The London-based firm announced the funding — divided between its $615 million Early Stage Fund IX and its $685 million Growth Fund II — on its website Monday (Aug. 12).

Writing on the company blog, Balderton managing partner Bernard Liautaud said the fund is a testament to the vibrancy of the European venture capital (VC) space.

“More people than ever are starting businesses — and those that do have global ambitions,” he wrote. “They are determined to build companies like Spotify or Revolut instead of smaller regional leaders.”

The trend is also reflected in European venture investment numbers as well, Liautaud added. In 2008, venture investments in European startups came to under $8 billion, compared to more than $50 billion last year.

“And the returns speak for themselves, with European VC funds outperforming North American funds over both a 10 and 15 year period,” he wrote.

A report on the fundraise by the Financial Times (FT) points out that European venture capital (VC) has been quite active of late, with venture investment in the region climbed 12% during the second quarter, according to data from Dealroom.

Balderton has been investing in Revolut since that FinTech’s earliest days, becoming its biggest investor. Revolut recently became the most valuable startup in Europe after embarking on an employee share sale at a $45 billion valuation.

“You can imagine how much that propels the fund,” Liautaud told the news outlet. “To have a great track record is one where you have consistent performance and sometimes you have an outsized return.”

The FT report further notes that Balderton, unlike other VC firms based in Europe, only backs European startups, meaning the company has missed out on many of the high-profile artificial intelligence (AI) startups based in Silicon Valley.

As covered here last month, AI projects have helped venture funding in the U.S. reach its highest quarterly total in two years, climbing to $55.6 billion during the second quarter of 2024. That’s up 47% from the $37.8 billion startups in the U.S. took in during the first quarter, fueled largely by major investments in AI firms like Elon Musk’s xAI.

At the same time, there’s also been some indication recently that investors have become pickier about AI projects, with a Financial Times report in June showing that most of the stocks that surged during last year’s AI hype have dropped.

“AI is still a big theme, but if you can’t demonstrate evidence, you’re getting hurt,” said Stuart Kaiser, Citi’s head of equity trading. “Just saying ‘AI’ 15 times is not going to cut it anymore.”

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The company raised $225 million in Series D capital and an additional $70 million in credit, bringing the total amount of capital it has raised to date to $500 million, FLYR said in a Thursday (Aug. 8) press release.

“This capital raise is a testament to the growth FLYR has achieved thus far, and we’re excited to continue supporting the world’s largest travel providers at pace,” FLYR founder and CEO Alex Mans said in the release.

FLYR’s products are used by airlines and hospitality brands to manage data, interconnect hundreds of systems and deliver a better digital experience to their customers, according to the release.

The products are natively powered by AI and built upon modularity and open standards, including IATA New Distribution Capacity (NDC) and ONE Order, the release said.

FLYR’s latest funding round comes at a time when, over the past 12 months, the company’s annualized recurring revenue grew by 290%, per the release.

Laurence A. Tosi, who is managing partner and founder of WestCap, which led the funding round, and who will join FLYR’s board of directors, said in the release: “Much of the travel industry has been technologically stagnant for years, reliant on a handful of legacy incumbents with limited capacity to innovate. FLYR delivers the open and dynamic platform the travel industry needs to better serve travelers and expand their services.”

Travel companies are introducing a range of AI-powered tools, signaling a change in how business trips are booked and managed, PYMNTS reported in July.

Product introductions include an AI platform from Altour that aims to streamline corporate travel planning and cut costs; new technology from United Airlines that keeps passengers better informed during weather-related flight delays; an AI-powered platform from AMGiNE that is designed to simplify the process of arranging business trips; and an AI-powered digital travel agent developed by Serko in collaboration with UneeQ that aims to provide real-time pricing and availability.

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The deal would value the company at $4.5 billion, a figure that is double the valuation it achieved in another fundraise six months ago, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Thursday (Aug. 8), citing unnamed sources.

The details of the deal have not been finalized, and they could change, according to the report.

Reached for comment by PYMNTS, Glean spokesperson Kate Miller said in an email: “To ensure we’re building the strongest business we can, we’re regularly in conversation with investors, but we have not solidified any plans to raise a new round since our Series D which was announced earlier this year. We’re encouraged by the momentum we’re seeing with customers, and continue to focus on building the leading work AI platform.”

The company’s subscription revenue has reached $55 million on an annualized basis and could reach $100 million by the end of the year, per the report.

