VC & Funding

Fintech Futures published the largest volume of acquisition news for the week, covering Nasdaq's acquisition of due diligence platform Dasseti to build out its eVestment suite, Nayla securing $17.9m to grow micro financing in Saudi Arabia, SBI paying $270m for a 20% stake in multi-asset investment platform Ajaib, BitGo bolstering its trading and capital market services through the acquisition of the NYDIG unit, and Stripe acquiring Clerky to build out an incorporation offering for start-ups.

The Altruist-Vanguard deal drew coverage from two outlets: The Fintech Blueprint provided analysis of Vanguard's acquisition of Altruist for $4B, while American Banker Fintech featured commentary from Altruist CEO Jason Wenk on the deal and what he described as his "life's work."

Several newsletters covered funding and market dynamics. Payments Wrap Up reported that Polymarket is targeting a $1B raise at a $21B valuation. Connecting the Dots in FinTech covered Singapore putting $173M into fintech even as private funding hits a decade low. Fintech Notebook covered a $210M development tied to what it called FIS's biggest problem. Fintech Snark Tank covered EY spending $100 Million on an initiative related to identifying which of its people can think. Sifted Fintech Newsletter addressed the state of Nordic fintech, noting that companies in the region are becoming better at surviving but worse at scaling.

Linas's Newsletter focused on payments and AI-agent themes, noting that PayPal rejected Stripe at $60.50 and that Stripe now trades at $53, alongside coverage of Grok Bot positioning SpaceXAI as an agentic payments player with Stripe Link described as a winner, and Claude Commerce Agents challenging ChatGPT and Gemini in the commerce space.