The United States Of Fintech Startups

The fintech space is rapidly maturing.

Investors are backing huge deals, with Q1’21 already setting the record for total mega-rounds in a quarter. It has also seen the highest funding total for a quarter since Q2’18, which included Ant Financial’s massive $14B raise.

The surge in e-commerce is likely to continue offering tailwinds to the space, as late-stage fintechs become ripe for exits. Already, there has been a host of exit activity from mature fintech startups of late, with multiple fintech companies filing for IPOs, going public, or getting acquired, including:

• Affirm, which made its public market debut in January
• SoFi, which exited via an $8.7B SPAC in January
• Sweden-based Klarna, which filed its prospectus late last year (and which we highlighted in our Fintech 250 list)
• Robinhood, also a Fintech 250 company, helped drive record-high fintech funding in 2021 and is another IPO hopeful

Using CB Insights data, we mapped out the top-funded fintech startup in every US state.

Collectively, these 44 startups have raised nearly $14.3B in equity funding, with leading companies including accounts payable automation startup AvidXchange (North Carolina, $1.2B raised), restaurant finances management system Toast (Massachusetts, $903M), and data analytics company Dataminr (New York, $569M).

See the full map below.

We define fintech broadly to include technology companies that provide services to the financial services industry as well as technology companies that create, distribute, and administer financial products themselves. Our analysis ranks private, VC-backed fintech companies based on total disclosed equity funding. Companies included have raised at least $1M in equity funding and have had an equity deal since 2015.

Please click to enlarge. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The most well-funded US fintech startup is Robinhood, with $5.6B in total disclosed equity funding. The San Francisco-based stock trading app saw a boom in retail investors amid the pandemic, fueled by pandemic-induced investor boredom as well as the recent GameStop short squeeze.
• Robinhood is followed by Minnesota-based Bright Health ($1.6B in disclosed equity funding), which provides a platform for healthcare plans, including Medicare Advantage plans, and North Carolina-based AvidXchange ($1.2B).
• There are 8 unicorn startups on our map: Robinhood (CA, $11.7B valuation), Toast (MA, $4.9B), AvidXchange (NC, $2.4B), MX Technologies (UT, $1.9B), Dataminr (NY, $1.6B), Remitly (WA, $1.5B), Bright Health (MN, $1B), and C2FO (KS, $1B).
• Three companies have garnered more than $1B in funding: Robinhood, Bright Health, and AvidXchange.
• Including the above, 19 startups on the map have raised over $100M in disclosed equity funding, including Georgia-based health claims management company Navicure and Illinois-based SaaS investment management company Enfusion.
• Six startups on this list have raised less than $10M in disclosed equity funding. The startup with the least funding on this list is Nebraska-based Financial Transmission Network, with $1.5M in equity funding.
• Since our last update in November 2020, there have been a number of shakeups. Several of these were due to exits, including the two top-funded companies of our previous graphic, SoFi and Oscar Health, which both went public. Intercontinental Exchange-backed crypto platform Bakkt said in January it will go public via a SPAC merger. Credit data company Cortera, based in Florida, was acquired by Moody’s in February, while restaurant software company Upserve was acquired by Lightspeed in December.