Glean’s product — search software that helps employees find information from across their organizations — is in the category of AI-powered productivity apps that investors believe could be more lucrative in the short term than AI-powered consumer-facing apps, the report said.

During its previous funding round, which was held in February, Glean raised more than $200 million from investors that include Citigroup, Capital One Ventures, Databricks and Sequoia, valuing the firm at $2.2 billion.

“Our investors join us in our belief that Glean is the right solution, built by the right team, at exactly the right time,” the company said in a Feb. 26 blog post announcing that fundraise.

Glean said in the blog post that its goal is to become the platform companies turn to when they need an AI work assistant, while also offering tools to “build custom generative AI experiences grounded in company knowledge.”

Integrating enterprise search capabilities that use AI represents an incremental improvement as well as a game-changer, transforming how companies can access, analyze and activate their accumulated data repositories, PYMNTS reported in March.

Eddie Zhou, head of AI at Glean, told PYMNTS in an interview posted on March 21: “The ability of generative AI models to be coherent and fluent when synthesizing material is a step function improvement in their output. Using these models as an interface to help businesses decide how to execute a set of tasks — that is a capability that was not present in AI models in the past.”

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The new funding, announced Tuesday (Aug. 6), will help Stori develop products to promote financial conclusion.

“Since the beginning, my co-founders and I recognized the unfair gap in the traditional financial system in Mexico, which has historically served only certain sectors of the population,” Marlene Garayzar, Stori’s co-founder, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “So we set off on our mission to facilitate access to finance, empowering Mexicans and, in the long term, many more people across Latin America.”

“This investment will enable us to continue developing innovative solutions, through technology, that promote financial inclusion and education. It is also a statement of confidence in the future of Mexico,” Garayzar added.

Stori launched its first credit card in 2020, aimed at consumers overlooked by traditional lenders. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 when a funding round raised its valuation to $1.2 billion, also becoming the first Mexican unicorn co-founded by a woman. Last fall, Stori won regulatory approval to launch Stori Cuenta+, its deposit account.

In addition to the new funding, Stori also announced it had named Diego Cabrera Canay, a veteran of companies like dLocal and Mercado Libre, to serve as its new chief financial officer.

Recent reporting by PYMNTS has examined the trend of companies vying for the business of Mexico’s unbanked/underbanked population, including Aviva, which this week raised $5.5 million in seed funding.

“Despite countless attempts by FinTechs and neobanks, the smartphone is not a one-size-fits-all solution for providing financial services; a non-conventional strategy is critical,” said Filiberto Castro, the company’s co-CEO. “We have proven that our phygital strategy is essential to reaching those who most benefit from access to financial services and who have paradoxically been excluded from the formal financial system.”

Last month, Blu Financiero introduced a “mass market” credit card that has a 99% approval rate and can be obtained without a formal credit history.

“We see a classic oligopoly problem where four of the top five banks control 70% of the deposits but are all foreign owned,” Casper Yonel, CEO of Blu, said in a news release. “With Mexico comprising less than 5% of their global balance sheets, these top few banks hold little incentive to develop the unique technology required to serve the growing middle class and mass market.”

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The company will also use the new funding to add talent and accelerate the development of the next generation of language processing units (LPUs), according to a Monday (Aug. 5) press release.

“We intend to make the resources available so that anyone can create cutting-edge AI products, not just the largest tech companies,” Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq, said in the release. “This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud.”

GroqCloud is currently being used by more than 360,000 developers who are building on the platform and creating AI applications on openly available models like Meta’s Llama 3.1, OpenAI’s Whisper Large V3, Google’s Gemma and Mistral’s Mixtral, according to the release.

With the new funding, Groq will scale the capacity of its tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and features to GroqCloud, the release said.

Groq’s latest funding round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners, per the release.

“The market for AI compute is meaningful and Groq’s vertically integrated solution is well positioned to meet this opportunity,” Samir Menon, managing director at BlackRock Private Equity Partners, said in the release. “We look forward to supporting Groq as they scale to meet demand and accelerate their innovation further.”

There is a critical need for next-generation systems for AI inference solutions that can boost performance and power efficiency while offering the lowest total cost of ownership, PYMNTS reported in May. This comes as AI training costs typically reach hundred of millions of dollars.

In July, San Francisco Compute Co. raised $12 million in an early funding round to launch a trading platform for computing power. With the platform, the company aims to help companies working with AI meet the challenge of getting access to the semiconductors they need.

In February, Recogni secured $102 million in a Series C funding round to drive the development of next-generation systems for AI inference solutions that aim to significantly boost performance and power efficiency while offering the lowest total cost of ownership.

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The fundraising is a sign that the artificial intelligence boom is reviving investor enthusiasm, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday (Aug. 5).

Thrive told its investors Sunday (Aug. 4) that it received commitments for the full amount, which marks its largest-ever fundraising and is among the biggest completed this year by a venture capital firm, according to the report.

“The technological breakthroughs that will occur over the next years will be unlike anything we have ever experienced before,” Thrive founder Josh Kushner wrote in a letter to announce the funds to Thrive’s investors, per the report.

Thrive has enjoyed greater prominence in tech startup circles due to its ties to OpenAI, in which it has invested hundreds of millions, the report said.

The news follows reports from January that Thrive was planning the fund, with one investor saying at the time that the effort would present “a very interesting litmus test” for other investors in a market in which investing had fallen dramatically.

Since then, American VC funding hit its highest quarterly total in two years in July, to the tune of $55.6 billion. The figure marks a 47% increase over the $37.8 billion startups in the U.S. brought in during the prior quarter, fueled largely by investments in AI firms, such as the $6 billion raised by Elon Musk’s xAI and $7.5 billion raised by CoreWeave.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the rise of the technology in the wearables market, in the form of the “friend” pendant, a $99 AI-powered necklace set to launch next year. The “always-listening pendant” responds to voice prompts with text messages and joins an increasing number of AI-powered wearable and handheld devices jockeying for a place in consumers’ daily lives.

“The concept is like all other smart wearables, AI-powered or not. It’s an imperfect solution,” Marty Meany, editor of tech review website Goosed.ie and a regular user of Meta’s AI-powered Ray-Ban sunglasses, told PYMNTS.

He pointed to potential design flaws in the pendant.

“I can already see the issue here, likely being that the necklace looks like something MC Hammer would wear,” he said. “It will probably end up being worn under your shirt/blouse — so what happens when it almost certainly overheats?”

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“This oversubscribed round highlights the strength of our model’s unit economics, as well as our mission to provide innovative and accessible financial services to a market of 70 million people who are still underserved or receive very low-quality products,” the company wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.

The funding will help Aviva develop what it calls its phygital — physical and digital — financial solutions. The company operates a series of kiosks around Mexico that allow users to apply for loans via video call, get approved in real time and receive their funds in under 24 hours.

“Despite countless attempts by FinTechs and neobanks, the smartphone is not a one-size-fits-all solution for providing financial services; a non-conventional strategy is critical,” Filiberto Castro, Co-CEO of Aviva, said in a report by Finextra. “We have proven that our phygital strategy is essential to reaching those who most benefit from access to financial services and who have paradoxically been excluded from the formal financial system.”

Recent reporting by PYMNTS shows that a number of companies are trying to capture the attention of Mexico’s unbanked/underbanked population.

Among them is Blu Financiero, which last month introduced a “mass market” credit card that has a 99% approval rate and can be obtained without a formal credit history.

The company said it had 50,000 people on a waiting list at the time of launch, testament to the need for accessible financial products in Mexico, where just 14% of the people have access to a credit card and only 30% have a formal credit history.

“We see a classic oligopoly problem where four of the top five banks control 70% of the deposits but are all foreign owned,” Casper Yonel, CEO of Blu, said in a news release. “With Mexico comprising less than 5% of their global balance sheets, these top few banks hold little incentive to develop the unique technology required to serve the growing middle class and mass market.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year that real-time payments in Mexico are taking a significant leap forward with the introduction of products like the new account-to-account payments tool from Uruguayan FinTech Prometeo.

“This innovative system employs a single application programming interface (API) to enable instantaneous payments directly to a bank account, granting businesses immediate access to collections — without requiring major technical overhauls,” that report said.

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The company will use the new funding to scale its team and deliver its solutions to more FinTechs, banks and other financial institutions, according to a July 29 press release.

“This investment not only validates the pressing need for innovation in AML compliance but also propels us closer to our vision of a world where humans work alongside AI agents to eliminate financial crime,” Ioannis Giannaros, CEO and co-founder of Axle Automation, said in the release.

Axle leverages generative AI to automate enhanced due diligence and other processes that are currently highly manual and inefficient, according to the release.

The company’s solutions enable financial institutions to scale their compliance efforts; reduce fraud, compliance risks and operational costs; and increase revenue, the release said.

These solutions arrive at a time when the amount of money spent on AML compliance is growing by 20% a year, surpassing $200 billion, and the amount of money laundered is estimated to be as much as $2 trillion a year, per the release.

