As U.S.-China tensions rumble on, fintech unicorn Airwallex pushes into Latin America with Mexico deal

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, marks a major push from Airwallex into Latin America.

Airwallex

Global fintech giant Airwallex on Thursday said it has agreed to acquire MexPago, a rival payments company based out of Mexico, for an undisclosed sum to help the firm expand its Latin America footprint.

The company, which competes with the likes of PayPal, Stripe, and Block, sells cross-border payment services to mainly small and medium-sized enterprises. Airwallex makes money by pocketing a fee each time a transaction is made.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions, marks a major push from Airwallex into Latin America, a market that has become more attractive for fintech firms thanks to a primarily younger population and increasing online penetration.

Jack Zhang, Airwallex’s CEO, said the company was looking at Mexico as something as a hedge as it deals with geopolitical and economic uncertainty going on between the U.S. and China.

“U.S. people export to Mexico to sell to the consumer there,” Zhang told CNBC. “Because of the supply chain, you can also export out of Mexico to other countries like the United States.”

“You get both the inflow and outflow of money,” he added. “That’s really what we like the most. We can take a global company to Mexico and also help the global companies making payments to the supply chain.”

U.S.-China trade tensions have escalated in recent years, as Washington seeks to address what it sees as China’s race to the bottom on trade.

The U.S. alleges China has been deliberately devaluing its currency by buying lots of U.S. dollars, thereby making Chinese exports cheaper and U.S. exports more expensive, and worsening the U.S. trade deficit with China.

China has sought to address these concerns, agreeing to “substantially reduce” the U.S. trade deficit by committing to “significantly increases” its purchases of American goods, although it’s struggled to make good on those commitments.

“Mexico is one of the largest populations in Latin America,” Zhang added. “As the trade war intensifies in China and the US, a lot is shifting from Asia to Mexico.”

“[Mexico] is very close to the U.S. Labour is cheaper compared to the U.S. domestically. A lot of the supply chain is shipping there. There’s a lot of opportunity from e-commerce as well.”

A maturing fintech

Airwallex operates around the world in markets including the U.S., Canada, China, the U.K., Australia, and Singapore. The Australia-founded company is the second-most valuable unicorn there, after design and presentations software startup Canva, which was last valued at $40 billion.

The company, whose customers include Papaya Global, Zip, Shein and Navan, processes more than $50 billion in a single year. It has also partnered with the likes of American Express, Shopify and Brex, to help it expand its services internationally.

It has been a tough environment for fintech companies to operate in lately, given how interest rates have risen sharply. That has made it more costly for startup firms to raise capital from investors.

For its part, Airwallex has raised more than $900 million in venture capital to date from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Tencent and Lone Pine Capital. The company was last valued at $5.6 billion.

At this stage we are still expanding against our mission, which is to enable those smaller businesses to operate anywhere in the world and keep building software on top.

Zhang said that the company is at a stage where it has reached enough maturity to consider an initial public offering — the company says it now processes more than $50 billion in annualized transactions. However, Airwallex won’t embark on the IPO route until it gets to a certain amount of annual revenue, Zhang added.

Zhang is targeting $100 million of annual recurring revenue (ARR) for its software the business within the next year or two. Once Airwallex reaches this point, he says, it will then look at a public listing.

“At this stage we are still expanding against our mission, which is to enable those smaller businesses to operate anywhere in the world and keep building software on top … to protect our margins [and] grow our margins from a cost point of view, not just infrastructure,” Zhang said.

MexPago offers much of the same services as Airwallex — multi-currency accounts for small and medium-sized businesses, foreign exchange services, and payment processing — but there are a few more payment methods it has on offer which Airwallex doesn’t currently provide.

Why Latin America?

A big selling point of the MexPago deal, Zhang said, is the ability to obtain a regulatory license in Mexico without having to embark on a long process of applying with the central bank. The company has secured an Institution of Electronic Payment Funds (IFPE) license from MexPago.

