2Q24 Newsletter
👋 Hello, It's BTV
Welcome back to our quarterly newsletter!
In case you missed it, Jake wrote another great piece for This Week in Fintech: Forget perfectionism, embrace the chaos! It needs no preamble here...besides this excellent throwback photo:
🚀 The Mint
We’re always looking for strong pre-seed founders to join The Mint. Our next batch starts mid-August, so please send early-stage fintech founders our way!
Want to read up on The Mint?
- Check out this post from Sheel.
- Want to learn more about some of the key themes that surfaced across our fireside speaker series? Check out this post from Sheel.
- Mary, CEO & Co-Founder of Inscope (Mint I), interviewed with Boring Business Nerd, reflecting on her experience going through the first cohort.
📈 BTV Portfolio Updates
💰 Fundraising
Atlas (Mint II) raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding.
InScope (Mint I) raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed.
Cadana (BTV I) raised $7.1 million in a seed funding round led by Costanoa.
Caliza (BTV I) raised $8.5 million in a seed extension funding round led by Initialized.
Coast (BTV I) raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Iconiq.
📰 In the News
Charlie (BTV II) released a new anti-fraud feature called SpeedBump.
“When a new payee or a device that hasn’t been used in 30 days is added to an account, or the account owner transfers over $100 to someone else, SpeedBump activates by pausing the transaction for up to six hours. During this time, Charlie sends notifications through the app, text, and email to the account owner about the transaction and also sends them educational modules about fraud. The hope is the pause is long enough for someone who is getting scammed to reverse the transaction, but not long enough to gum up everyday financial transactions.”
LogRock (BTV II) officially entered the insurance space! If you want to learn more about what they’ve been up to (acquiring 3 extraordinary truck insurance agencies), check out this post from Hunter (Co-Founder and CEO)!
Unit (BTV I) announced the Unite Summit, an invite-only gathering of the people building the future of embedded finance: banks, tech companies, regulators, and industry leaders. Learn more and request a seat here!
P.S. nothing better than seeing our portfolio companies partner up!
📢 BTV in the Spotlight
Podcasts and articles featuring our portfolio founders:
- Daniel (Coast) was featured in Lithic’s Fintech Layer Cake podcast, giving a “masterclass” on fleet payments, a “fascinating specialized use case where vanilla commercial cards just won't get the job done.”
- Kevin (Charlie) sat down with Fast Company to discuss what it means to create banking services that help protect older people.
Our BTV team also spent some time in the spotlight:
- Jake was on Breaking Banks, talking about the twists and turns of co-founding a boot-strapping start-up — particularly when he was young — then realizing they were on to something…and having to figure everything out, fast.
🤙 Community
BTV 🤝 NYC!
We’re enjoying laying deeper roots in NYC, with our founders and with the ever-expanding fintech-obsessed community (our people!).
In June, Jake made a trip over, and we got our East Coast founders together for a delicious meal…in a private indoor tent. A fun perk to our East Coast portfolio growth requiring more and more seats at the dinner table!
Then, with the help of our friends at SVB, we gathered all of our NYC fintech friends for breakfast in a tucked-away carriage house + sunny courtyard. Real talk: should we all just agree to replace evening happy hours with daylight brunches…? Look how lovely it is!
💪 Talent
Genuinely, we love hands-on helping our founders with all things talent! Q2 had us working closely with many of our Mint companies on topics such as role definition, driving engaging recruiting processes, interview feedback, and closing strategy.
We spent time working side by side with founders to show them the basics of finding and engaging talent, and we drove results with a number of companies hiring founding team members during the cohort.
With founding engineers being a frequent need, we continued to invest in meeting talent for the BTV network and facilitating introductions across the portfolio.
📖 Reading
Our friend, Matt Brown at Matrix, wrote another great piece with some great lessons on lending: How to make money selling money.
Our favorite tidbit is how fintechs need to “price and shape risk that others can’t or won’t.”
🗓️ Coming Up - Let’s Hang!
Here’s where you’ll find Team BTV over the next few months:
- 🇦🇷 Aug. 4-10: Jake will be in Buenos Aires
- 🇧🇷 Aug. 10-13: Jake will be in São Paulo
- 🍃 Aug. 16-23: the entire BTV team will be in San Francisco kicking off The Mint’s third cohort!
- 🇸🇦 Sept. 3-5: Sheel and Nihar will be in Saudi Arabia, where Sheel will be speaking at 24 Fintech
- 🇦🇪 Sept. 6: Sheel and Nihar will be making a quick stop in Dubai!
- 🇧🇹 Oct. 1-4: Sheel will be in Bhutan, speaking at the Bhutan Innovation Forum
- 🌉 Oct. 24: the entire BTV Team will be in San Francisco for our Annual LP Meeting and Mint III’s Demo Day! (see you there?)
- 🏕️ Oct. 25-27: the entire BTV portfolio will be heading into the California Redwoods for our annual founder retreat, Camp BTV!
- 🎰 Oct. 27-30: Jake and Sheel will head straight from Camp to Vegas for Money 20/20. We'll be hosting some fun & healthy hangs, per usual, so keep an eye out for invites!
Made it this far? We appreciate you. Feel free to hit reply and tell us what you want from this newsletter so we can be better tomorrow (and next quarter).
Until next time,
Team BTV