In meeting these challenges, Axle Automation aims to become “the market leader for AI-powered compliance,” Ken Nguyen, partner at Diagram Ventures, which led the company’s seed funding round, said in the release.

“Axle’s innovative approach to automating compliance workflows aligns perfectly with our goal of leveraging transformative technologies to drive positive impact,” Nguyen said.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that 71% of financial institutions now use both AI and machine learning (ML) in their fraud-fighting efforts.

All 10 North American financial institutions that were surveyed said they rely on a mix of in-house fraud prevention systems, third-party resources and new technologies to protect their institutions and customers, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Hawk collaboration, “Financial Institutions Revamping Technologies to Fight Financial Crime.”

On Wednesday (July 31), Hawk expanded its Series B funding amid a new investing partnership with Macquarie Capital, saying the funding will drive the international expansion efforts for its fraud prevention and AML technology using AI.

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The new funding will allow Layer2 to enhance its infrastructure, which uses fiat and digital currencies to securely move billions of dollars per year, according to a Wednesday (July 31) press release.

Layer2 has seen a 20% or more increase month over month in transaction processing volumes “as more businesses seek efficient, transparent and compliant ways to issue payments across jurisdictions,” the release said.

The funding will let the company invest in product development, market expansion, tech infrastructure and talent acquisition, per the release.

The Layer2 platform is “positioned to disrupt the traditional payments ecosystem, making international money movement faster, more transparent and cost-effective,” Mike Giampapa, general partner at Galaxy Ventures, which led the funding round, said in the release.

The value of cross-border payments is projected to climb to more than $250 trillion over the next three years.

However, despite the size of the total addressable market, cross-border payments are still generally more expensive, opaque and slower than domestic payments — whether we’re talking about business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

“That’s why the time has never been better for advances that can help make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more accessible and more transparent — as well as help drive interoperability across the far-flung central banks, payment system operators, providers and participants that make up the global cross-border payments ecosystem,” PYMNTS reported in April.

While cross-border payments have rebounded alongside global trade, businesses looking to enter foreign markets quickly find that traditional cross-border payment methods, such as wire transfers, are full of delays and complexities.

Faulty cross-border payments cost U.S. merchants at least $3.8 billion in sales just last year, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Cross-Border Sales and the Challenge of Failed Payments,” which also showed that 70% of U.S. firms saw higher rates of failed payments in cross-border sales compared to domestic transactions.

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The round, which included participation by Tencent Holdings, lifted Moonshot’s valuation to $3.3 billion, Bloomberg News reported Monday (Aug. 5), citing sources familiar with the matter.

The report notes that the investments mark a surge in new deals for Chinese artificial intelligence companies hoping to eventually create their country’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Earlier this year, Tencent rival Alibaba led a record $1 billion funding round for Moonshot, while both companies more recently invested in AI firm Baichuan, which is valued at $2.8 billion.

Meanwhile, China is leading the U.S. in the AI race, at least in some respects. A study by AI and analytics software company SAS and Coleman Parkes Research showed that 83% of Chinese respondents in a range of industries use generative AI, compared to just 65% of Americans and a global average of 54%.

And a recent report by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization showed that China is also ahead of the U.S. in generative AI patents, filing more than 38,000 patents between 2014 and 2023, compared to 6,276 filed by the United States in the same timeframe. As PYMNTS wrote last month, China’s regulatory landscape has played a crucial role.

“China’s approach to regulation has not surprisingly taken a China-first approach,” Nicholas Rioux, CTO of Labviva, an AI procurement technology company for life sciences, told PYMNTS. “Regulations are being implemented to ensure local market dominance within the Chinese market for local firms. This gives local companies, aligned with regulators, an unfair advantage over foreign and less aligned local competitors.”

Meanwhile, American tech giants’ AI efforts have begun getting a largely negative reaction from Wall Street, with Amazon, Google and Microsoft all seeing their share prices drop in the wake of their most recent earnings report, Bloomberg reported last week.

That report argued these companies have failed to demonstrate that their AI infrastructure investments were translating into sales.

One exception: Meta, whose second-quarter revenue surpassed expectations, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that the company’s investment in AI has led to better ad targeting and content recommendations.

Zuckerberg also predicted that AI would one day generate personalized ads, letting advertisers specify business objectives and budgets, with Meta’s AI doing the rest.

“Advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we’re going to go do the rest for them,” he said. “We’re going to get there incrementally over time, but I think this is going to be a very big deal.”

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