Fintech valuations

It’s been an up and down first week in New York for me. I was absolutely exhausted yesterday throughout the day - I felt as if I could take a 5 hour nap at any point throughout the day. I’m not sure if it’s directly related to the vaccine side effects, jet lag, or just a bad night of sleep in Monday… more likely a combination of all the above. I feel much better today however.

There were a lot of rumors going around for awhile, but Plaid announced that they just raised a $425m funding round at $13b. This is just about a year after they announced a deal to be acquired by Plaid for $5m which was called off.

The original Plaid deal was seen as perhaps the catalyst for fintech valuations going through the roof over the last year. Since that acquisition was announced, we have Stripe at $95b, Chime at $14.5b, Marqeta at $4b and Robinhood nearing $40b just to name a few.

It’s a good time to be in fintech. Perhaps we can look back and thank Plaid for paving the way for us.