Innovation in financial services rarely comes from a single breakthrough. It emerges when visionary founders, institutional expertise, and enabling technologies converge to reshape the industry’s foundations.
In this week’s edition of B2B FinTech @Scale, we meet André Dibé, Founder & CEO of Talwex, whose second entrepreneurial journey is redefining how institutional bond markets can operate through regulated blockchain infrastructure. Alongside our featured Q&A, Samarth Shekhar explores four startups unlocking new opportunities for banks, insurers, and wealth managers through AI, cybersecurity, fund infrastructure, and quantitative investing. Frank Schwab examines the powerful convergence of capital, blockchain infrastructure, and AI, highlighting the forces accelerating the next era of financial services.
We also round up the week’s most significant funding announcements, showcasing the founders and technologies attracting investor confidence—and shaping the future of finance.
Enjoy the read.
A Q&A with André Dibé from Talwex on Bringing Bonds Onto Regulated Blockchain Rails
After leading his first venture from regulatory approval to multimillion-euro fundraising, an unexpected co-founder dispute brought that chapter to an abrupt end. Rather than stepping away from innovation, André Dibé returned with a more ambitious vision: Talwex, a regulated blockchain infrastructure designed to modernize one of finance’s oldest and least digitized markets—the global bond market. Alongside trusted collaborators Pierre Voillet and Iloan Valero, he is rethinking how bonds are issued, traded, settled, and managed for the next generation of institutional finance.
In this conversation, André shares the lessons behind his entrepreneurial journey, why tokenized bonds are reaching a pivotal moment, and how Talwex aims to provide the infrastructure—not the competition—that enables financial institutions to move faster, operate more efficiently, and unlock new sources of liquidity.
1 — Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s).
I’m André Dibé, a Canadian-Lebanese entrepreneur building my second venture. I was born and raised in Beirut and left Lebanon for France in 2012 to pursue my studies. I graduated from two of France’s top engineering schools and a jazz conservatory, and in 2022 I built my first startup, Kamea Labs, developing next-generation, blockchain-based crowdfunding tools. I secured AMF regulatory approval in France in 2023, raised around €2M in 2024, and signed €500K in contracts within our first six months of operation. We were at the top of our game when, in April 2025, a co-founder dispute forced me out of the company I had built.
A year after he took over, he drove it into bankruptcy, while my investors backed me to keep innovating. So in 2026 I founded Talwex, the first end-to-end, blockchain-based infrastructure for bonds. I chose to build it as sole founder but surrounded myself with people I trust and had already worked with: Pierre Voillet, a serial entrepreneur turned blockchain advisor, and Iloan Valero, my right hand since my first venture, granting them equity from the start and treating them as co-founders.
Read more from the interview: Talwex on Modernizing Bond Markets with Blockchain Infrastructure
B2B FinTech @Scale Deal Highlights: MDOTM, Wultra, Nomerra & EquiLibre.
Samarth Shekhar highlights startups that can help scale financial services by unlocking new customer segments or product offerings via B2B partnerships.
The mass-affluent segment has been too expensive to serve with discretionary-quality investment advice. MDOTM enables personalization at scale – a bank or insurer with a wealth arm can go from offering 10–20 model portfolios to offering thousands of individually tailored portfolios without adding headcount. I think of their new product as “robo-plus”- better than a passive robo, cheaper than a human adviser, and compliant. For an insurer with a unit-linked or savings product book, it also enables dynamic asset allocation updates and automated client reporting that makes those products meaningfully more competitive against standalone wealth platforms.
Wultra unlocks a specific new product: passwordless, quantum-safe onboarding and authentication as a differentiator in digital banking, especially in markets where digital banking competition is fierce- Central and Eastern Europe, ASEAN, Being the first bank to offer demonstrably quantum-resistant login is a genuine customer acquisition and retention argument, particularly for the HNW and corporate segments where security credibility matters.
The operational burden of running quarterly NAV calculations, investor reporting, and transfer agency for a new alternatives product is preventing banks and insurers from entering the semi-liquid and evergreen alternatives space at scale. Nomerra removes that constraint, which means a bank with an alternatives ambition but no fund administration scale can now credibly launch private credit or infrastructure feeder funds for their wealth clients without building a back office from scratch.
EquiLibre can help a bank with a systematic trading desk to white-label or partner with EquiLibre‘s RL agents, gaining access to a strategy that has allegedly produced zero negative months in live market conditions. It can enable a new quantitative fund or structured product backed by the strategy.
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.
Capital, infrastructure, and commerce are converging.
by Frank Schwab
As investors move beyond crypto, Solana scales the rails, and AI agents begin replacing costly intermediaries.
Crypto Capital Moves Into Frontier Tech: Major crypto investors are expanding into AI, robotics, energy, semiconductors, biotechnology, and quantum computing as blockchain becomes one layer of a broader technology market.
Solana Scales for Mass Adoption: With 1,000+ applications, 100M+ daily transactions, 4.3M daily users, and $360B+ in 2026 DEX volume, Solana is evolving into infrastructure for DeFi, consumer apps, robotics, drones, and Physical AI.