Why Americans are relocating to Mexico City for a better life

That will allow Airwallex’s customers, both in Mexico and around the world, to gain access to local payment methods such as SPEI, Mexico’s interbank electronic payment system, and OXXO, a voucher-based payment method that lets shoppers order things online, get a voucher, and then fulfill their order with cash.

“The ability to access the license for the native infrastructure over there will give us a significant advantage with our global proposition,” Zhang told CNBC.

Airwallex has seen huge levels of growth in the Americas in the past year — the company reported a 460% jump in revenues there year-over-year.

Airwallex isn’t the only company seeing the potential in Latin America.

SumUp, the British payments company, has been active in Latin America since 2013, opening an office in Brazil back in 2013. The firm’s CFO Hermione McKee told CNBC in June at the Money 20/20 conference that it plans to ramp up its expansion in the region.

“We’ve had very strong success in Latin America, in particular, Chile recently,” McKee told CNBC in an interview.

“We are looking at launching new countries over the coming months.”

More than 156 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean are between the ages of 15 and 29, accounting for over a fourth of its population. These consumers tend to be more digital-native and mistrusting of established banks.

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Nvidia-backed platform that turns text into A.I.-generated avatars boosts valuation to $1 billion

An animated avatar generated by the AI video platform Synthesia.

Synthesia

Synthesia, a digital media platform that lets users create artificial intelligence-generated videos, has raked in $90 million from investors — including U.S. chip giant Nvidia, the company told CNBC exclusively.

The London-based company raised the cash in a funding round led by Accel, an early investor in Facebook, Slack and Spotify. Nvidia came in as a strategic investor, putting in an undisclosed amount of money. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital and MMC. 

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Founded in 2017 by researchers and entrepreneurs Victor Riparbelli, Matthias Niessner, Steffen Tjerrild and Lourdes Agapito, Synthesia develops software that allows people to make their own digital avatars to deliver corporate presentations, training videos — or even compliments to colleagues in more than 120 different languages.

Its ultimate aim is to eliminate cameras, microphones, actors, lengthy edits and other costs from the professional video production process. To do that, Synthesia has created animated avatars which look and sound like humans, but are generated by AI. The avatars are based on real-life actors who speak in front of a green screen.

“Productivity can be improved because you are reducing the cost of producing the video to that of making a PowerPoint,” Philippe Botteri, at Accel, the lead investor in Synthesia’s Series C, told CNBC, adding that adoption of video has been proliferated by consumer platforms such as YouTube, Netflix and TikTok.

“Video is a much better way to communicate knowledge. When we think about the potential of the company and the valuation, we think about what it can return, [and] in the case of Synthesia, we’re just scratching the surface.”

Synthesia is a form of generative AI, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But the company says it has been working on its own proprietary generative AI for years, and that although ChatGPT may have only recently emerged into public consciousness, generative AI itself isn’t a new technology.

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Synthesia sells to enterprise clients, including Tiffany’s, IHG and Moody’s Analytics. The company doesn’t disclose its sales or revenue metrics, though it says it has “consistently driven triple digit growth,” with over 12 million videos produced on the platform to date. The number of users on Synthesia spiked 456% year over year, the company said.

Synthesia plans to ramp up investment into its technology, with a particular focus on advancing its AI research and making Synthesia avatars capable of performing more tasks. 

“We work with 35% of the Fortune 100 [with a focus on] product marketing, customer support, customer success — areas of the company you have a lot of text that you want to turn into video,” Riparbelli told CNBC.

WATCH: How Nvidia-backed A.I. video platform Synthesia works

How Nvidia-backed A.I. video platform Synthesia works

“As we’re progressing to the next phase of the next generation of Synthesia technology, it’s all about making the avatars more expressive, be able to do more things, walk around in a room, have conversations,” he added.

Riparbelli explained Nvidia isn’t just a semiconductor manufacturer — it’s also a powerhouse of research and development talent with an army of engineers, academics and researchers who produce papers on the subject.

“They’re not just a chip producer,” he said. “They have amazing research teams that are very much leading in terms of, how do you actually train these large models? What works, what doesn’t work?”

Investor interest in A.I.

Business Insider previously reported that Synthesia was in talks with investors to raise between $50 million and $75 million in new funds at a valuation of around $1 billion.

