PYMNTS Innovation Investment Tracker | November 1-7

Click here to see this week’s breakdown of investments

Weekly Breakdown

Tis’ the season for shopping.

Well almost anyway. The first week of November saw an investment community gearing up of the holiday shopping season, with $571 million in investments all in, about half of which (47 percent) driven by strategic or venture-backed investments. Retail was the major focus of the week’s investment activity among those strategic and venture investments and took down 39 percent of the week’s total investment activity, or around $224 million.

While Halloween costumes went into drawers and sleigh bills readied themselves for jingling, building a more loyal customer through a better shopping experience was the investment road more travelled last week – 61 percent of venture and strategic backed investments were either in payments or customer loyalty/acquisition, bringing the total investment to around $164 million.

Taking a back seat for the first time in a while on this tracker were investments in was security/fraud prevention. Along with with P2p, prepaid, authentication/biometrics and POS payment and acceptance – security and fraud prevention saw the lowest amount of investment activity.

There were also a few big plays during the week, Boston-based commercial financing company NewStar brought in $300 million in a debt funding round led by Franklin Square, who was the week’s biggest investor. Intel Capital, with $45 million invested and BDC Venture Capital with $36 M held the number two and three spots.

The second biggest round this week was BlueSnap’s, they brought in $50 million in a growth equity round from Great Hill Partners, Parthenon Capital Partners and BlueSnap CEO Ralph Dangelmaier.

From a geographic perspective US was again the most active region, followed by Europe and Asia ex China. The median investment amount was $2.3 Million.

The Retail and Commercial Payments Top 20

Here are the top 20 investments that drove 98 percent of the funding activity in the first week of November 2014.

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