The infrastructure of the future is being built right now — in lending workflows, living rooms, and on-chain protocols. This edition of B2B FinTech @Scale follows the capital and the conviction: Samarth spotlights three companies redefining how financial institutions scale — Otomato, CasaPerks, and Saris — each tackling a distinct layer of the modern financial stack.
Frank takes us deeper into the megatrend reshaping trust in banking: blockchain as foundational infrastructure, not buzzword. We sit down with Lukas Waldner of 21energy, who has found an elegant answer to a question nobody thought to ask — what if your home heater also mined Bitcoin?
And as always, we round up the funding rounds worth watching, from agentic insurance workflows to AI-powered healthcare payments. The convergence is happening. Read on.
A Q&A with Lukas Waldner from 21energy on Turning Bitcoin Mining into Profitable Clean Heating
What do the Karakoram mountains and a Bitcoin space heater have in common? More than you’d think — at least if you ask Lukas Waldner.
At just 25, the Innsbruck native has already led a first ascent on a 6,653-metre peak in Pakistan, managed the largest German-speaking Bitcoin conference, and co-founded a company that is quietly rewriting the economics of home heating across Europe. Together with CEO Maximilian Obwexer, Lukas built 21energy from a bold idea born in 2022 — that the waste heat of a Bitcoin mining chip shouldn’t go to waste at all. The result is the Ofen, a certified space heater that warms your home and earns Bitcoin at the same time.
In just three years, 21energy has fulfilled over 10,000 orders, shipped to 36 countries, and hit €2.5 million in revenue — all while preparing to scale into industrial heating and grid-flexibility services. The company sits at a fascinating intersection: energy infrastructure, Bitcoin treasury, and the hard-nosed business of keeping people warm in winter.
We sat down with Lukas to understand how 21energy is positioning itself at the crossroads of the energy transition and the Bitcoin economy — and why this might be exactly the kind of infrastructure bet that financial institutions should be paying attention to.
1. Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s).
I’m Lukas Waldner, Co-Founder and COO of 21energy. We build energy-infrastructure services powered by Bitcoin mining: repurposing ASIC waste heat into high-efficiency Bitcoin space heaters, and deploying mobile mining containers that provide demand-response capacity while converting surplus electricity into revenue.
Outside the company I’m an professional alpinist and athlete of the international Millet team, focused on fast-and-light alpinism on technical routes in the Alps, Karakoram and Himalaya.
Read more from the interview: Turning Bitcoin Mining into the Future of Home Heating
B2B FinTech @Scale – Deal Highlights
Samarth Shekhar highlights startups that can help scale financial services by unlocking new customer segments or product offerings via B2B partnerships.
Otomato is essentially a cross-platform portfolio intelligence and real-time risk alert layer. the DeFi equivalent in TradFi would be tools that aggregate positions across multiple brokerages, detect events that matter (margin calls, rate changes, earnings surprises), and push personalised alerts rather than generic noise – e.g. Koyfin, Ziggma or Atom Finance. Otomato‘s edge is that once a user connects their wallet, Otomato auto-detects every position across every protocol without any manual input. If DeFi becomes the backend of an AI-agent economy where autonomous agents are managing on-chain positions, those agents will need exactly what Otomato provides: a real-time intelligence layer that knows what’s held and what matters.
Otomato raises $2M from Improbable to build real-time intelligence layer for DeFi users…Active DeFi users today manage positions across multiple protocols and chains, constantly switching between dashboards, missing critical events such as liquidations, rate spikes, and depegs (when a stablecoin or currency loses its fixed value against the asset it is meant to track), and drowning in noise from generic alert tools. Otomato solves this problem. Its customers provide their wallet addresses, and Otomato automatically detects every on-chain position – lending, tokens, NFTs, prediction markets – monitors them in real time across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and HyperEVM, and surfaces only the alerts that actually matter.
