Most compliance software adds visibility. Sphinx wants to do the work. The San Francisco–based fintech startup just raised a $7.1 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital Its pitch is simple: compliance isn’t primarily a technology problem, it’s an operations problem, and AI […]
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually do a different way of doing banking, lending or consumer finance in Colombia?” – Santiago Suarez, co-founder and CEO, Addi When Santiago Suarez talks about why he started Addi, a Colombian credit and buy now, pay later platform, he doesn’t begin with technology, funding rounds or market […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight early-stage bets on the future of tech. This edition looks at Bretton AI, a fintech that’s raising big to make “trust” a core product feature for financial crime operations. Bretton AI has raised a $75 million Series B to turn compliance work into something banks can […]
After years of regulatory paralysis, the floodgates have opened for new bank charters from fintech companies. Zero fintech-related banks were chartered during the Biden administration’s four years. Now, barely a year into the Trump administration, we’re seeing preliminary approvals announced almost weekly, with over 30 applications in various stages of review. But preliminary approval is […]
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Former PayPal President David Marcus reflects on missed leverage, bad metrics, and how financial optimization replaced product conviction. We translate into 7 practical takeaways for teams. If you missed it, David Marcus dropped a blunt postmortem on what went sideways at PayPal. Here’s how we’d translate these reflections into actionable takeaways for builders and leaders […]
One dev’s guide to solving the data-parsing problem with a hybrid approach safe for high-stakes workflows. In banking and fintech, we talk a lot about APIs, real-time payments, cloud migration, and AI-driven insights. Yet much of the financial industry still depends on one of the least structured formats imaginable: PDFs. Bank statements, transaction reports, regulatory […]
The first month of 2026 is closing and as we look to what the year will bring, founders and investors point to stablecoins, AI and regulations, among other topics, to drive business and investment this year. “2026 could be the inflection where crypto becomes core financial infrastructure rather than a parallel ecosystem.” — Daniel Liu, […]
Fireworks AI CEO Lin Qiao builds the case for autonomous intelligence, a system where a model evolves based on the product’s use, powered by open-source. An IBM survey found that just 1 in 4 AI initiatives delivered expected ROI over the past few years, while MIT’s State of AI in Business report found a whopping […]
Arpan Bhattacharya is CEO of The Intelligent Search Company, a startup building AI for adversarial environments. He describes what it takes to build “noise cancellation for decision-making.” When shopping online, context is everything. You either know exactly what to look for, or you find yourself browsing endlessly or typing vague queries into a search bar, […]