Every week, the future of finance reveals itself in fragments — a founder’s conviction, an analyst’s sharp read, a fresh round of capital betting on what’s next. This edition brings those fragments together.
We open with Samarth Shekhar’s take on three startups quietly rewiring how financial services scale — from corporate bond issuance to private capital intelligence. Frank Schwab then looks further out, to a USD 13 trillion machine economy where robots carry their own wallets.
Our Q&A spotlight goes to Jeroen Merchiers of Zazume, who’s bringing Airbnb-style trust to Spain’s residential rental market. And we close with a round-up of the founders and funds shaping fintech’s next chapter — proof that conviction, capital, and timing still move markets.
Let’s dive in.
A Q&A with Jeroen Merchiers from Zazume on Revolutionizing Residential Rentals in Spain
How do you bring transparency, efficiency, and absolute trust to a €33 billion market that has been deeply underserved and analogue for decades? You look to the visionaries who have already revolutionized how we live and travel.
In this edition, we sit down with Jeroen Merchiers (former EMEA leader who helped scale Airbnb to its 2020 IPO) and Guillermo Ceballos (a seasoned entrepreneur who successfully sold his previous venture to French benefits giant Sodexo). Together, they founded Zazume—a Barcelona-born proptech powerhouse built to do for long-term residential rentals what Airbnb did for short-term stays. By combining proprietary AI-driven technology with embedded financial services, Zazume democratizes the market, guaranteeing over €50 million in rental income to small landlords while managing a staggering €735 million in residential assets.
Dive into our exclusive Q&A to discover how they achieved profitability, secured a fresh €2.5M funding round, and why they are the natural partner for financial institutions looking to unlock the massive Southern European real estate ecosystem.
1. Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s).
I’m Jeroen Merchiers, CEO and co-founder of Zazume. Before founding Zazume, I worked at Airbnb, where I led the EMEA business all the way up to IPO in 2020. My cofounder is Guillermo Ceballos (Willy), who sold his last company to Sodexo, a french benefits powerhouse. Together we founded Zazume in Barcelona to do for residential rental management what Airbnb did for short-term stays: bring transparency, efficiency, and trust to a market that has been deeply underserved for decades.
Read more from the interview: Bringing Airbnb-Style Trust to Residential Rental
B2B FinTech @Scale Deal Highlights: Capconnect+, Ionava & Capsa
Samarth Shekhar highlights startups that can help scale financial services by unlocking new customer segments or product offerings via B2B partnerships.
CapConnect+ targets the primary commercial paper and corporate bond issuance market, which has operated on phone calls, Bloomberg messages, and spreadsheets for decades. It opens up mid-market corporate issuers who have historically lacked the dealer relationships to access the CP market at competitive rates. Its real-time demand curve and pricing optimizer gives them visibility into investor demand that was previously only available to bulge-bracket clients. Banks acting as dealers could likely plug CapConnect+ into their existing DCM workflows to automate book-building, allocation, and straight-through processing across their entire issuer book, vs. what is currently a high-touch, labor-intensive business.
Ionava is bringing in health data is an untapped underwriting signal, by combining a real-time health score with insurance offers, a digital wallet, and interest-bearing accounts in a single onboarding. It combines wellness and financial planning for health-conscious but financially underserved consumer who have never been offered insurance pricing that reflects their actual behavior. While this could be harder to implement in Europe, I can foresee US incumbents embedding a white-label of the health score and insurance offer layer into an existing bank or insurer’s app.
At mid-to-large private capital firms, institutional knowledge is currently trapped in the heads of senior partners and departing analysts. Capsa indexes a fund’s entire data estate (CRM, email, SharePoint, deal memos, IC notes) into a single searchable knowledge layer that captures how a fund thinks, not just what documents it holds. Capsa’s edge compounds — every new memo, email, and IC note makes the knowledge layer more valuable- a growing moat. With PE firms looking to get smarter about AI, efficiency and costs, and LPs closely monitoring how their GPs adopt AI, this is well-timed.
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.
Robots will need wallets: the USD 13 trillion machine economy is here
Frank Schwab describes the emerging machine economy where autonomous robots will need their own digital wallets to conduct transactions independently.
During a live conversationThe Paypers had atMoney Motion 2026, he mentioned that as a robot owner, you’ll preload a wallet so your robot can go shopping at autonomous shops. These machines won’t pay with cash or even use traditional banking networks – they may pay with robot and machine protocols provided by banking infrastructure, crypto infrastructure, or entirely new systems designed for these use cases.
