As venture capital grew around the world, tracking the fintech market was a fine way to understand the general health of the VC world; when venture was getting bigger, so too was fintech fundraising.
Worth around a fifth of all venture dollars invested last year, fintech startups raised nearly unfathomable sums of capital but with good reason. While companies around the world turned to software during the pandemic to ensure that they could keep operating, accelerating the digital transformation, there has been analogous work going on in the consumer world.
In simple terms, financial technology has been busy digitizing consumers’ lives in recent years, just as enterprise software helped corporations ditch pencils, paper and generic spreadsheets. So it is not a huge surprise that fintech had a big part to play in the venture boom that is now behind us. Nor that as the boom faded, fintech did as well.
New Q2 2022 data from CB Insights and PitchBook lay bare fintech’s retreat.
Let’s talk about the fintech market from a global perspective and a U.S.-focused viewpoint. What’s really going on out there?