Canadian Fintech: Personal Lending 💸
Neo competes with Amex. Financeit goes direct to consumer. Float partners with Airwallex.
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💰 Funding
Clio, a legal billing and ops platform raised $1.3b at a $4b valuation, the biggest Canadian venture round of all time.
Gumloop, a Canadian founded AI automation company for performing tasks like extracting invoice info from PDFs raised over $4m.
Protexxa, a cybersecurity firm that monitors employees accidentally sharing sensitive corporate data online, raised $10m.Â
Canadian lender Propel increased their credit facility by $110m for their US consumer lending brand Credit Fresh.Â
🚀 ProductÂ
Financeit, Canada’s largest home improvement lender launched a direct to consumer personal loan product.Â
Financeit has historically only funded consumers indirectly through the dealers that are performing the work on the house (ex. Installing a new HVAC).
Fig another embedded consumer lender recently announced that they will also start offering direct to consumer loans.Â
Float’s bill pay features announced earlier this summer are being powered by Airwallex, a US based b2b payment infrastructure company.
Clearco, a Canadian based invoice funding company has partnered with Boundless, a Canadian based business loan marketplace to offer clients other types of loan products.
Clearco used to offer a variety of loan products including revenue-based financing, but last year refocused their efforts on invoice factoring.Â
Finofo, a b2b multi currency payment company launched corporate cards similar to Float, Loop, Keep and Truly.Â
I made a market map of these types of businesses here.
TD will begin testing Cohere’s large language models across various use cases. Cohere is Canada’s largest home grown AI firm.
TD is also home to Layer 6, an AI research firm.Â
Neo Financial teased the launch of their high rewards credit card intended to compete with Amex.Â
Neo will offer high cash back rewards for customers who retain high balances in their deposit accounts.
EQ Bank also launched a deposit tied rewards product on their card this summer. Customers that maintain high balances for longer periods of time can unlock high yields on their deposits.Â
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