Andreessen Horowitz’s first FinTech investment in DACH shows that payments are still hot🔥; What plans Spotify has for Web3? 🤔; Accounting software for DAOs?! 🤨

Good Morning FinTech, March 21

Good day Everyone,

And happy Monday! Hope you had some time to relax over the weekend. To make the best start of the new week, I invite you to explore 3 great FinTech stories I’ve prepared for you today. Let’s dive in it together:

Andreessen Horowitz’s first FinTech investment in DACH shows that payments are still hot🔥

The funding 💸 Germany-based financial operating system Payrails has raised $6.4M in a seed round to launch its financial operations (FinOps) platform.

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which marks its first FinTech investment in the DACH region. In addition to a16z, this seed investment also includes a number of others from the city’s FinTech, food tech, and delivery ecosystems: HV Capital; Delivery Hero CFO Emmanuel Thomassin; Flixbus founders Jochen Engert, André Schwämmlein, and Daniel Krauss; and the founder of HelloFresh, Dominik Richter.

The USP 🥊 Founded in late 2021 by Orkhan Abdullayev, Emre Talay, and Nicolas Thouzeau, Payrails wants to enable high-growth companies to curate their payment experiences and financial services globally. Its mission is to empower enterprises to build, operate, and scale payment acceptance and embed financial services, without the need for a costly and complex in-house infrastructure. In the age of growing e-commerce, digital payments are more needed than ever before. 

With Payrails, merchants can thus add new payment methods to serve their customers and increase their authorization rates while managing local compliance and regulatory requirements.

What does this tell us? A few things. Here’s the takeaway: