Welcome to The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup on Thursday 23 March.
Funding and investments
HeavyFinance, a climate tech investment marketplace for the agricultural industry, has successfully raised €3million during its seed funding round, led by VC firm Practica Capital. The investment will help the company continue its European expansion, currently operating in Poland, Portugal, Lithuania, Latvia and Bulgaria, with plans to nearly double its current headcount of 33 staff over the next 12 months.
emma, an end-to-end, no-code multi-cloud management application platform, has raised $6million in Seed funding in a round led by RTP Global. There’s also participation from AltaIR Capital and CircleRock Capital. The investment will be used to develop the emma platform further and increase the size of emma’s team allowing it to serve customers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Auros, a crypto-native algorithmic trading and market making firm, has raised $17million in a funding round led by global high frequency trading firm Vivienne Court. There was also participation from Bit Digital Inc. This latest funding round will accelerate Auros’ mission to support builders in the Web3 ecosystem.
M&As
Mangopay, the platform specific payment infrastructure provider, has acquired WhenThen, a Dublin-based payments technology company. This marks the second acquisition for Mangopay in less than six months. It previously acquired Nethone in November 2022 and supports its growth plan to scale payment offering by bringing specialist expertise in-house.
Partnerships
Hexaware Technologies, an IT services company, and Xceptor, a data automation platform provider, has launched a new Center of Excellence and Solution factory in India. The partnership combines Hexaware’s banking and financial services expertise and technical delivery capabilities with Xceptor’s platform for automating data workflows.
CellPoint Digital has teamed up with Nium, the platform for on-demand money movement. Through this integration, CellPoint Digital and Nium will offer merchants a frictionless, optimised end-to-end money movement process.
Zeta, a next-gen credit card processor, and Featurespace, an enterprise fraud and financial crime prevention, have forged a partnership to bring to market a solution that combines credit card processing and fraud detection for issuers in the US.
Al Etihad Credit Bureau (AECB), a company that provides information and analytics to support credit decisions, has announced a collaboration with Nakheel PJSC. The strategic collaboration aims to develop a sustainable, data-driven framework that will support the growth of the UAE real estate sector at scale and further reinforces AECB’s position as a key provider of credit information solutions in the country.
Alloy, the leading identity decisioning platform for banks and fintech companies, has teamed up with Kyckr. The partnership gives Alloy’s 350+ clients — including Carta, Ramp and Brex — a powerful tool in performing KYB checks for companies outside of the US.
Job updates
Matt Russell has been appointed as the new CEO of leading benefits technology platform Zest. He succeeds Ray Sieber who is retiring after 10 years at the helm. Zest is an employee benefits platform that offers flexible benefits services for businesses, including Hargreaves Lansdown, Taylor Wimpey, ADP and Travis Perkins. Prior to becoming CEO he was CCO at cloud-based HR-software business Ciphr.
Ebury, the global financial services firm, names Tom Davies as managing director of the Middle East & Africa. He has been at Ebury for close to 12 years. Most recently in Switzerland and the UK & Ireland where he was country manager and responsible for all commercial activity.
Provenir appoints Kees-Jan Koppenaal as general manager, Northern Europe. Koppenaal leads Provenir’s expansion in the region, responsible for directing and driving new business. He will also build customer loyalty and support corporate strategies. He’s also held senior roles at Accenture, Mambu, Oracle, Backbase and Adobe.
More job moves
Data security and management firm Cohesity appoints Kit Beall to the role of chief revenue officer. In this role, Beall will utilise his international experience in overseeing all sales and partner functions worldwide. Beall was previously senior vice president of global accounts and telcos at VMware.
Siepe, a provider of technology, data and analytics, hires Paul Livanos as vice president of sales. In this role, Livanos is responsible for building out and managing the sales and business development efforts across the company’s managed services and software solution suite.
ASX is to deepen its focus on enterprise technology by splitting the current group executive, technology and data and CIO role, to create a standalone technology division under a dedicated chief information officer.
The new CIO role will report directly to CEO Helen Lofthouse and will focus on ensuring system resilience
across ASX, and the delivery of multi-year technology transformation programmes.
