Venture capital flows into fintech as five new unicorns emerge
Venture capital investment in fintech has surged to a new high and more unicorns have emerged.
Global investment in fintech is on track to reach all-time highs thanks to a flood of money from venture capitalists, new research from CB Insights has found.
With funding climbing 20 percent in the three months ending June, Q2 of 2017 saw more investment dollars flow into fintech than any quarter on record. Fintech companies raised $5.2 billion across 251 deals.
The spike in volume, the report found, was spurred by several ‘mega deals’.
These include Japanese telecoms giant SoftBank’s US$1.4 billion investment in Paytm, India’s largest digital payments start-up.
It also includes North Carolinian invoice funder AvidXchange getting $300 million from a group of investors led by Mastercard.
Asia saw more investment than any other continent, with funding jumping 240 percent on the previous quarter. The surge owes mostly to China and India’s weak financial infrastructure, which makes the countries rich pickings for payments technology firms.
Fintech unicorns are a multiplying species, the report also found, with five new American companies joining the $1 billion club.
New unicorns include Clover, RobinHood, Symphony, AvidXchange and Tuandaiwang, a Chinese peer-to-peer lender.
CB Insight’s report comes at a time when other research suggests fintech investment is declining. A report by Morgan Stanley earlier this year claimed that fintech investment had peaked.
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