Read more here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/frankschwab_ai-solana-agenticcommerce-activity-7480134826923249664-BjYc
VENTURE FINANCING
Nomerra raises $2 million to tackle private markets’ looming paperwork crisis
Berlin, Germany, June 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Nomerra has raised $2 million to make private market operations AI-native for the asset servicers and asset managers behind the world’s fastest-growing capital market. The round was led by 14Peaks Capital, with participation from Redstone Fintech and individuals from firms including KKR and Intapp. Founded by Johannes Gebendorfer and Jakob Zacherl, both first employees at bunch (a tech-enabled fund administrator with over $50 million in backing), Nomerra makes private market operations AI-native, starting with fund accounting, treasury, and transfer agency. The goal is to shift people from preparing deliverables to reviewing them — agents handle end-to-end execution and present output in purpose-built review interfaces with a full audit trail. The company will use the funding to grow its engineering team and meet surging demand across enterprise asset servicers and managers in Europe and the United States.
Wultra Raises €6.8 Million in Series A Funding to Accelerate Global Expansion of Post-Quantum Digital Identity Solutions
PRAGUE, July 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Wultra, a European provider of post-quantum authentication and digital identity solutions for banks and fintechs, announced the completion of a €6.8 million Series A funding round led by Seventure Partners, with participation from ARIADNEXT founders Marc Norlain and Guillaume Despagne and existing investors J&T Ventures and Elevator Ventures. Proceeds will scale Wultra’s digital identity platform and support expansion into the Middle East and the United States. Gartner named Wultra the only Sample Vendor for Post-Quantum Authentication in its 2025 Hype Cycle for Digital Identity. The company now supports more than 70 clients across 25 countries including Raiffeisen Bank International, Erste Digital, OTP Bank, and Global Payments, and will use the capital to accelerate development of digital identity wallet capabilities in support of the European Digital Identity Wallet ecosystem.
EToro (ETOR) ramps up blockchain trading push, investing in derivatives venue Extended
Digital broker eToro led a $12.5 million funding round for onchain derivatives platform Extended, a startup led by Revolut’s former crypto head Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, and plans to integrate perpetual futures into crypto wallet Zengo. Jump Crypto also participated. Extended, built on StarkWare’s StarkEx scaling engine, had processed more than $245 billion in trading volume as of June and supports more than 100 perpetual markets. The investment ties into eToro’s April acquisition of Zengo for approximately $70 million — Extended’s perpetual futures engine will be integrated directly into the Zengo wallet, allowing users to trade on-chain derivatives while retaining custody of their assets. The move comes as rival Robinhood expands its own blockchain ambitions with tokenized stocks and perpetual futures, and as the lines between crypto exchanges, prediction markets, and traditional brokerages increasingly blur.
MDOTM Raises $27M Growth Equity Round Led by Expedition Growth Capital as AI Adoption Permeates the Asset and Wealth Management Industry
NEW YORK, June 30, 2026 (BUSINESS WIRE) — MDOTM Ltd., the global provider of AI-driven investment solutions for Asset and Wealth Management companies, today announced the close of a $27 million growth equity round led by Expedition Growth Capital. Founded in London in 2015, MDOTM serves over 60 financial institutions across the US, UK and Europe — including Morgan Stanley, Amundi and Zurich Bank — with its Sphere platform supporting over $100 billion in AUM. Total investment is now $36.5 million. New board members include Steve Twomey of Expedition and James Hays, former CEO of Wells Fargo Advisors with nearly 40 years of industry experience. The investment will accelerate global expansion of Sphere and significant hiring across AI research, engineering, product, sales, and client solutions. Steve Twomey: “Financial institutions have spent the last decade buying back-office and front-end software, but the work in the middle still happens in spreadsheets. MDOTM has built the AI infrastructure that finally scales that work, with the explainability and governance institutional buyers demand.”
The DeepMind trio who built a poker AI are now making money for quant hedge funds
Three former DeepMind researchers who created an AI that beat humans at poker have applied the same reinforcement learning technology to trading stocks. Their Prague-based AI lab, EquiLibre Technologies, is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed Series A led by Creandum — the firm’s largest single investment ever. Founded in 2022 by Martin Schmid, Rudolf Kadlec, and Matej Moravcik, the company’s RL agents trade billions of dollars on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq daily in partnership with Tower Research Capital, claiming zero negative months since inception. The funding will go primarily toward scaling compute infrastructure, bringing online one of the largest clusters in Central and Eastern Europe. Cameron Sellers, VP at Creandum: “EquiLibre is doing what the best frontier labs do: picking a domain where the feedback loop is brutal and honest, and letting the technology speak for itself.”
Every week, the fintech ecosystem offers another reminder that meaningful innovation is driven by ambitious founders solving complex problems with practical technology. Whether through AI, digital identity, blockchain infrastructure, or capital markets modernization, the companies featured in this edition demonstrate how financial services continue to evolve toward greater efficiency, accessibility, and resilience.
Thank you for reading B2B FinTech @Scale. We look forward to bringing you more conversations with founders, expert analysis, and the innovations shaping tomorrow’s financial industry.