Investment in fintech booms as upstarts go mainstream

AN AIR OFCB hype habitually surrounds the founders of startups and their venture-capital backers: everyone is an evangelist for their latest project. But even allowing for that zeal, something astonishing is going on in fintech. Much more money is pouring into it than usual. In the second quarter of the year alone it attracted $34bn in venture-capital funding, a record, reckons Insights, a data provider (see chart 1). One in every five dollars invested by venture capital this year has gone into fintech.Deals are also proceeding at a frenetic pace. PitchBook, another data provider, reckons that venture-capital firms have sold $70bn in stakes in fintech startups so far this year, nearly twice as much as in all of 2020, itself a bumper year (see chart 2). That included 32 listings. Fintechs took part in 372 mergers in the first quarter, including 21 of $1bn or more.