This Week in FinTech: From Latin America to Africa, Funding Focuses on B2B and Platforms

The FinTech landscape is being altered by the news this week of the Global Payments and FIS dealmaking. Tens of billions of dollars are attached to the transactions, focused on merchant services and embedded finance.

The dollars are not flowing between the big guns in the payments space: Recent announcements of new funding rounds indicate a bit of buoyancy in money flowing to the smaller firms innovating digital payments, in both consumer-facing and B2B settings. And the investment activity, on the part of VCs and private equity firms, has been international in scope.

It’s been widely reported that coming into 2025, FinTech capital raising had hit a nadir in the fourth quarter of last year, with $21 billion representing the lowest level since 2016. More recently, as of this week, the data for the first quarter indicate that, as S&P Global has estimated, FinTechs grabbed about $8 billion, up 46% from last year. The impact of tariffs, and dislocation in the capital markets, we’d note, sharpened in April, and so any recovery may be volatile, to say the least.

Where the Money’s Flowing: From Plaid to Poland

But even amid the tariff and trade wind dramas, recent announcements show that capital raises, though relatively small in terms of dollar amounts, are focusing on international players and platforms. Plaid’s a standout here, having announced a $575 million funding round led by Franklin Templeton, alongside Fidelity Management and Research and others, including existing Plaid investors NEA and Ribbit Capital.

As reported this week, Toku, an accounts receivable SaaS platform focused on Latin America and based in Chile, said it had raised $48 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to $55 million. The announcement noted that the firm’s software connects companies’ ERPs with banks and payment rails, enabling payment orchestration and automated collections along with automated reconciliation in the back office. Toku says it increases automated payment methods for enterprises from 10% to 90%.

PYMNTS reported Tuesday (April 15) that South Africa-based payments infrastructure company Stitch raised $55 million in a Series B funding round to expand its offerings for enterprise merchants. The company said it will use the new funding to deepen its in-person payments offering, bolster its online payments suite and move into the acquiring space. Stitch is now expanding its in-person payments solution and said it will add acquiring to its services list soon. The funding round had been led by QED Investors.

In India, Varthana, a FinTech that operates in the education financing space, has gathered $8.7 million in debt funding from B2B platform OfBusiness, through its Oxyzo financial services unit. The funding will reportedly be used to back school loans extended to students.

Separately, Warsaw-based startup BidFinance, the FinTech behind a platform for trading debt portfolios, has raised EUR 1.6 million in funding from venture capital funds 4growth VC, FundingBox, and a group of business angels. The capital will help support international expansion.

A bit closer to home, in the states, as reported here, Deck raised $12 million in a Series A funding round to support its developer infrastructure for accessing any user-permissioned data. The funding round was led by Infinity Ventures. Deck enables users to tap into user-permissioned data from more than 100,000 providers in more than 40 countries to, among other things, automate billing.