The fintechs that raised big money in February: are they hiring?
Ah, February... the shortest month of the year and certainly one of the quietest. Success in the second month of the year is hard to come by and those that have a truly standout month are few and far between.
Last February, 22 fintech companies raised over $50M; this year that number was just 5. These are some of the biggest fundraisers in February and a look at their hiring strategies.
Cloud Specialists Stand Out
The transition to cloud based software is happening on a massive scale. Within finance Goldman Sachs is prioritizing its cloud based transaction banking service. In fintech, Cloud optimization firm ProsperOps looks like an attractive proposition.
The Texas based firm raised $72m in its first ever funding round, more than any other fintech in the US this month. This comes off the back of a spate of recent hires in the last few months as they bring in new employees both inside and outside the engineering department.
ProsperOps biggest recent tech hire is senior engineer Paul Kizior, hired in December after spending over three years as an engineer at Amazon. It also brought in Alex Koontz a month later from Austin based IT solutions company Spiceworks, where he spent over eight years.
ProsperOps says it's hiring, but it only appears to have five vacancies right now.
Credit Suisse backed digital asset platform wants engineers
Banks are still excited to get involved in the digital assets and blockchain space. Nomura backed Laser Digital has looked a hot prospect recently but Switzerland based fintech Taurus raised $65M in series B funding led by Credit Suisse.
This isn't Credit Suisse's first involvement in the company; the bank's vice chairman Christian Gellerstad has been a non-executive board member since 2019. Its influence on the company grows, however, as Credit Suisse MD Salvatore Lacangelo became a Taurus board member this month.
This year's hiring includes compliance officer Tania Nortik and junior operations officer Victor Bengold, another Credit Suisse alumnus. Noémien Kocher, a machine learning focused masters graduate just joined after nearly four years participating in research projects for Swiss école EPFL.
Of six job listings, half are in engineering, including a technology lead position.
InsurTech Unicorn gets a top up
Last July, Berlin-based insurance technology giant WeFox raised a massive $400M to achieve a company valuation of $4.5B. This month, it received an additional $55M; a far more modest sum but more of an extension than a seperate funding round.
WeFox has ramped up engineer hiring in 2023. Three senior Java developers have arrived: Gaurav Gupta, Marcelo Surriabre and most recently Accenture alumni Cristian Castro. Pooja Choudhary joined previously as a data engineer from KPMG; Rohit Anand joined as a VP of data engineering from HelloFresh.
WeFox has 80 open roles across Europe.
Aspire-ing for success
We've already had our say on Singapore fintech Aspire's $100M funding round.
When we reported their success, the payments fintech had listed 44 open roles. Since then, that's risen to 52.
The new listings have placed a greater emphasis on technology and product; nearly half of the new listings are across those departments.
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