Why we're seeing so many seed-stage deals in fintech

Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign up! It was a relatively quiet week in fintech startup land, so we took the time to scrutinize where we’re seeing the most funding deals.

Seed deals everywhere

Across the board in all industries, except perhaps AI, we’ve seen a big drop in later-stage funding deals and no shortage of seed-stage rounds.

When it comes to fintech, I can tell you at least anecdotally that the vast majority of pitches that hit my inbox are for seed rounds. It is very rare these days to get pitched for Series B or later, or even for Series A rounds.

Venture banker Samir Kaji, co-founder and CEO of Allocate, points out that the private markets often take their cues from the public markets and as such, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing far fewer later-stage deals and a plethora of seed rounds. The Fintech Index — which tracks the performance of emerging, publicly traded financial technology companies — was down a staggering 72% in 2022, according to F-Prime Capital’s State of Fintech 2022 report.

“Seed is typically the least affected because those companies are just too early to really feel like you have to worry about where the public markets are,” he told me in a phone interview last week. “We’re so far divorced from the time period where these companies are going to be large enough where the public market sentiment is going to really matter.”

Allocate, which recently just closed on $10 million in capital, is currently an investor in about 60 funds. But Kaji is seeing the tide beginning to turn.

“The investment pace in 2022 was just so slow, and the beginning of 2023 was incredibly slow as well, but we’re starting to see things pick up as people are now starting to see that the bid ask on deals at the Series A and later are starting to narrow,” Kaji added. “And I think entrepreneurs have started to capitulate to this new environment. This always is the case — it’s like an 18- to 24-month lag in the public markets. So I would expect much more later-stage activity again in the next 18 to 24 months.”

I asked our friends at PitchBook what they’re seeing, and unsurprisingly, in the second quarter, there were more seed deals forged in the retail fintech space (135) compared to any other stage. When it came to the enterprise fintech space, early-stage deals accounted for most of the deal activity (239) with seed-stage coming in a close second (221), according to PitchBook.

Will we start seeing more later-stage deals in 2024? I sure hope so. Will we see any fintechs actually go public? That’s probably less likely. But you can be sure we’ll be on the lookout.

Slope continues its climb

It’s always great to see startups rise through the ranks, especially at a time when fintech hasn’t been doing so well. One of the companies I have had the pleasure of following is Slope. The company, founded by Lawrence Murata and Alice Deng, developed a business-to-business payments platform for enterprise companies.

When covering the company’s initial $8 million seed round in 2021, I learned that Slope’s origins came from Murata watching his wholesaler family struggle with an easier way to manage payments. He and Deng built the company so that moving to a digital order-to-cash workflow was seamless.

Last year, Slope raised another $24 million in Series A funding, and this week banked $30 million in a venture round led by Union Square Ventures, which co-led the Series A. It also included participation from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and a list of other heavy VC hitters. Read more. — Christine