Fastest European FinTech to become a unicorn 🦄; Twitter’s dedicated crypto team 👀; Affirm + Shopify = Cash Cow💰🐮

Good Morning FinTech, 12 November

Good day Everyone,

And happy Friday! The week is over, you made it! 🙌🏼 Before you go off for the weekend, here’s a final mix of 3 awesome FinTech stories for today:

Fastest European FinTech to become a unicorn 🦄

The funding 💸 Zilch, the direct-to-consumer buy-now-pay- later (BNPL) provider, has closed a $110M Series C funding round, pushing its valuation to more than $2B and making it the fastest European company to become a unicorn from its Series A round. 

The oversubscribed round was led by Ventura Capital and Gauss Ventures and was closed in just 3.5 weeks from its launch.

The USP 🥊 Zilch only opened in beta in 2019, looking to distinguish itself in the crowded BNPL arena by connecting directly with customers and using soft background credit checks performed by Credit Kudos via Open Banking to determine affordability.

Working with Monavate, the company has built an over-the-top platform meaning that it is merchant agnostic, letting customers tap to pay wherever they want.

Headquartered in London, the company was one of the first BNPL providers in the UK to receive a consumer credit license from the FCA and secured a lending license in California earlier this year.