Now Playing
AI Finance Unicorns, Bitcoin ETF Surge & Embedded Finance Shift
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
AI-native finance infrastructure hits unicorn status as Rillet closes a $100M Series C at a $1B valuation, Bitcoin ETFs pull in $1.61B in four days, and embedded finance reshapes how ISVs capture the payments stack. Today's briefing covers the sharpest signals in fintech and banking for finance professionals and investors.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Rillet just crossed a billion-dollar valuation, and that's the clearest signal yet that AI-native finance infrastructure has become its own investment category, not just a feature set bolted onto legacy software. The company closed a hundred-million-dollar Series C led by ICONIQ, with Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz participating.
Rillet isn't alone in this race. Natural, an AI agent payments infrastructure startup, just secured a hundred-million-dollar credit facility from Upper90 Capital to expand payment volumes and credit offerings.
Rounding out the AI infrastructure theme, Prevalent AI raised twenty-two million dollars in its first-ever external funding round. Nine years old, no outside capital until now.
Shifting to crypto, spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded their strongest weekly inflow of twenty twenty-six, pulling in one point six one billion dollars across four trading days. BlackRock's IBIT alone pulled in five hundred and two point nine nine million dollars on a single day.
On payments, Helcim landed a fifty-three-million-dollar Series C in Canada, valuing the Calgary processor at two hundred and fifty million dollars. It now processes nearly ten billion dollars annually for over twenty-two thousand businesses.
The structural shift underneath all of this is embedded finance maturation. ISVs are now the primary distribution layer for fintech capabilities, earning payment, lending, and treasury revenue without building bank infrastructure themselves.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.