By 2035, this market is projected to reach USD 13 trillion, making it one of the biggest markets, and banks must now consider their share of it.
Read more here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7468587576476561408/
VENTURE FINANCING
Sunbay Raises €550k to Reinvent Invoice Collections
Sunbay, which automates invoice collection using email, SMS and AI voice calls for finance teams, has raised €550k in seed funding. Investors include Kogito Ventures, S20, Jostein Håvaldsrud, Sebastian Bobrowski, Sebastian Pietrowski, and Szymon Brodziak. The platform offers personalised multi-channel reminders, customisable collection workflows with configurable escalation rules, and automated generation of interest notices and late-payment documents. Use of funds: expanding the platform with predictive insights and additional automation; ensuring GDPR compliance with EEA-based data infrastructure.
Source: https://sifted.eu/articles/deals/sunbay-raises-550k
WealthReach Raises $1m Seed Round to Scale AI Growth Platform
WealthReach, an AI-powered organic growth platform for registered investment advisors (RIAs) and wealth management firms, has raised $1m in seed funding. The round was led by Cecure Corporation, a privately held financial services holding company co-founded by Robert S. Schwartz. The capital will be used to scale WealthReach’s team and invest in engineering and support infrastructure. WealthReach provides AI-powered tools to help financial advisors improve their online visibility, support personalised outreach, and convert prospect interest into clients. The company recently unveiled Living Sites, a new category of advisor website designed to continuously improve search visibility and convert qualified prospects. Founded in 2025.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/10/wealthreach-raises-1m-seed-round-to-scale-ai-growth-platform/
Titan Raises $3m to Bring Native AI to Banking
Titan, a banking-native AI platform purpose-built for financial services, has raised $3m in new funding led by Entropy Ventures (inaugural commitment from Entropy Ventures Fund I). The round will be used to accelerate product development and support key hires as Titan expands its AI infrastructure offering, designed around the compliance, risk, and operational demands specific to the financial sector. Titan launched from stealth in October 2025 and has since tripled its live annual recurring revenue from an initial seven-figure ARR base. The platform is aimed at banks, credit unions, and FinTechs facing regulatory pressure to adopt AI responsibly, offering secure, auditable, and knowledge-grounded AI services that reasons through complex banking tasks like credit risk, lending, and regulatory compliance. Titan argues that widely used general-purpose LLMs present material risks for regulated financial institutions due to their tendency to hallucinate.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/10/titan-raises-3m-to-bring-native-ai-to-banking/
AI-native lending platform Copperlane lands $4.1M seed round
Copperlane, an AI-native mortgage origination platform, has raised $4.1 million in seed funding to scale an autonomous AI mortgage loan officer that aims to compress hours of document reviews into minutes. The round was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, US News Digital Ventures, Mercor, Valon Mortgage, and others. The company has created Penny, the first AI mortgage loan officer that autonomously analyzes thousands of pages of borrower documents and surfaces recommendations for human staff by using a generalized AI model to interpret income patterns, assets and credit file nuances. At the application stage, Penny can scan bank statements for large deposits that fall outside expected income, identify other conditions an underwriter is likely to question and proactively contact the borrower for clarification.
Source: https://www.housingwire.com/articles/copperlane-ai-mortgage-seed/
Reset raises $6m seed round led by credit union customers
Reset, an embedded earned wage access (EWA) platform designed for credit unions and community banks, has closed a $6m seed funding round. More than two-thirds of the round came directly from credit union customers, with investors including Georgia’s Own Credit Union, InTouch Credit Union, Chartway Credit Union, VyStar Credit Union, and One Washington Financial. Additional backers include Curql, Navari (formerly CUSG), and the Bankers Helping Bankers Fund. The capital will be directed towards expanding sales and implementation capacity, advancing product development, and accelerating deployments already in progress. Reset’s platform integrates directly into a financial institution’s existing technology infrastructure, enabling members to access their wages daily on a fee-free basis through a card issued by the credit union itself.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/09/reset-raises-6m-seed-round-led-by-credit-union-customers/
Trustap raises $10m to make marketplace listings transactable by AI agents
Trustap raised $10 million led by Aperture Capital to launch Trustap Index, making marketplace listings transactable by AI shopping agents. The company provides secure escrow-style payment solutions for e-commerce, peer-to-peer, and marketplace transactions. Additional investors include TX Ventures, Atlantic Bridge Capital, Enterprise Ireland, and MiddleGame Ventures. The investment will be deployed across three areas: (1) developing an AI agent shopping system enabling users to search for products across major retailers and platforms; (2) enhancing the platform’s structured data system to support AI agents in product discovery, negotiation, and payments; (3) supporting adoption by additional online marketplaces.