Most proptech platforms touch tenants at lease signing and renewal- so twice a year. CasaPerks is designed for monthly (or more frequent) active interaction via rewards. The Tackle acquisition means CasaPerks already has payment behaviour data a bank can use to offer pre-approved credit products to an engaged tenant audience, or insurers can use to embed renters insurance at lease signing or as a reward redemption.
CasaPerks Technologies, Inc., AI-Powered Rent and Workplace Rewards Platform, Closes Significant $15.8M Seed Round…At the core of the business, CasaPerks is the fastest and most intelligent rewards platform in the category — built on years of investment to let operators issue rewards and residents redeem them in under a minute, anywhere in the world. The same AI engine optimizes the rewards experience for both operators and residents — personalizing what each resident earns and redeems based on their preferences and behavior, surfacing real-time insights to operators on activation patterns and retention risk, and continuously learning which rewards and brand partnerships actually drive leasing, renewals, and NOI. Together with rent and credit monitoring capabilities from the Tackle acquisition, CasaPerks helps operators accelerate leasing, increase activation, improve retention, and grow ancillary revenue.
The case for players like Saris is that as agents are trained on a bank’s specific workflows, documents, exception patterns, and staff behaviours, they build institutional memory that a generic module from e.g. Fiserv AI can’t replicate without going through the same calibration process. Over time, Saris could also accumulate cross-institutional training data and data flywheel that makes it materially smarter than anything a single bank could build internally. However, they’ll need to watch out for incumbent platforms building this out themselves.
Saris Raises $28.8 Million to Scale Agentic Workflow Automation for Financial Institutions… Series A led by 8VC, with participation from Audacious Ventures, Homebrew, Btech Consortium, and Service Ventures…Saris’s platform is the first of its kind in the financial industry. Its agentic workflows reduce tasks that once took hours to minutes: up to 70% of consumer, mortgage, and commercial lending tasks are automated, and costs are reduced by up to 35%. As a result, banks and credit unions are more than doubling output without adding headcount.
Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of 20K+, reach out to Samarth Shekhar or Frank Schwab.
Megatrend: Blockchain is Redefining Trust in Banking
by Frank Schwab
Blockchain is no longer just a buzzword—it is rapidly becoming the foundational infrastructure for the future of digital finance . By reshaping how we handle transparency, security, and efficiency, it is completely rewiring traditional banking operations .
Here is a look at the massive impact on the horizon:
1️⃣ Global Adoption: By 2027, an estimated 10% of global GDP could be stored using blockchain technology…
Read more here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/frankschwab_blockchain-redefining-trust-42-megatrends-ugcPost-7462903115122417667-PKn0/
FUNDING ROUNDS
Otomato raises $2M from Improbable to build real-time intelligence layer for DeFi users
The French-founded startup helps DeFi users track risks and important changes across multiple crypto platforms through real-time personalised alerts already used by more than 2,000 users..
DeFi intelligence company Otomato has raised $2 million from Improbable.
Active DeFi users today manage positions across multiple protocols and chains, constantly switching between dashboards, missing critical events such as liquidations, rate spikes, and depegs (when a stablecoin or currency loses its fixed value against the asset it is meant to track), and drowning in noise from generic alert tools.
Otomato solves this problem. Its customers provide their wallet addresses, and Otomato automatically detects every on-chain position – lending, tokens, NFTs, prediction markets – monitors them in real time across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and HyperEVM, and surfaces only the alerts that actually matter.
DeepTree Raises €2M in Funding
DeepTree, a Milan, Italy-based developer of an AI-driven market intelligence platform for the private capital sectors, raised €2m in funding.
The round was led by CDP Venture Capital through its Digital Transition – PNRR fund, alongside participation from strategic international private angel investors.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its international expansion into European markets—with a core focus on the United Kingdom—while acquiring regional datasets, enhancing product features, and expanding its technical and sales teams.