The report didn’t include detail about Nvidia’s involvement, nor mention the total $90 million sum raised.

Synthesia is one of many firms attracting interest from investors with AI and enterprise software that can reduce costs involved in certain business processes. Companies are looking to lower expenses everywhere they can to combat climbing inflation and prepare for a possible recession. 

Last week, French business planning software company Pigment raised $88 million from investors including Iconiq Growth, Felix Capital, Meritech IVP and FirstMark, in part to ramp up its investment in AI.

We're in the early stage of the A.I. hype cycle, says venture capital fund

Generative AI has been a rare bright spot in a European tech market reeling from declining funding and a pullback in valuations. Investors have rotated out of high-growth tech firms into value sectors with more resilient income generation, such as financials, industrials, energy and consumer staples.

Recently, a report from venture capital firm Atomico showed funding for Europe’s technology startups was on track to fall a further 39% in 2023 to $51 billion from $83 billion in 2022.

However, AI was one area that drew more investments, Atomico said, with generative AI accounting for 35% of total investment into AI and machine learning firms last year — the highest share ever and a big jump from 5% in 2022.

Ethical concerns about deepfakes

There are concerns that the use of video AI tools as advanced as Synthesia could lead to deepfakes, videos which take a user’s likeness and manipulate it to make it appear as though they are saying or doing something they’re not.

There has also been an increasing number of calls from tech leaders and academics for a global pause on AI development beyond systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4, because of fears that the technology is becoming so advanced it may pose an existential risk to humanity.

Synthesia first attracted mainstream attention in 2019 for a deepfake video that featured a digitally animated version of celebrity soccer player David Beckham speaking about a campaign to end malaria in nine languages.

While that was done with the consent of Beckham and for a good cause, more widespread use of deepfake technology has led to worries about the potential for misinformation.

A.I. generated image went viral showing fake explosion outside the Pentagon

To address that, Synthesia says it has kept ethics in mind while developing its software. The company requires consent from the people who feature as avatars in its software, and uses a mix of humans and machine learning to target material such as profanity and hate speech.

It is also signed up to Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media, a voluntary industrywide framework for the ethical and responsible development, creation and sharing of synthetic media.

“There are many different discourses going on right now. There’s one about the very long-term existential sort of risk scenarios. I think they’re important to talk about as well. But I’d love to see more focus on where are we today?” Riparbelli told CNBC in an interview.

“These technologies are already powerful. How do we deal with hallucinations? How do we deal with all of the problems that arise?” he added. “There’s definitely pitfalls. But there’s also just so much opportunity in it, I think, leveling the playing field and enabling people to do much more with less.”

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Venture capital for Black entrepreneurs plummeted 45% in 2022, data shows

Bea Dixon, the CEO and co-founder of The Honey Pot Company

Courtesy: Honey Pot Company

In 2016, Beatrice Dixon had finally secured a deal with Target to carry her line of feminine care products. But she had one problem: She was still making them in the kitchen of her Atlanta home, and she needed to scale up — fast. 

The CEO and co-founder of The Honey Pot Company, a vaginal-wellness brand, was faced with the “impossible” task of launching in 1,100 stores and needed funding to bring on manufacturers so she could deliver on the retailer’s orders. 

She managed to secure that crucial round of financing from the New Voices Foundation, a fund led by Richelieu Dennis that’s devoted to supporting women entrepreneurs of color. Using that financing, and some funding from family and friends, Dixon was able to quit her job, move operations out of her kitchen and launch in Target stores nationwide by 2017. 

Some six years later, Dixon’s products are a staple in retailers across the country. 

“It was really hard, man, we weren’t having any luck,” Dixon told CNBC in a recent interview about the struggles she faced securing investors. “I don’t know what would have happened if we didn’t get that money.”

Dixon is one of many Black entrepreneurs who struggled to secure funding for their businesses and relied on venture capital financing earmarked for diverse founders. While Dixon and many others have ultimately succeeded, Black-led businesses and Black founders have historically faced disparities in securing VC funding. 

