Recently I helped one venture fund to analyze hundreds of FinTech start-ups and make the short list of the most promising projects. I will say right away that I don’t pretend to be a Goldman Sachs level analyst and you may want to argue with my rating. Nevertheless, I’m sure that my list will seem interesting to many. During the selection, I have paid attention to the following requirements:
- Project is in the early stage (the product is either in development or in beta version)
- Strong and experienced team of both founders and developers
- The project attracted first financing, but not more than $100 mln.
- A business model is well-developed
- Cool business idea and market perspectives
For sure, my analysis of more than 300+ FinTech start-ups included a much more significant number of indicators, but in my methodology, the listed parameters had the maximum weight.
As a result, I made a short list of the 30 most promising FinTech startups in completely different segments. I cannot disclose the full list here, because of the NDA, signed with my client. Still I”m allowed to share here the most remarkable FinTech start-ups as of May 2019 in each of 5 key sectors: Investing, Wall Street, Realty, Payments, and Lending.
Roobee
Sector: InvestingFunding: $5,5 mln.Latest valuation: $60 mln.Web: roobee.io
Roobee is the first-ever blockchain-based investment platform that utilizes AI and fully transparent statistics to help make intelligent investments in digitized assets. It serves as a disruptive alternative to the Robo-advisors, digital brokerage platforms, and general retail investing services that form the current WealthTech market.
The platform is tailored for retail investors and it allows investments from as little as $10 from a phone or desktop with no fees for buying investment products. Roobee’s AI will help you quickly and easily create a safe portfolio of investment products from different markets, such as IPO, venture & investment funds, real estate, stock and crypto products, loans, promising start-ups and etc.
Roobee have raised $4.5 mln. in a pre-seed round and $1 mln. in the first seconds of private sales prior to the IEO launch. The company claims to have enabled 5,000 people to invest approximately $15 million in different investment and blockchain projects and funds.
Behavox
Sector: Wall StreetFunding: $15 mln.Latest valuation: $300 mln.Web: behavox.com
Behavox is an AI-based start-up that aggregate and analyze large volumes of unstructured communications to identify capital markets misconduct and insider threats. It helps analyze data from everywhere — starting emails and phone calls and even trade deals and chats. Among its clients are brokers, hedge funds and other companies from Wall Street.
Startups already have near 30 huge clients from U.S. Wall St. and London City and have no competitors yet. Among other services Behavox provide is a system, that captures and reports hidden behavioral patterns that could bring to light inappropriate employee behavior that could tarnish the company’s reputation.
Behavox works with forward thinking, multinational businesses, financial institutions and investment firms. Behavox has offices in New York City, London, Singapore, Montreal and San Francisco.
Roofstock
Sector: RealtyFunding: $75 mln.Latest valuation: $300 mln.Web: roofstock.com
Roofstock is a service that helps buy and sell investment properties. The start-up is pretty much young, still, in the U.S. it already becomes the top marketplace for buying and selling single-family rental homes, or, let’s say, real estate crowdfunding marketplaces. The company provides its clients with research, analytics, and insights to evaluate and purchase independently certified properties at set prices.
Roofstock offers an easier path to a more passive form of real estate investing than the normal route of finding an agent, touring home after home, and manually researching all the comps and documents.
Forter
Sector: PaymentsFunding: $100 mln.Latest valuation: $345 mln.Web: forter.com
Forter is a company that uses machine learning to detect and prevent fraud in online retail transactions. This very actual, regarding market growth. In 2018 global online retail sales amounted to more than $2 trillion, and this number is projected to reach more than $4.5 trillion by 2021. As online retail grows, so does online fraud.
Forter processes more than $50 billion in transactions annually for its network of retailers, from top companies like Nordstrom to startups. It states, that its algorithms are both substantially more accurate than older fraud detection methods and infinitely scalable.
Lending Express
Sector: LendingFunding: $2,7 mln.Latest valuation: No dataWeb: lending-express.com
Key Lending Express feature is that it uses AI algorithms to match eligible businesses with relevant lenders, facilitating loans in less than 24 hours. The company works in collaboration with more than 25 lenders that make it one of the most comprehensive and competitive lenders in small-to-medium businesses sector.
Particularly Lending Express helps SMBs increase their funding odds, unlock better funding opportunities, and access their optimal funding solution. The project states, that it already helped small and middle business with 125 mln. financing in total.