Led by Co-founder and CEO Lorenzo Ferretti alongside Co-founder and CTO Claudio Arione, DeepTree develops a proprietary market intelligence platform designed for investment banks, private equity funds, and M&A advisory firms.
https://www.finsmes.com/2026/05/deeptree-raises-e2m-in-funding.html
IOTrader Raises $3.8M in Strategic Funding Round Led by Animoca Brands
IOTrader, a decentralized finance protocol built on the BNB Chain, has secured $3.8 million in a strategic investment round, marking a significant vote of confidence in its trading infrastructure. The round was led by Animoca Brands, with participation from ViaBTC Capital, Everwood Capital, CANDAQ, WAGMI Ventures, and Web3 Labs.
Strategic Backing for DeFi Expansion
The funding arrives at a time when the DeFi sector is navigating both regulatory scrutiny and renewed interest in automated trading solutions. IOTrader’s protocol focuses on providing on-chain trading tools, including limit orders and dollar-cost averaging strategies, which are often absent from standard decentralized exchange interfaces. The involvement of Animoca Brands, a major player in blockchain gaming and venture capital, signals a broader interest in infrastructure that bridges DeFi with mainstream crypto applications.
https://cryptorank.io/news/feed/ea454-iotrader-strategic-funding-animoca-brands
Squid Raises $6M to Expand Consumer Product Offering on Cross-Chain Infrastructure
Platform has routed $6B+ in volume across 100+ blockchain networks for 1M+ users since January 2023 launch
ZUG, Switzerland, May 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Squid, a cross-chain platform connecting networks, liquidity sources, and applications to power the movement of digital assets across crypto, today announces $6M in funding led by North Island Ventures. Participating investors include Ripple, Dialectic, Borderless, Scenius Capital, Altos, and Arche Capital, along with angels from Axelar, Ledger, Polymer, Enso, and Peanut. Since launching in January 2023, Squid has routed over $6 billion in volume through more than 4 million transactions, serving over one million users and generating revenue through enterprise services and soon transaction fees. The funding will accelerate Squid’s expansion into consumer products that make accessing and managing digital assets across blockchains simple enough that users never need to think about the infrastructure underneath.
Kubera Health Raises $6.5M to Repair the Payment Layer Driving Healthcare’s $1 Trillion Admin Burden
The company is building an AI-native platform that connects every payor-provider contract to the operations that depend on it, from negotiation and modeling to payment and reconciliation.
NEW YORK, May 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Kubera Health today announced it has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Company Ventures, Dria Ventures, and SemperVirens. The company is building the contract-to-payment system of record for American healthcare: the missing infrastructure layer between the agreements that govern payment and the systems that execute them.
The American Medical Association has estimated that one in five commercial claims is processed inaccurately, a rate that has barely moved in over a decade. It contributes to a U.S. healthcare administrative burden that now runs approximately $1 trillion a year, with hospital bad debt up 10% in 2025 alone.
Harmoney raises €10m to boost AI compliance tools
Harmoney has secured a €10 million strategic minority investment from Smile Sail as the company looks to strengthen its compliance technology platform and expand internationally.
The funding will support product development, international expansion, and the acceleration of AI-driven capabilities within counterparty risk management. Harmoney said the investment will also help deepen support for its existing customer base across Europe.
The deal comes as financial institutions across the European Union prepare for major regulatory changes, including the implementation of the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Regulation in 2027 and the growing operational scope of the European Anti-Money Laundering Authority. At the same time, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is increasing compliance responsibilities across third-party supply chains.
https://ibsintelligence.com/ibsi-news/harmoney-raises-e10m-to-boost-ai-compliance-tools
CasaPerks Technologies, Inc., AI-Powered Rent and Workplace Rewards Platform, Closes Significant $15.8M Seed Round
Capital fuels expansion across real estate and the workplace while unlocking the company’s next phase of consumer growth
AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CasaPerks Technologies, Inc. (“CasaPerks Technologies”), the AI-powered intelligent rewards platform behind CasaPerks and WorksPerks — both built on Anthropic’s Claude — today announced the close of a $15.8 million seed round. Longevity Equity, investor in Elon Musk’s SpaceX/Ai platform headed by Managing Director Will Steakley, was among the round’s lead investors, with additional participation from institutional and top real estate operators. The capital will accelerate the company’s expansion across student housing and conventional multifamily, scale WorksPerks — its AI-powered workplace recognition platform — and fuel the company’s growing consumer rewards business.
