Paytech is the part of the Fintech ecosystem that drives it forward and helps make users’ lives easier by automating routine operations. New ideas disrupt the market and move technology forward. The companies we list in this article are the biggest investors in subscription management and recurring billing technology companies, helping new names and new ideas to launch.
New Enterprise Associates
Link: www.nea.com
Number of investments: 1652
Number of exits: 368
Headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast
Contact: kbarrett@nea.com
Stage: Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture
Industries: SaaS
Founders: Chuck Newhall, Frank A. Bonsal, Jr., Richard Kramlich
New Enterprise Associates is a global venture capital firm investing in technology and health care. They help entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors, and geographies. With over $19 billion in cumulative committed capital since the firm’s founding in 1977, NEA invests in technology and health-care companies at all stages in a company’s life cycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm’s long track record of successful investing includes more than 210 portfolio company IPOs and more than 360 acquisitions.
As an example, NEA is democratizing finance for all by investing in Robinhood, one of the best known robo-advisors in the market. A pioneer of commission-free investing, with more than 10M accounts, Robinhood gives users more ways to make their money work harder. Along with Robinhood, they finance Plaid, a modern developer platform for interacting with bank and transaction data, and Braintree, a company that specializes in mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies.
Accel
Link: www.accel.com
Number of investments: 1439
Number of exits: 293
Headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast
Contact: (650) 614-4800
Stage: Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Seed
Industries: Finance, Online Portals, Venture Capital
Founders: Arthur Patterson, Jim Swartz
Accel is an early and growth-stage venture capital firm that powers the global community of entrepreneurs. Founded in 1983, Accel brings more than three decades of experience building and supporting hundreds of companies. Accel’s vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries.
Among the finance companies that have invested with Accel are Chargebee, Braintree, Cardspring, GoCardless, Justpay, Venmo, Wimbo, Xendit, Yapstone, Yodlee, and more. The firm seeks to understand entrepreneurs as individuals, appreciate their originality, and play to their strengths. They believe that greatness doesn’t have a stereotype.
Index Ventures
Link: www.indexventures.com
Number of investments: 818
Number of exits: 170
Headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US
Contact: 415-471-1700
Stage: Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Seed
Industries: Finance, Venture Capital
Founders: David Rimer, Giuseppe Zocco, Neil Rimer
Index Ventures helps the most ambitious entrepreneurs turn bold ideas into global businesses. Since 1996, Index has partnered with exceptional entrepreneurs, and they are using technology to reshape the world around us. They believe they invest in people, not deals, which enables them to form durable partnerships based on curiosity, thoughtfulness, and deep conviction.
Today the fund comprises 39 companies focused on financial services. They include Wealthfront, Robinhood, Revolut, Adyen, and more. Another major company is Boku, the leading billing and cross-platform mobile payments company that brings bank-grade payment technology and mobile users together, creating a trusted, accessible platform. Based in San Francisco with offices in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, Boku has 24 million active users monthly, across 70 countries with more than 200 merchant partners. You can find more information on their index investments in financial services on their website.
Andreessen Horowitz
Link: www.a16z.com
Number of investments: 811
Number of exits: 132
Headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast
Contact: businessplans@a16z.com
Stage: Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture
Industries: Finance, Venture Capital
Founders: Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen
Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm with $2.7 billion under management, investing from seed to growth. They prefer to invest in the social media business and technology sector, with a focus on software since June 2009, those that have appeared since the previous financial crisis.
a16z invests in seed to late-stage technology companies, across the consumer, enterprise, bio/health-care, crypto, and Fintech spaces. a16z has $10B in assets under management across multiple funds, including the $650M Bio funds, the $350M Crypto Fund, and the Cultural Leadership Fund. The companies in their portfolio include TransferWise, Mercury, Stripe, and so on.
General Catalyst
Link: www.generalcatalyst.com
Number of investments: 723
Number of exits: 124
Headquarters: Greater Boston Area, East Coast, New England
Contact: gcinfo@generalcatalyst.com
Stage: Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Seed
Industries: Enterprise, Mobile, Venture Capital
Founders: Bill Fitzgerald, David Fialkow, David Orfao, Joel Cutler
General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that makes early-stage and growth equity investments. Since 2000, General Catalyst has managed eight venture capital funds totaling approximately $3.75 billion in capital commitments. Yet the best measure of their success is how many of their entrepreneurs and founders come back again to work with them. That bond of trust and friendship is born in their earliest interactions.
