VC & Funding

Fintech Futures was the most active newsletter this week, covering several acquisitions and funding rounds. It reported on Nasdaq's acquisition of due diligence platform Dasseti to build out its eVestment suite, Stripe's acquisition of Clerky to expand its incorporation offering for start-ups, and BitGo's acquisition of the NYDIG unit to bolster its trading and capital market services. On the funding side, Fintech Futures covered Nayla's $17.9m raise to grow micro financing in Saudi Arabia and SBI's $270m payment for a 20% stake in multi-asset investment platform Ajaib.

The Vanguard-Altruist deal drew coverage from two newsletters. The Fintech Blueprint reported that Vanguard is acquiring Altruist for $4B, while American Banker Fintech covered comments from Altruist CEO Jason Wenk on the deal and what he described as his "life's work." Separately, Fintech Notebook reported that $210M made FIS's biggest problem go away, without further detail provided in the title.

Funding activity elsewhere included Payments Wrap Up's coverage of Polymarket targeting a $1B raise at a $21B valuation, and Connecting the Dots in FinTech's report that Singapore put $173M into fintech as private funding hit a decade low. Sifted Fintech Newsletter covered the state of Nordic fintech, noting that companies in the region are described as becoming excellent at surviving and worse at scaling.

Linas's Newsletter covered several items related to payments and AI, including a comparison of PayPal's and Stripe's valuations, with PayPal having rejected Stripe at $60.50 and now trading at $53, as well as Grok Bot's role in making SpaceXAI an agentic payments player alongside Stripe Link, and Claude Commerce Agents' position relative to ChatGPT and Gemini. Fintech Snark Tank covered EY's $100 million spending related to assessing its people's thinking, without elaborating further on the subject.