I always thought that “unicorns” was the wrong name for fintechs that reached a billion dollar valuation. After all, unicorns do not exist (sorry kids) but such fintechs do. They are not mythical, but they are rare. What’s more, they seem to be getting rarer. We probably should have called them fintech red wolves or fintech Amur leopards. Are they going extinct though? I think not.
Fintech Funding Down
Despite the obvious downturn in parts of the economy, fintech is in reasonable health. While global fintech funding fell by almost a half last year, it was still a fifth of of all funding globally, which would seem to indicate that investors remain positive. A CB Insights recently found that two of the largest global VC firms (Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz) actually backed more fintech companies in 2022 than any other category, putting around a quarter of the total investments into fintech startups.
This doesn’t mean that fintechs are heading for the stratosphere though and there are signs that some startups may be overvalued. In recent months, several…