Who invests in fintech startups?

Recent studies of the Life.SREDA venture fund have shown that the volume of investments in the FinTech sector is doubled annually. So, in 2012 it amounted to a little more than $ 1.6 billion, in 2013 - already $ 2.2 billion, and in only nine months of 2014 it reached $ 4.2 billion. According to information from CrunchBase , the online database of companies , people and investors, last year in the venture capital market, Fintech startups attracted investments more rapidly than others. Moreover, such giants as Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are also entering the FinTech market. Life.SREDA predicts that by 2018, the total investment in companies involved in the development and implementation of innovative projects for the financial sector will be $ 8 billion.

The largest market segments that attracted investment in 2014 were: online lending, electronic payment solutions, special solutions for businesses (small and medium), online trading, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, personal finance management systems, mobile banking, mPOS and international money translations.

In this article we will present to your attention a selection of the most active companies investing in FINTECH startups, and we will also tell you what startups Russian investors recommend investing in. The review was prepared by the editors of Web-payment.ru , a site about payment services and fintech startups with an electronic currency exchange aggregator.

Flint capital

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Flint Capital is a venture fund managed by Flint Management. The fund’s volume is $ 50 million. Flint Capital’s key investment area is the TMT sector (telecommunications, media, technology), but there are also FinTech projects in the fund’s portfolio. For example, the services CreditCards Online (a service specializing in online lending) and Platiza (instant online loans). The fund is focused on the markets of Eastern Europe, Israel and the USA.

Maxfield Capital

Maxfield Capital investment fund focuses on fintech start-ups that are preparing to launch their product on the global market. The company was founded in 2013. The average bill is more than $ 1 million. The fund portfolio includes Fingooroo.ru (online p2p lending service), Qbaka (JS error tracking service), Too.me messenger, DialMyApp (mobile designer of Android applications for business), Drchrono ( cloud medical platform), LogDog (protection system for online services) and some others. Priority is given to those teams that work in the field of large data processing, fin-tech, e-health, new media and mobile platforms.

In February 2015, Maxfield Capital invested in Zdravprint, a Russian company specializing in 3D printing of lightweight and durable bioplastic orthoses, designed to replace plaster casts. In total, the fund allocates up to $ 4 million for subsequent investments in portfolio companies demonstrating steady growth.

Runa Capital

Runa Capital is a venture fund specializing in investments in rapidly developing IT areas. Runa Capital I with a volume of $ 135 million was created in 2010, in 2014 Runa Capital II was created with a volume of $ 200 million. Runa Capital focuses on cloud computing, virtualization, sophisticated software and mobile applications. The portfolio fintech project of the fund is Ubank, a mobile payment service that allows payments to be made without commission.

Life.SREDA.vc

Life.SREDA is a venture capital fund founded in 2012 and specializing exclusively in fintech investments. Key areas of investment: mPOS, mobile banks, e-wallets, mobile payment systems, online and p2p lending, Internet acquiring, money transfers. From September 2012 to November 2014, the fund invested 15 projects, the total investment amounted to $ 40 million. Among them: LifePay (the leader of the Russian mPOS market), SumUp (the leading player of the mPOS market in Europe), Scorista (the first Russian cloud service provider for scoring), Fidor (a joint project of the Russian Foundation Life.SREDA and the German bank Fidor), myWishBoard crowdfunding platform, Rocketbank (the first Russian bank built in accordance with the “mobile-first” logic), My-Apps (designer of mobile applications).

In 2015, Life.SREDA plans to invest up to $ 90 million in Asian fintech startups. In particular, the fund is interested in the countries of Southeast Asia - Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and China. According to Vladislav Solodky, managing partner of Life.SREDA, investments will be directed to the development of 20 or 30 Asian startups, each of which will get from $ 1 million to $ 10 million, depending on the level of development of the company.

