Stripe’s Fast fails too fast? It was just too fast & too luxurious 🤷‍♂️; Klarna’s quest to compete with Google & Amazon 🤯; Bringing stablecoins & assets to Bitcoin 👀

Good Morning FinTech, 6 April

Good day Everyone,

And happy Wednesday! Today’s issue is undoubtedly the hottest & most interesting one this week so far. In addition to 3 massive FinTech stories, there’s lots of funding news, 3 great developments worth watching, and something more. Let’s dive into them right away.

Stripe’s Fast fails too fast? It was just too fast & too luxurious 🤷‍♂️

Breaking🔥 Fast, a startup that focused on online checkout, announced late yesterday that it will shut down. The Information first reported the company’s final chapter.

In a statement, the company said that in the wake of making great strides on our mission of making buying and selling frictionless for everyone, we have made the difficult decision to close our doors.

USP 🥊 Fast Checkout offered a one-click purchasing process that reportedly took less than a second, without requiring a password or manually inputting information for every order. Buyers were automatically signed up for Fast after their first purchase, making future shopping effortless on any website with Fast. Sellers could also place Checkout on individual product pages, enabling buyers to forego the cumbersome shopping cart process altogether.

In other words, Fast was like Shop Pay or Amazon Pay, just that… There’s no just, that was literally it.

Crazy numbers (in a bad way) 🤯 The company has raised a whopping $124.5M since its 2019 inception, according to Crunchbase. That’s pretty massive if you ask me… Besides Stripe, which led both their Series A & Series B, other investors include Index Ventures, Susa Ventures, and Global Founders Capital. That’s solid backing.

Despite millions raised, the company’s burn rate was even crazier - Fast was said to be burning as much as $10 million. Every single month. Unsustainable is an understatement here.

So, what does this tell us? At the core, Fast was just too fast and too luxurious. But there’s more to that, so here’s the takeaway:

P.S. I will shortly share a deeper dive into Fast & the lessons to learn for startups beyond just FinTech. Hit the subscribe button so you won’t miss it👇🏼 (+ other great stuff that’s cookin’)