Fintech Startups Raised $33.9B In 2019 As Early Stage Startups Struggle

2019 has been massive for consolidation among fintech companies, with notable deals like Fidelity National Information services acquiring Worldpay, Global Payments' acquisition of Total System Services, and Fiserv and First Data's merger. Early-stage fintech startups, on the other hand, struggle to get capital.

Market intelligence firm CB Insights published an annual report last week that details the status of venture capital funding in 2019. In the report, CB Insights reported that fintech startups last year couldn't match the total size of all transactions in 2018. Fintech startups raised about $33.9 billion in 1,912 deals in 2019, a figure that is $8 billion short from the year before.

However, 2018 recorded a pretty high number because of the whopping $14 billion that Ant Financial, an Alibaba Group affiliated company, was able to raise. Discounting that from the mix, then 2019 figures aren't too bad.

The report notes that in North America, Europe, and Asia, early-stage startups in 2019 couldn't get the much-needed financing as funding for Seed or Series A falls to a five-year low. Still, the transactions were much more significant, with 83 deals that surpassed $100 million. And, about $17.2 billion from the total capital raised was from mature companies raising private funding.

About 24 fintech unicorns also emerged last year with eight new startups breaching the $1 billion valuation mark in Q4. These include Next, Bright Health, Flywire, Riskified, Figure ($1.2 billion), Ripple ($10 billion), HighRadius, Rapyd ($1.2 billion), Ebanx, wefox Group ($1.8 billion) and Pine Labs ($1.6 billion).

Breaking down by region, Asia had a higher number of deals and capital raised than that of Europe. European startups in the third quarter generated $1.6 billion in 95 deals, while Asian companies, on the other hand, amassed $1.8 billion in 157 deals.

In the fourth quarter, the U.S. landed $4.6 billion in total in 177 deals. Asia comes next with $2.8 billion in 126 deals and Europe with $1.2 billion in 100 (Germany accounted for $1.79 billion in 65 deals in all of 2019). Southeast Asia (SEA) was at its record year with $993 million in 124 rounds.