InVenture Partners

InVenture Partners is an investment company that helps start-up entrepreneurs who build their business on advanced technologies. The company invests in various niches in the segment of Internet and mobile services, Internet commerce and software. One of their first portfolio projects of the fund was 2Can - a mobile acquiring service. In 2012, InVenture Partners invested $ 1.6 million in the project, and in 2014 together with Almaz Capital Partners invested another $ 5 million in the framework of the new round. In addition to 2Can, the fund’s portfolio includes such projects: GetTaxi (mobile application for quick taxi booking), Fogg (mobile data network that allows you to access the Internet from anywhere in the world at a single fixed price), OnlineTours (online travel tour agency), Moneymatika (financial services aggregator), Netology (online educational center), GillBus (online bus ticket service), GetGoing (software for companies operating in the travel segment) and CrowdSystems (a company that offers turnkey solutions for quantitative research).

SBT Venture Capital

SBT Venture Capital is a venture capital fund owned by Serbank and investing in promising financial startups. The fund was established in 2012. SBT Venture Capital shares with start-up projects its own experience in the banking sector, contacts of financial companies, as well as technology suppliers interacting with them. The volume of the fund is $ 100 million.

FinSight Ventures

FinSight Ventures is a joint project of the Finam investment holding and the investment company Skagit Investments . The foundation was founded last May. The target volume of FinSight Ventures is $ 50-100 million. The key areas for investment are p2p platforms, payment systems and software products for the financial sector, which can introduce new technologies in this sector. For the most part, the fund is focused on Western startups, however, in the portfolio of FinSight Ventures there is such a company as GillBus (not a startup) - an online bus ticket service for long-distance and international flights in the CIS, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

Qiwi Venture and Qiwi Universe

QIWI Venture is the corporate investment direction of the QIWI Group, which has existed since 2013. The purpose of this structure is the search and development of innovative projects. QIWI Venture pays special attention to ideas that are synergistic to the core business of the Group, i.e. fintech projects. The key areas of QIWI Venture investment are Big Data, cloud technologies, logistics and financial services, B2C applications, e-commerce and m-commerce, geolocation, remote user identification, recognition technology, artificial intelligence.

The fund's portfolio projects include Easy Wallet (an online service that allows you to select the most profitable bank card) and Zaimix (an online service that provides credit history and helps you choose a banking offer). In 2014, the company announced the launch of partnership projects with graduates of the Qiwi Universe corporate accelerator. Among them are two fintech startups: POSFinance and PINBonus . In 2015, Qiwi is ready to invest in small startups at an early stage of development. Projects can count on the sum to 6 million rbl.

Prostor Capital

Prostor Capital is a Russian investment fund focused on high-yield investments in dynamically developing IT companies. The fund was founded by a group of private investors in 2011. The fund's volume is $ 50 million. Prostor Capital makes investments according to the Media for Equity model, both in cash and in media.
The basis for the formation of the Prostor Capital portfolio is a cluster strategy: companies with a common industry specialization are combined into one “cluster”. Then they consider profile projects that can complement this niche. One of the priorities for the fund is the field of innovative financial technologies.

Ocean ventures

Ocean Ventures is a venture fund formed in May 2014 by the Ocean Group. This fund, as well as Life.SREDA, is focused on investing the fintech sphere.
The Ocean Group is owned by Ocean Bank (Ocean Internet Bank), as well as the Robokassa electronic payment service. The structure was created as a corporate fund: the integration of portfolio projects into the core business is not the goal of the partners, however, if the fund is useful for other Ocean Group projects, then synergy is possible.

Ocean Ventures is ready to invest in startups up to $ 1 million. The fund volume is $ 10 million. Detailed terms of the transaction, as well as the volume of investments are negotiated individually with each company and depend on the stage of the project development.

Accelerator 404 HUB

404 HUB is a private accelerator, opened last year in St. Petersburg by the holding company 404 Group. Unlike most investment funds and accelerators operating in Russia, the 404 Hub does not focus on projects that promise quick profits and have a high degree of risk. The company's goal is projects that have a clear niche specialization in the IT market, as well as a well-built concept. The priority area of ​​the company is financial technology. 404 HUB offers startups of up to 1 million rubles for a minority stake in the project. With the successful completion of the acceleration program, a second round of investment of up to 20 million rubles is possible.

Y-Combinator

Y-Combinator is one of the largest American accelerators. Founded in 2005. Y-Combinator holds two three-month financing cycles annually, during which the fund works with the founders of companies, helps them find investors and invests in their own way in exchange for 2-10% of the company. The fund's program consists of weekly lunches, to which various experts are invited to talk with the founders of the companies. Guests often give advice or invest in startups.