Source: https://sifted.eu/articles/deals/trustap-raises-10m
SyntheticFi Raises $13m and Hits $2bn in Assets
SyntheticFi, a WealthTech platform enabling registered investment advisors (RIAs) to offer portfolio-backed financing solutions, has surpassed $2bn in regulatory assets under management (RAUM) and raised $13 million. Investors include Y Combinator, Social Leverage, NextGen VP, The Compound Capital Fund, and additional backers from across the wealth management sector. The company’s network has grown to over 300 independent advisory firms, collectively representing more than 3,000 advisors across the US — roughly three times the scale at its last public disclosure. Portfolio-based financing tools such as box spreads and variable prepaid forwards (VPFs) have historically been difficult to access outside of institutional circles. SyntheticFi was established to address this gap, broadening access to these strategies for independent advisors and their clients.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/09/synthetifi-raises-13m-and-hits-2bn-in-assets/
DiligentIQ Raises $12 Million in Series A Funding Round Led by FINTOP Capital to Accelerate AI-Powered Due Diligence in Private Markets
NEW YORK, February 18, 2025 (Business Wire) — DiligentIQ, the leading AI-powered platform for conducting private equity due diligence, has raised up to $12 million in a two-tranche Series A funding round led by FINTOP Capital and partner JAM FINTOP. The investment will be used to scale ToltIQ’s team and operations as it expands its presence in private markets. It will also accelerate product innovation, expand integrations, and scale go-to-market efforts. ToltIQ is an AI-powered platform that streamlines due diligence by allowing users to upload entire virtual data rooms and instantly query financial, legal, technical, and market details. The platform delivers analyst-quality outputs with full source citations, enabling faster, more accurate deal analysis at a fraction of the time and cost. Built with enterprise-grade security, collaboration tools, and PE-specific guardrails, ToltIQ empowers deal teams to focus on decision-making and portfolio growth.
Capsa AI Raises $18m Series A for Private Capital AI
Capsa AI, a London and New York-based startup developing an AI operating system for private capital, has closed an $18m Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to $20m. The round was co-led by TX Ventures and Pivot Investment Partners, with significant participation from Bek Ventures. All existing institutional investors reinvested, including Antler, Outward VC, and Cornerstone VC, as well as angel investors from leading private capital firms and tier-1 US operators, among them Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed. The raise follows strong commercial performance: 100% customer renewal rate; net dollar retention exceeding 122%; 14x year-on-year ARR growth. The technology is already in use at several of the world’s largest private capital firms, with further major enterprise deployments rolling out across the US and Europe.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/10/capsa-ai-raises-18m-series-a-for-private-capital-ai/
Vinyl Equity Raises $20m Series A Led by Jump Capital
Vinyl Equity, a FinTech infrastructure company for capital markets and corporate transactions and SEC-registered transfer agent, has closed a $20m Series A funding round led by Jump Capital. The raise also drew strategic participation from MUFG Innovation Partners (MUIP), the corporate venture capital arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, alongside continued backing from Index Ventures and Spark Capital. Vinyl replaces legacy workflows with modern systems that deliver real-time accuracy, auditability, and control across the full lifecycle of capital markets and corporate transactions in both private and public markets. Its payments solutions provide compliant, secure distributions through a single integrated workflow. The platform is built with document collection, KYC/KYB controls, tax filing, audit trails, and fraud prevention integrated at the workflow layer.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/09/vinyl-equity-raises-20m-series-a-led-by-jump-capital/
OpenReserve Holdings Raises $24M for Blockchain-Native National Bank
OpenReserve Holdings, a financial technology company building a national bank integrating blockchain infrastructure into traditional banking products and services, has raised $24,005,501 according to an SEC filing. The total offering is $25,000,000 with eleven investors in this close. The company was founded by Diwakar Choubey, co-founder of MoneyLion, and Richard Correia in 2025. The company has filed an application with the OCC to charter OpenReserve Bank, National Association, which will operate as a full-service national bank integrating blockchain infrastructure into traditional banking products and services to serve the growing demand for regulated banking services from digital asset native clients. The bank is being structured as a wholly owned subsidiary of OpenReserve Holdings Inc., headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, with the Federal Reserve application for holding company status filed in parallel.
