Hi there,

ICYMI, the CB Insights Fintech 250 is out. 

For context, we're seeing a dramatic changing of the guard in financial services. 

It was happening gradually. Now, it's happening suddenly.

Why? 2 reasons for GTS (gradually, then suddenly):

1. An absolute flood of fintech innovation capital

2. The great financial services unbundling

In short, smart investors are backing smart founders tackling a giant market. 

All of this has made fintech the #1 category for unicorns.

Add in recent successful fintech exits, which ultimately serve to spur more financing, and you get the venture "circle of life.”

The second force is the unbundling of financial services. 

When legacy FS companies think about markets, they only get excited by giant markets. We can call this the "curse of the TAM.” 

Because legacy banks, payments firms, and insurers obsess over TAM, they leave openings for startups that are unafraid to “'niche down” to build a beachhead in a market — like a teen-focused challenger bank or BNPL for wedding expenses. 

Not all of these fintech companies have great ideas or will succeed. But a handful of them will make it and start doing other things.  

We saw this with “etailers” in the late 90s. There was Kozmo, Webvan, and Pets.com, and then there was Amazon and eBay.  

The new guard — like Coinbase, Stripe, Square, etc. — have created massive value in a fraction of the time of the old guard. 

Just look at the growth of Square’s valuation over time. Particularly comedic is the pundit class reveling in Square’s lackluster IPO. Square has gone on to crush after that.

In summary, lots of capital + great unbundling means these startups can and will grow quickly.

Download the full 80-slide presentation here for more analysis + stats. 

In the presentation, we also look at how much the mega-old guard financial services companies have grown vs. insurgent fintech companies. The picture is not pretty.

Living life in the bike lane

While micromobility startups have struggled with profitability issues, they’re seeing a post-pandemic rebound — Lime, for example, turned its first quarterly profit in Q3’20 and Bird Rides announced plans to go public via SPAC ($2.3B valuation) in May 2021. 

We analyze the state of micromobility around the world and the challenges the sector faces here.  

It’s gonna be a health party
 

We’re excited to announce 5 more demo companies for this year’s Future of Health (Dec. 8-9, online).

• avoMD (Healthcare IT)

• Boulder Care (Telehealth)

• Novadiscovery (Clinical Trials Tech)

• Qualio (Pharma Supply Chain)

• Vim (Healthcare IT)

Each company will provide a 6-minute demo of their product on our designated tech demo stream.
 

Register here to make sure you don’t miss a single demo and be the first to hear from these exciting companies. Save $50 with code demos.

Optimizing supply chains

As pressure on global supply chains mounts, supply chain execution is top of mind for retailers.

Here are 290+ companies — across categories like robotic fulfillment and reverse logistics — enabling retailers to respond faster to disruption and eliminate supply chain inefficiencies.

The analyst will take your call now

We are now conducting vendor briefings with companies in key markets that our clients care about. For reference, our clients are buyers of technology products, as well as investors & acquirers of technology companies.  

Analyst briefings are an opportunity to educate our analysts about your technology and products, to be featured in our research, and to ultimately get in front of our clients. 

Analyst briefings are 100% free.  

If you’re a company in one of the markets below (or know a company in these spaces), please complete the analyst briefing surveys linked below to start the process.

SaaS platforms for investment management

These are software platforms that consolidate data across front- and back-office systems to streamline the investment decision process. Using these solutions, investment management firms can manage pipelines and track investments, reporting, compliance, and more. 

Relevant companies include Limina, Juniper Square, and Alpima among others.

Complete the analyst briefing survey here.

Technology infrastructure for payments & banking

These companies provide modern technology infrastructure and banking-as-a-service platforms to enable enterprises to launch innovative payment and banking programs (e.g., issue cards, create digital accounts, etc.). 

Relevant companies include Banking Circle, Form3, and Sandbox Banking among others.

Complete the analyst briefing survey here.

TechCrunch. Alex Wilhelm (@alex) reports on the rising unicorn backlog using CB Insights data.

AVC. Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) cites CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal (@asanwal) and features CBI data.

dot.LA. Harrison Weber (@HarrisonWeber) speaks with CB Insights senior analyst Chris Bendtsen about LA’s deal rush.
 

P.S. Go behind the scenes of the Fintech 250 next week with the analysts who compiled the list. Register for the free webinar here.

Client-Exclusive Research
 

[Sustainability]

Climate tech outlook. Companies creating solutions that abate emissions and reduce resource intensity are seeing record-high funding levels in 2021 to date.

[Supply chain]

Factory analytics platforms. Given narrow margins and strained supply chains, factories are increasingly looking to technology vendors to help them manage production efforts.

[Marketplaces]

A busy day at the market. Mirakl, a marketplace platform for e-commerce stores, raised $555M at a $3.8B valuation.