Compared with other investment funds, Y-Combinator itself invests insignificant amounts of funds ($ 14 thousand for startups from one person, $ 17 thousand for startups with two founders, $ 20 thousand - with three or more). Nevertheless, the foundation opened up hundreds of startups to the world, among which are such large companies as AirBnB and DropBox. The average rating of companies that have passed through Y-Combinator is $ 22.4 million.

Plug and Play Tech Center

The Plug and Play Tech Center is another American accelerator specializing in startups. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco, California. The investment network of Plug and Play includes 300 fintech startups and 180 investors and communities of leading universities and corporate partners. The Foundation offers all start-up companies to participate in the financing program, and also provides its own data center, helps to find qualified, talented personnel, offers mentoring for entrepreneurs and provides free advice on strategic planning. In the fund portfolio companies such as Paypal and Lending club.

Expert opinion

We reviewed the 13 largest investors who prefer to invest in promising fintech startups. Next, we will tell you which areas, in addition to FinTech, experts consider the most promising and in which projects they would like to invest.

Dmitry Chikhachev

Dmitry Chikhachev, the founder and managing partner of Runa Capital, points out several promising areas for potential investors: cloud technologies for business, sophisticated software and IT solutions for the financial sector, education and public services. The expert notes that the least developed today is the educational sphere, in which, contrary to modern trends and digital technologies, outdated methods are still used: paper textbooks, exercise books and classrooms.

The global education market is about 4 trillion dollars a year. This is the amount that governments of various countries spend on education. Of these $ 4 trillion, about $ 90 billion is accounted for by online education, and every year this figure grows by about $ 20 billion. The development of digital education gives people additional opportunities, it is interactive, adaptive and personalized for the needs of the student. Educational content, according to Dmitry Chikhachev, is an excellent growth point for start-ups and, accordingly, for investors.

The expert considers medicine to be another “interesting sphere”. Currently, almost any process in the human body can be monitored and measured. However, in medicine there are still not enough tools for storing, processing and transmitting an array of such data. Chikhachyov considers promising the direction of “developing software for systematizing and processing large amounts of genome decoding data by searching for marker regions responsible for determining pathology”.

Alexander Ivanov

Former partner and co-founder of the Life.SREDA fund, Alexander Ivanov, is confident that the venture capital market is driven by global trends. Based on this, the expert calls the most promising areas Big Data and m2m (machine interaction), and also predicts the growth of FinTech.

Another important trend Alexander Ivanov considers the economic recovery after the crisis, followed by the growth of small and medium enterprises (SME). Because of this, services designed to optimize internal processes for SME (invoicing, loyalty services and communication with customers, mobile payment services) can be the most popular.

Oleg Seydak

Oleg Seydak, a Flint Capital venture fund partner, considers the financial industry to be the most conservative. The additional regulation introduced after the 2008 crisis significantly limited the freedom of action of traditional financial institutions. At the same time, the growing popularity of the Internet and mobile devices has led to the emergence of new players and business models on the market. This prompted many investors to invest in fintech projects.

Another trend is projects working with Big Data. The main consumers of products based on processing large data arrays are medicine, large-scale production and other industries where instruments are equipped with an increasing number of sensors. Currently there are still few projects focused on Big Data on the market, which means that in this area new players have great opportunities.

Other experts

Alexander Chachava, the initiator of the foundation of the LETA Capital fund, calls the most promising areas Big Data, robotics and mobile applications.

Lyubov Simonova, director of Almaz Capital, believes that it is worthwhile to develop domestic projects by investing in technological Internet companies that have big ambitions. The expert also notes that you need to invest in what you understand yourself and in the one who can realize the idea.

Managing partner of the fund iTech Capital Gleb Davidyuk relies on fintech and the Internet of things.
The creator of the QIWI group of companies and the managing partner of the Run Capital fund, Andrey Romanenko, prefers projects aimed at optimizing and simplifying the routine tasks of a wide audience (service aggregators, transfer services from offline to online space).

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