Monad-Based DeFi Project TownSquare Secures $16.25M in Pre-Series A Funding
TownSquare, a decentralized finance (DeFi) money market protocol built on the Monad blockchain, has announced the successful closure of a $16.25 million pre-Series A funding round. The project disclosed the raise via its official X account, revealing a diverse group of investors that includes World Liberty Financial, Ouroscapital, Arcane, OKX Ventures, Animoca Brands, Amber Group, and Aptos.
Strategic Allocation of Capital
The fresh capital is earmarked to strengthen TownSquare’s revenue generation infrastructure, with a specific focus on two key areas: the USD1 stablecoin initiative and the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs). By integrating these assets into its money market protocol, TownSquare aims to bridge traditional finance with the on-chain economy, offering users more stable and yield-generating opportunities.
https://cryptorank.io/news/feed/498d0-townsquare-defi-monad-funding
Benefitbay raises $18m Series A to scale ICHRA platform
Benefitbay, a leading Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA) platform serving brokerages, employers and employees across the US, has reportedly closed an $18m Series A funding round.
The raise was led by Ten Coves Capital, with additional investment from KCRise Fund III, which participated in late March, according to a report from Start Land News. The capital is intended to support the next stage of the Kansas City-built company’s growth as the ICHRA market continues to mature.
The funds will go towards strengthening the company’s core infrastructure, broadening its payments capabilities beyond medical, and developing tools that allow brokers and employers to grow their operations more efficiently.
https://fintech.global/2026/05/26/benefitbay-raises-18m-series-a-to-scale-ichra-platform/
Saris Raises $28.8 Million to Scale Agentic Workflow Automation for Financial Institutions
Series A led by 8VC, with participation from Audacious Ventures, Homebrew, Btech Consortium, and Service Ventures
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Saris, the agentic workflow platform for banks and credit unions, today announced it has raised $28.8 million in Series A financing.
The round was led by 8VC, with participation from Audacious Ventures, Homebrew, Btech Consortium, and Service Ventures. It will be used to scale Saris’s platform across more financial institutions, deepen integrations with partners like Fiserv, Encompass, and MeridianLink, and grow the team that trains and deploys Saris agents.
Alex Kolicich, founding partner of 8VC, said, “Financial institutions of every size are under pressure to modernize their operations, and most have been underserved by technology that wasn’t built for the complexity of today’s banking. Saris is changing that. Their platform delivers real, measurable results without disrupting the systems and teams institutions depend on.”
Handle.com Raises $27M Million Series B to Build AI for Construction Finance
Construction is one of the largest industries in the world. Trillions of dollars move through it every year to build homes, hospitals, warehouses, roads, power plants, and data centers that power the global economy.
Yet despite its scale, many of construction’s most critical financial workflows still operate through fragmented systems, emailed PDFs, spreadsheets, phone calls, and manual coordination.
Every payment in construction carries layers of complexity: lien rights, waiver exchanges, project-level billing, retainage, compliance deadlines, conditional documentation, multi-party approvals, and collections workflows that generic financial software was never designed to handle.
For decades, construction companies were forced to stitch together disconnected point solutions and manual processes to manage these workflows.
https://www.handle.com/series-b
Foresight Ventures Leads $30M Investment in PopDEX to Advance Trader-Centric Perp DEXs
Foresight Ventures, the first and only crypto VC bridging East and West, today announced a $30 million strategic seed investment in PopDEX, a trader-centric perpetual decentralized exchange (perp DEX) built to align incentives with real contributors and enhance capital efficiency.
