Top Insights
Capital kept moving this week – from wholesale settlement plumbing to card infrastructure and compliance AI. Below are the raises that actually change roadmaps, with details pulled strictly from the sources you shared.
The Big Five
Tether
up to $20B (private round, target valuation ~$500B)
Tether is in talks to raise between $15–$20B in new equity for roughly 3% of the company, a deal that would imply a valuation close to $500B.
The operator of USDT (~$170B in circulation; cited user base ~500M) posted about $13.4B profit last year largely from Treasuries, and Cantor Fitzgerald is advising lead investors.
The company was fined in 2021 over reserve disclosures and says proceeds would scale existing and new lines.
Fnality
$136M Series C
WisdomTree, Bank of America, Citi, KBC Group, Temasek, and Tradeweb led the round. Existing backers include Santander, Barclays, BNP Paribas, DTCC, Euroclear, Goldman Sachs, ING, Nasdaq Ventures, State Street, UBS.
Fnality operates DLT-based wholesale payment systems anchored in central-bank money; the Sterling Fnality Payment System (£FnPS) went live in Dec 2023 and received settlement finality in Dec 2024.
Next up: more currencies, liquidity tools, and interoperability for stablecoins/tokenized deposits, plus DvP/PvP and real-time repo uses.
Cardless
$60M Series C
Spark Capital led, with support from Activant, Industry Ventures, Pear VC and others, bringing total funding to >$170M.
Cardless provides the stack for brands to launch co-branded credit cards end-to-end – apps, underwriting, servicing, often in ~90 days.
Customers include Bilt, Coinbase, Qatar Airways, and Alibaba – the company reports 400% YoY transaction-volume growth, and its lead investor says revenue is 10x-ing. Funds go to new partnerships and product expansion.
OnFinance AI
$4.2M Pre-Series A
Peak XV’s Surge led; participants include Shyamal Hitesh Anadkat (OpenAI), Groww Founders’ Fund, MarsShot VC (Razorpay Founders’ Fund), Climber Capital, Indian Angel Network, Silverneedle Ventures.
The Bengaluru startup builds BFSI-specific gen-AI for compliance/risk (products: NeoGPT, ComplianceOS) that parse India’s frequent regulatory circulars.
Clients include BSE, Kotak MF, Nippon India MF, Aditya Birla Capital Digital, and HDFC Securities. Capital supports R&D, overseas expansion, and product build-out.
PredictAP
$5M (real-estate AP automation)
RET Ventures led, with Wise Ventures participating. PredictAP’s AI ingests and codes invoices for real-estate operators and integrates with Yardi, MRI, and RealPage.
The company says it now serves 100+ customers, processes >4M invoices annually, and cut average AP cycle times from 11 days to ~3 days.
It also announced a payments partnership with Bottomline. Funds go to go-to-market and product integrations.
Startups on the Radar
Predicti – funding (amount undisclosed)
TX Ventures and Dreamcraft Ventures led, Plug and Play joined.
Predicti’s platform helps financial institutions anticipate customer life events (e.g., home purchases, company formations, relocations) using internal/external data so banks can time offers more precisely.
Capital supports scaling and broader adoption in finance.
What ties these raises together is the way fintech is maturing at both ends of the spectrum. At the top, giants like Tether and Fnality are building the pipes for global settlement and stablecoin infrastructure. Further down, players such as Cardless, OnFinance AI, and PredictAP are embedding credit, compliance, and automation into everyday operations. Different layers, same theme: money is moving from experiments and slide decks into systems that are already running in production.
Disclaimer: This digest is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
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