Source: https://www.alleywatch.com/2026/06/the-alleywatch-startup-daily-funding-report-6-11-2026/
EDGE Markets Secures $29.2m Series A from CoinFund
EDGE Markets, a financial services firm building infrastructure products for gaming, digital asset, and prediction markets, has closed a $29.2m Series A funding round led by CoinFund, with additional participation from Indicator Ventures, Mantis VC, StepStone Group, and Bullpen Capital. Proceeds will be used in part to launch EDGE Pro, the first high-throughput deposit account for market makers that enables real-time deposits into all CFTC-regulated exchanges. The product addresses two of the most significant barriers to institutional scaling: post-execution settlement across multiple liquidity pools, and margin. The company is in the process of applying for futures commission merchant (FCM) and swap dealer licences.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/08/edge-markets-secures-29-2m-series-a-from-coinfund/
Italian FinTech Unicorn Satispay Plans €120 Million Raise; Secures Nearly €60 Million from Existing Investors
Momentum S.p.A., the holding company of Satispay Group, announced a plan to raise up to €120 million in a capital increase to be offered as a pre-emptive right to existing shareholders. A shareholders’ meeting is set for June 29, 2026 to vote on the resolution. Approximately half of the proposed capital raise (nearly €60 million) is covered by subscription commitments from existing investors including Greyhound, Addition, and Lightrock. The transaction reaffirms a company valuation of over €1 billion. The round follows Satispay’s €60 million raise in November 2024. Satispay operates across Italy, France, and Luxembourg, serving 380,000+ merchants and 6.5 million users. Annualised revenues as of 31 May 2026 surpassed €116 million (+80% YoY). The company has achieved gross operating profitability across all core business lines and total deposits surpassed €670 million by end of May.
Morpho Association Raises $175M To Build The Open Credit Network For The World
Morpho Association announced a $175M funding round co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Ribbit Capital, with strategic participation from Apollo Funds, Circle Ventures, VanEck, and Ledger Cathay. Additional participants include Variant, Wintermute Ventures, Prelude, IOSG, Hashkey, Mirana, NJJ Capital, SBI Group, and Bpifrance. Fortune reported a $2 billion valuation. The raise marks one of the largest ever DeFi rounds. Morpho is an onchain lending network with $11B+ in deposits connecting lenders and borrowers to optimal opportunities worldwide. Leaders like Coinbase, Bitwise Asset Management, and Société Générale already build on Morpho to deploy secure, scalable onchain credit products. By April 2026, Coinbase’s Morpho-powered loan service had originated over $2.17 billion in USDC. This is the company’s fourth institutional fundraise since 2021.
Source: https://fortune.com/2026/06/09/morpho-fundraise-a16z-crypto-paradigm-ribbit-capital-175-million/
Digital Asset Raises $355 Million to Accelerate Canton’s Role as Onchain Infrastructure for Capital Markets
NEW YORK, June 11, 2026 — Digital Asset (DA), the creator of Canton, announced a $355 million funding round led by a16z crypto, with participation from 7RIDGE, ABN Amro, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Greenwulf Asset Management, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, iCapital, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, R136 Ventures, S&P Global, SBI Group, Smash Capital, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair. FT Partners served as exclusive strategic and financial advisor. The round valued the company above $2 billion. Canton is a layer-one blockchain built to address a central barrier to blockchain adoption in finance: enabling institutions to use shared infrastructure while preserving the privacy, compliance, and control required in regulated markets. The network has more than 700 ecosystem participants.
Vestd Secures Foresight Backing for Growth Push
Vestd, the UK sharetech platform on a mission to make equity inclusion a reality for every private company, has secured a growth investment from Foresight Group (FTSE 250 investment manager) in its first-ever institutional funding round. Grow London also participated. The investment will be deployed across four areas: (1) building out Vestd’s infrastructure as a licensed PISCES operator under the FCA’s new private company share-trading regime; (2) scaling operations in India; (3) expanding enterprise product capabilities for larger businesses, including those with multi-class equity structures and companies listed on AIM and Aquis; (4) executing a strategic AI programme. Vestd has been profitable for a number of years and last raised several million pounds from friends and associates in summer 2021. This round marks the first time the company has brought in institutional capital.
Source: https://www.vestd.com/blog/vestd-raises-its-first-institutional-round-with-foresight-group
That’s this week’s edition — proof that the most interesting parts of fintech are still being built by people who saw an inefficiency nobody else was solving, and decided to fix it. From Zazume’s bet on residential rental to the founders reimagining everything from credit networks to machine-economy payments, the throughline is the same: conviction backed by capital, moving fast.
We’ll be back next week with more deals, more insights, and more of the people building what’s next. Until then — keep watching this space.