handle treasury management and gas fees, so companies don’t need to hold crypto on their books, or worry about key management.
The rise of AI agents. Soon, most economic transactions will be executed by AI agents. These new economic actors will buy your groceries, book your flights, and manage the inventories and balance sheets of entire companies.
However, legacy systems have been designed to keep agents out. We know this particularly well given Crossmint co-founder Alfonso was formerly the PM behind Google’s “I’m not a robot,” reCAPTCHA, designed to block automated use.
Agents will need new systems that don’t require them to circumvent captchas, two-factor prompts, and manual approvals designed for human users. This is why we’ve adapted our APIs to cater to this new and rising class of consumer.
Our wallet, payment, and credential APIs now let agents securely hold funds, trade assets, and purchase goods and services. Crossmint’s GOAT SDK is the most downloaded open-source library for connecting AI agents to blockchain protocols, with 150,000 downloads in the past two months.
What’s next. In the past year, we’ve seen our subscription revenue increase by 1,100%, with over 40,000 companies and developers now using the Crossmint platform across 40+ blockchains. This momentum confirms what we’ve long believed: the world is ready to move onchain.
https://blog.crossmint.com/crossmint-raises-23-6m-led-by-ribbit-capital/
Mena Banking-as-a-Service player NymCard raises $33 million
Abu Dhabi-based banking-as-a-Service vendor NymCard has secured $33 million in a Series B funding round.
Led by QED Investors, the round saw strong backing from existing investors including Lunate, Dubai Future District Fund, Mashreq Bank, Knollwood, Reciprocal, FJLabs, Shorooq and Endeavor, alongside new participation from Oraseya Capital
Operating across 10+ markets in Mena, NymCard’s full-stack infrastructure provides embedded card issuing and processing, lending and real-time money movement services to a client base comprising 50+ banks, enterprises, fintechs and telecom providers.
“This investment is a testament to the strength of our technology and our commitment to enabling financial innovation in Mena,” says Omar Onsi, CEO of NymCard. “With the backing of our investors, we will continue pushing the boundaries of payments and embedded finance, ensuring our clients have access to best-in-class payment infrastructure solutions backed up by solid programme management capabilities.”
Inn-Flow Secures $45 Million Growth Investment from Mainsail Partners
Inn-Flow has secured $45 million to help accelerate innovation, enhance customer experience, and fuel growth for its all-in-one hotel management and accounting platform
Raleigh, NC – March 14, 2025 – Inn-Flow, a leading provider of modern, all-in-one back-office management and accounting software specifically designed for hotels, today announced a $45 million growth capital investment from Mainsail Partners, a growth equity firm that specializes in partnering with vertical SaaS companies. This investment will help accelerate Inn-Flow’s ongoing product innovation, significantly enhance customer experience, and expand the team to better serve the evolving needs of hotel owners and management companies.
Originally developed in 2009 by hospitality industry veteran John Erhart to address operational challenges within his family’s hotel management business, Inn-Flow officially launched industry-wide in 2014. Since then, it has grown quickly into a comprehensive, cloud-based platform purpose-built to streamline hotel operations, enhance financial management, and optimize labor costs. Inn-Flow’s integrated solutions span accounting and bookkeeping, labor management, payroll, business intelligence, and more—enabling hotel operators to efficiently run and scale their businesses.
https://mainsailpartners.com/inn-flow-secures-45-million-growth-investment-from-mainsail-partners/
Fortis secures capital infusion
Fortis, a payments technology leader for software providers, ERP customers, and scaling businesses announced today that it has received a joint investment from Audax Private Equity (“Audax”) and existing investor Lovell Minnick Partners (“LMP”). This investment will support Fortis in accelerating its mission to become the global leader in payment technology and embedded commerce experiences for businesses. Fortis, under LMP’s stewardship, has experienced rapid expansion by delivering innovative, technology-driven solutions that empower businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate payments into their software and workflows. Audax and LMP will jointly participate in this growth-oriented recapitalization. This capital infusion positions the company for continued growth and expansion in the rapidly expanding $100 trillion B2B payments market.
Since the investment by LMP in 2019, Fortis has expanded its reach across the business-to-business platform and software ecosystem, providing tailored payment solutions that drive efficiency and improved customer and business experiences…
…Through this strategic investment, Audax will join LMP in its partnership with Fortis to enhance the embedded payments journey, enhance product and service offerings, and scale infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of businesses. By leveraging the deep expertise and resources of Audax in scaling middle-market companies and Fortis’ track record in embedded, ERP and business payments, the partnership is poised to strengthen Fortis’ market position and technological capabilities.
https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/104760/fortis-secures-capital-infusion
VENTURE FUNDS
In another good sign for fintech, Ribbit Capital is raising a new $500M fund
Ribbit Capital, a venture firm known for its fintech investments, is raising $500 million for a new fund, a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed on Wednesday.
The new capital appears to be a part of the Palo Alto-based venture firm’s latest flagship fund, titled Ribbit Capital Y, the SEC filing suggests.
In 2023, Ribbit Capital raised $800 million, reportedly for its tenth flagship fund, Ribbit Capital X.
The venture firm has invested in (and exited) some of the world’s biggest fintech startups, including Nubank, Affirm, and Robinhood. In addition to backing North American startups, the firm has invested in fintechs across emerging markets, including those in India, such as CRED, Fi, Groww, Razorpay, and PhonePe, among others. It also invested in crypto-focused companies including the likes of Coinbase, CoinSwitch, and Uniswap.
Interestingly, Ribbit Capital’s recent funds are significantly smaller than the $1.15 billion vehicle it raised in 2022. That followed a busy year for the firm, which closed deals even in markets like Latin America to capitalize on the global 2021 VC boom.
Nevertheless, since its inception in 2012, Ribbit Capital has backed 243 investments and led 90 of them, per the details available on Crunchbase. Crypto wallet infrastructure startup Privy’s $15 million round was the latest led by Ribbit Capital this week.
The firm also exited 24 of its investments, per Crunchbase.
The fundraise is yet another signal that the once-beleaguered fintech area is back on the upswing. Other signs include the planned IPO of international buy now, pay later darling Klarna and the rise in valuations of Ramp and Stripe. This after ServiceTitan had a blockbuster IPO in December that was a good omen for other fintechs.
Vento rolls out new €75M fund for Italian founders, no matter where they live
Over the last 15 years or so, as European venture capital shifted into a higher gear, one way to help a nation’s ecosystem flourish was to invest in founders from that country, regardless of where they were based. This would help re-patriate the entrepreneurial mindset back home. In Europe, the approach was pioneered in part by Paris-based Kima Ventures. Now a new venture firm hopes to replicate that idea from Italy.
Vento, one of Italy’s most active private early-stage VCs, is launching its second fund, hard-capped at €75 million, specifically to back Italian startup founders at home and abroad.
The sector-agnostic fund originated from the organizers of Italian Tech Week (ITW), held annually in Turin, which has hosted the likes of Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk, among others.
The event was originally launched by Fiat family scion John Elkann, chairman of Vento, as well as chairman of Stellantis (the parent company of Fiat) and Exor (the holding company of the Agnelli family, which controls Fiat and other assets).
