Fintech

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Introduction

Fintech is one of the largest VC investment categories, together with health, enterprise software, energy and transportation.

Over $500B in VC funding has gone into fintech startups since 2016, and more than $1.1T of exit value has been created in the same period.

Fintech has, however, been hit hard by the venture capital market downturn. Fintech startups have never been able to get back to the highs of 2021/2022 in terms of VC amounts raised.

Looking back to 2016, mortgages & lending was the largest segment together with payments, while crypto & defi was just nascent.

Fast forward to 2021-2022, crypto & defi became the largest segment (along with payments) before falling back strongly in 2023, while mortgages & lending share has shrunk significantly.
Payments has overall been the dominant fintech sub-industry in the last few years.

Zooming into specific trends, change the yearly view and select the sub-industry of interest to see the evolution of fintech segments in time.

Comparison with other industries

The share of total VC funding going to Fintech was at an all time high of 19% in 2021. Since then the share has been steadily dropping.

Fintech ranked third in 2024, and saw a small drop compared to 2023, but still was nearly 3 times higher than a decade ago.

Fintech startups are now worth $3.7T, matching 2021 peak levels, with nearly 2/3 of the value still private.

Public fintech valuations have dropped significantly from 2021 to 2022, erasing almost ~$0.7T of market cap but has rebounded slightly since, while the combined private valuation is still growing albeit slowly.

Unicorns

Unicorn creation dropped strongly from a peak of over 40 unicorns quarterly in 2021, however has rebounded compared to previous quarters with 5 new unicorns minted in Q3 2023.

Fintech is still the leading industry by cumulative unicorns created.

Exits

Public listings (IPOs and SPACs) are at their minimum in the latest years, while M&A is very active and higher in 2024 than in previous years.

Public listings (IPOs and SPACs) dropped significantly after the outlier year of 2021, both in combined value and count.

M&A is the most common exit route by count and reached its highest ever activity rate in 2024.

Investment by stage

Early stage

Access all early-up stage funding rounds into Fintech startups globally here on the platform.

Breakout stage

Access all breakout-up stage funding rounds into Fintech startups globally here on the platform.

Scaleup stage

Access all scale-up stage funding rounds into Fintech startups globally here on the platform.

Late-stage fintech funding spiked in 2021 with over $80B in funding, a four-time increase from 2020.

Looking at it all together, the share of mega-rounds has increased from just 20% in 2012 to over 50-60% in 2021-2023, peaking in 2021.

Monthly investment trends

Investors

Most active investors into Fintech

We’ve ranked the top VC investors based on the number of investments they’ve made into fintech startups (the number one investor is indexed to 100).

Fintech segments and tags

Looking at business models in fintech. B2B SaaS startups attracted the most funding in 2023.

Overall, B2C share in fintech has constantly been shrinking since 2016 from over 50% to around 20% in 2022-2023.

Payment startups have attracted the largest share of funding in 2023 (updated until Q3 2023), even if a large part of this came from Stripe mega-financing.

Zooming into specific trends, change the yearly view and select the sub-industry of interest to see the evolution of fintech segments in time.

Top countries and cities

The US has been the leading VC market for fintech, notably followed by the UK, which pushes above its weight, and India. All countries have been experiencing a declining growth in the past years.

While London surpassed the Bay Area to gain the top spot in 2022, the Bay Area comes back on top this year. NYC comes a close third.

Los Angeles has been a fast growing hub in the past years.

Top Fintech startups ranked by Dealroom Signal

Top 100 fintech startups to watch ranked by Dealroom signal.

The Dealroom Signal is a proprietary predictive algorithm to discover the most promising companies. The input for each Signal's algorithm includes company growth (team size, product growth), founders' strength, completion score and contextual data (does the company fit into segments of interest), timing (is the startup likely to raise their next round soon) and team composition.

Partners

One of the leading Dutch banks.

ABN AMRO Bank is the third-largest Dutch bank, with headquarters in Amsterdam

ABN AMRO Bank has offices in 15 countries with 32,000 employees, most of whom are based in the Netherlands. Its operations include a private banking division which focuses on high-net-worth clients in 14 countries, commercial and merchant banking operations that play a major role in energy, commodities and transportation markets, as well as brokerage, clearing, and custody.

ABN Amro also launched its corporate venture arm, ABN Amro Ventures, in 2015. Following the demonstrable successes since then, the fund has increased to reach €150 million under management. In October 2023, ABN Amro has finalized a partnership with Motive Partners, in which the current ABN Amro Ventures portfolio becomes operationally managed by Motive Partners, while ABN Amro retains the legal ownership.

Furthermore, ABN Amro is now a significant Motive Parners' LP. Hugo Bongers, Managing Director and Head of ABN AMRO Ventures, and Tim Wanders, Executive Director at ABN AMRO, are joining Motive Ventures as Partner and Principal, respectively.

Specialist private equity platform focused on financial technology.

Founded in 2015, Motive Partners is a specialist private equity platform, combining Investors, Operators and Innovators, to build, back and buy the technology companies that enable the financial economy.

Motive invests across stages in technology-enabled financial and business services in North America and Europe. Motive has offices in New York City, London and Berlin, with over 230 professionals, and has raised $5.8 billion across two Investment programs, Motive Ventures (early stage) and Motive Capital (growth and buyout).

The Motive Partners’ team has acquired deep expertise and connectivity across the financial technology landscape over the last four decades – a horizontal sector that touches all parts of the global economy.

Specialised banking for tech and life science sectors

HSBC Innovation Banking is HSBC's new global, specialised banking proposition for businesses in cutting-edge sectors, such as tech and life sciences, and their investors.

It combines the expertise of the former Silicon Valley Bank UK (SVB UK) with HSBC's international strength in the US, Israel and Hong Kong to enable businesses focused on innovation to compete globally.

HSBC Innovation Banking supports a range of businesses from early-stage growth ones to late-stage public and private corporates, and connects them with its global capabilities, including investment banking, private banking and asset management services.