General Catalyst invests in companies that bring positive change to the world. The payments industry is presented in General Catalyst’s portfolio with Monzo, Stripe, and so on. Recently, for example, they funded Lemonade, the popular insurance technology company. In 2018, Lemonade and its customers gave $162,135 back to 15 charities, and, in 2019, that impact grew to $631,540.07, benefitting 26 organizations. That’s real, positive change, with the potential for benefitting thousands of people.
Greylock
Link: www.greylock.com
Number of investments: 709
Number of exits: 202
Headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast
Contact: press@greylock.com
Stage: Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture
Industries: Consumer, Enterprise Software, Venture Capital
Founders: Bill Elfers
Greylock partners early with consumer and enterprise software entrepreneurs. Founded in 1965, their mission is to help realize rare potential. The committed capital of Greylock is about $3.5 billion under management. Greylock invested in Zuora, a SaaS platform that automates subscription order-to-cash operations.
Pitching a venture capital fund is a challenge for beginners with bright ideas. A Greylock partner, Josh Elman, in an article for Wired, tells the story about what happens in a VC pitch meeting, which might be useful for startups to acquire some insights and avoid mistakes.
Battery Ventures
Link: www.battery.com
Number of investments: 689
Number of exits: 154
Headquarters: Greater Boston Area, East Coast, New England
Contact: (415) 426-5900
Stage: Debt, Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Private Equity, Seed
Industries: Finance, Financial Services, FinTech
Founders: Rick Frisbie
Battery Ventures finances technology sector companies with venture capital, private equity, and debt financing investments. Cross River Bank, TrialPay by Visa, Paystand, Inc., Affirm, N26, Soldo, Intacct, and others are in the Battery portfolio. Since inception, the firm has raised over $8.9 billion and is now investing its thirteenth funds, Battery Ventures XIII and Battery Ventures XIII Side Fund, with a combined capitalization of $2 billion.
Aaron Rinberg, VP at Battery, who works on a variety of deal structures including venture, growth equity, and buyouts across multiple tech sectors, said in his interview in Soldo’s blog:
“The amount of technology that’s available and necessary to create solutions for the problems that we have today is drastically different to the sorts of problems that folks were solving years ago. But the tech is not necessarily more expensive to get at. In fact, we see a lot of community-driven, open-source projects that allow entrepreneurs to implement technology in a more scalable manner than was the case before.”
Silicon Valley Bank
Link: www.svb.com/
Number of investments: 609
Number of exits: 209
Headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast
Contact: clientservice@svb.com
Stage: Debt, Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Private Equity
Industries: Banking, Business Development, Finance
Silicon Valley Bank works with technology, life sciences, cleantech, venture capital, private equity, and premium wine businesses. For more than 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has helped innovative companies and their investors move bold ideas forward, fast. SVB provides a full range of financial services and expertise to companies of all sizes in innovation centers around the world. SBV invested in SaaSOptics, a subscription management platform, and Intacct, a provider of accounting and financial management software.
The SVB Private Bank serves the needs of individuals who are part of the Innovation sector of the US economy. This includes venture capital and private equity professionals, as well as C-level executives from all the businesses Silicon Valley Bank serves nationwide. SVB is uniquely positioned with access to the key players in the industry. If you want to learn more about the fund, SVB’s director, Kamir Kothari, shares some secrets of getting a venture capital investment in his article “Finding Venture Capital: Why Fit Matters More Than Money.”
Tiger Global Management
Link: tigerglobal.com
Number of investments: 425
Number of exits: 64
Headquarters: Greater New York Area, East Coast, Northeastern US
Contact: info@tigerglobal.com
Stage: Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Post-Ipo, Private Equity, Secondary Market
Industries: Consumer, Information Technology, Internet
Founders: Chase Coleman
Tiger Global Management is an investment firm that deploys capital globally in both public and private markets. Founded in 2001, its objective is to generate superior risk-adjusted returns for its investors over the long term. Tiger Global Management focuses predominately on private and public companies in the global Internet, software, consumer, and payments industries. Tiger Global invested in Stripe, a payment platform, and Chargebee, a recurring billing platform.
Tiger Global Management has raised seven funds, their latest being Tiger Global Private Investment Partners XII. This fund was announced on Jan 24, 2020, and raised a total of $3.8B and was the latest sign of investors’ continued interest in private technology companies, despite worries about overheated valuations.
Sources
The information used in this article was taken from open sources such as Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Pitchbook, and the official websites of NEA, Accel, Tiger Global Management, SVB, Battery Ventures, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and General Catalyst. Moderate inconsistencies may be present in the text above.