According to CoinGecko’s State of Crypto Perpetuals Report 2026, perpetual trading volume reached $751.59 billion in January 2026, which is significantly above the same period in 2025. This sustained year-over-year growth highlights the increasing importance of perp DEX infrastructure as traders look for more efficient, secure, and user-aligned venues. PopDEX aims to address these needs by building a trading platform designed around the real requirements of traders, while returning platform value to the contributors who help drive its growth.
Daloopa Raises $47 Million Series C to Power the Data Layer Behind AI-Driven Finance
The announcement on May 28, 2026, that Daloopa has closed a $47 million Series C funding round led by Brighton Park Capital marks a critical turning point in the commercialization of financial AI. Over the past two years, Wall Street and the broader buy-side ecosystem have aggressively integrated Large Language Models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents into their research operations. However, firms have run into a brick wall: generalist AI models suffer from severe data accuracy and “hallucination” problems because they rely on scraped, unstructured web inputs. In high-stakes environments like valuation modeling, portfolio risk evaluation, and earnings tracking, a single unstandardized data definition or misaligned fiscal calendar can quietly corrupt an entire quantitative strategy.
Thrive and Sequoia back Pace in $46m Series B round
Pace, an AI operations partner for insurers, has raised $46m in a Series B funding round co-led by Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital, with Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital also participating.
The round will fund an expansion of Pace’s agentic workforce capabilities, targeting tens of millions of operations tasks across the US, Europe and further international markets this year.
Pace counts several publicly known insurers and brokers among its partners, including The Mutual Group, Newfront, Prudential and WTW. Since its launch last year, the company’s AI agents have autonomously handled more than 250,000 critical insurance workflows.
At Prudential, the platform automates significant volumes of manual work across policy servicing and issuance for customer acquisition. Working alongside Ryze Claim Solutions, Pace has cut claim cycle times by 30%, while at Convex US its agents accelerate data ingestion for new business and renewals.
https://fintech.global/2026/05/27/thrive-and-sequoia-back-pace-in-46m-series-b-round/
Airwallex is now valued at $12 billion
Payments firm Airwallex has raised new funding at around a $12 billion valuation led by Lee Fixel’s Addition, Axios has learned.
Driving the news: The new round marks a 50% increase over its $8 billion valuation late last year, also led by Addition.
- Airwallex also is said to have hit the $1.5 billion ARR mark, versus $1 billion last October, with talk of hitting $2 billion by year-end. Its U.S. unit processes around $100 billion for over 40,000 businesses.
- The company is expected to seek a U.K. banking license, mirroring the Revolut strategy.
The big picture: Airwallex competes with financial firms from Stripe to Citi, and is seeking to become a business superapp.
- It began by focusing on cross-border transactions, but since has added spend spend management, billing, and business accounting.
https://www.axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/2026/05/28/airwallex-addition-valuation
Capchase, The ‘Affirm for B2B,’ Secures $200M In Debt And Equity
Financing startup Capchase has secured a new round of funding, consisting of $26 million in equity and a $174 million credit facility, the company told Crunchbase News exclusively.
01 Advisors led the round, which included participation from Caffeinated Capital, Thomvest Ventures, Scifi VC, Bling Capital, Invesco and others.
Founded in 2020, New York-based Capchase initially made a name for itself by providing revenue-based financing for SaaS companies. However, by late 2022, the company began to evolve into its current iteration: a vendor-financing technology platform. Capchase embeds itself directly into the sales workflows of companies such as original equipment manufacturers, software vendors and cybersecurity providers.
It has entirely discontinued its revenue-based financing, and instead now focuses on B2B buy now, pay later tools that help software and hardware vendors offer flexible payment terms while getting paid upfront.
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/fintech-capchase-b2b-bnpl-200m-debt-equity
Every issue of B2B FinTech @Scale is a reminder that the most consequential changes in finance rarely announce themselves loudly. They arrive as a DeFi alert, a rewards redemption, an automated lending decision — small moments in which the architecture of money shifts, quietly and irreversibly.
The founders and investors in these pages are building that architecture. We are grateful to learn alongside them — and alongside you. Until next week, keep building, keep backing, and stay curious.