Funded: Paige raises $2.5M to bring legacy planning into the fintech stack

Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week’s issue looks at a category most fintech founders avoid: what happens after the wealth is built.  Houston-based Paige has raised a $2.5 million round led by 22nd State Banking Company to help families organize their financial […]

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Inside Parafin’s Push to Close Small Business Finance’s $2 Trillion Gap

Parafin co-founder Sahill Poddar said it took one visit to an auto body shop to know he and co-founders Vineet Goel and Ralph Furman were on the right track with their vision for an embedded financial infrastructure company, one that addresses a $2 trillion opportunity. When Parafin was in its infancy, Poddar walked into an […]

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Funded: Fonoa raises $110M to build the operating system for autonomous tax

Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week, we’re looking at a startup taking aim at one of the most complex corners of enterprise infrastructure: tax. Fonoa has raised fresh capital to build an AI-powered system that unifies compliance, invoicing, and tax operations under […]

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Private Fintech Has Quietly Become Bigger Than Public Fintech. Now What?

The top 100 private fintech companies in the world are now worth $1.9 trillion, nearly three times the combined market cap of the 100 largest public fintechs founded in the last twenty years. They generate about 10% more revenue, too. That’s the headline finding from a new report jointly produced by Blue Dot Investors and […]

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Merge CEO on building the pipes behind AI, and starting with zero code

Should we buy or build?  It’s a question the technology industry has been stuck on for decades. Some argue that building in-house is better because it gives you ultimate control. Others insist it’s better to buy the infrastructure and focus on your core product. Six years ago, Shensi Ding left her job as Chief of […]

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Integral Ventures’ Stephanie Sher is all about seeing diamonds in the rough

“You have to remember that the rest of the world exists.” — Stephanie Sher, founder and general partner of Integral Ventures Stephanie Sher is not interested in winning venture capital by playing the usual game. As founder and general partner of Integral Ventures, she is building a firm around a very specific, and increasingly rare, […]

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“A race against time” – Fenrock AI’s CEO on fighting the impending wave of AI fraud

When Anthropic announced its AI model Mythos, the company was clear in saying that the model is too powerful for the world—and it’s only going to be available to select partners so that they can secure the systems that form the basis of the modern internet. Much like Mythos, OpenAI is building an advanced AI […]

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What is Really Going on With Private Credit

For the past three months, the financial press has been writing about private credit as though the apocalypse is imminent. Redemption gates, illiquid assets, SaaS exposure, shadow banking lurking just outside the regulatory perimeter. If you’ve been following the coverage, you might think the entire $1.7 trillion industry is on the verge of collapse. It […]

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How Traversal Prevents Million-Dollar Outages

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack with fake needles everywhere.” – Anish Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Traversal Website outages are painful, but in the age of AI-generated code they’re turning existential. Last year, companies, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, Cloudflare and Google Cloud all announced major outages, some lasting over 15 hours. […]

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Combining Households in the Era of Modern Money Management

“If you’re feeling confident managing things at home, you can feel confident at work. And if you feel confident at work, you should definitely feel confident bringing that knowledge back home.” – Lindsey Stanberry, founder of The Purse For many founders and executives, managing money at work feels like second nature. You’re fluent in KPIs, […]

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