Overall, Black entrepreneurs typically receive less than 2% of all VC dollars each year while companies led by Black women receive less than 1%, according to data from Crunchbase. 

In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd and the racial justice reckoning that followed, Black founders and Black-led startups saw historic gains in securing VC funding in 2021. However, as momentum around the movement fizzled and market conditions worsened, a lot of those gains were lost by the end of 2022. 

While overall VC funding dropped by 36% in 2022 as inflation and interest rates surged, financing for Black businesses saw a steeper drop of 45%, according to the Crunchbase data. That drop is the largest year-over-year decrease Black entrepreneurs have seen over the past decade. 

“There were a lot of political and cultural strife problems in 2020 and early 2021 that created a higher focus on Black and diverse founders,” said Kyle Stanford, a senior analyst at Pitchbook. “No one wants that to be the reason why they focus on investing in any group, but that did put a lot of focus on the problems that VC has had investing in anyone outside of a straight white male.”

Marlon Nichols, the co-founder and managing general partner of MaC Venture Capital, said diverse businesses tend to take the brunt of VC slowdowns because firms typically resort to the status quo in times of economic uncertainty. 

“We’ve always invested in white men and that’s what we’re going to do right now. That’s where we’re comfortable. That’s where we know and believe that we’re going to get the return,” is how Nichols, who is Black, described the decisions made by some firms. “This diversity thing is cool, we’ll pick it back up maybe, you know, once we’ve weathered this storm.”

So-called ‘risky bets’

In 2014, Dixon was working at Whole Foods and suffering from an ongoing case of bacterial vaginosis that she wasn’t able to shake. Then, she said, her late grandmother came to her with a solution — in a dream.  

“She just told me that she had been walking with me and seeing me struggle and she knew how to fix it, and she basically hands me a piece of paper that has a list of ingredients on it and she tells me to memorize what’s on the paper,” Dixon said, recalling the dream of her grandmother. “I made it within a couple of days, and, basically, this formula actually healed me.”

The mixture, which included ingredients such as lavender, apple cider vinegar, grapefruit seed extract and rose, worked for family and friends, too, Dixon said. Using a $21,000 loan from her brother, she began selling the product and displaying it at trade shows and expositions.

Honey Pot Company products

Courtesy: Honey Pot Company

Using her connections at Whole Foods, she got the product on the shelves of the store but wasn’t able to seriously scale up and attract outside investors until she secured the deal with Target. 

“It was hard. Us being Black-owned business founders, was it harder? Sure, it probably was,” said Dixon. “I think every time we raised money, we had trouble doing it, you know, but I think that the important context to put there is that anybody that raises money, it’s not going to be easy.” 

While he doesn’t invest exclusively in diverse businesses, Nichols said he’s more likely than some venture capitalists because MaC Venture Capital is led by a diverse team unlike other firms that are typically run by white men.

“The investors are primarily white and male and usually come from affluent communities, which means that they have very specific experiences and have been exposed to very specific things and are comfortable with very specific things,” said Nichols, whose latest firm opened in 2019. 

To many firms, investing in founders from diverse backgrounds is considered a riskier bet because the entrepreneurs differ from the norm they’ve become accustomed to, said Ladi Greenstreet, the CEO of Diversity VC, which works to tackle systemic bias within venture capital.

In the aftermath of Floyd’s murder in May 2020, many major banks, corporations and investment firms pledged to change that — and make diversity a top priority moving forward. 

However, the steep funding drop-off Black founders saw in 2022 indicates some of those promises may have been short-lived charity plays rather than investments that firms actually believed would bring in strong returns.

“When you take venture capital financing, the expectation is that, you know, you have a partner now, if you perform, your partner is going to continue to back you, they’re going to help you to raise that next round of funding, right?” said Nichols. 

For white-led teams, there’s no expectation that recipients have to be “extraordinary” in their first two years of operations in order to get follow-on funding, but the bar is far higher for Black entrepreneurs, said Nichols, whose firm manages about $450 million in assets.

“For most of these Black founders, that’s exactly like the expectation, you’ve got to be extraordinarily exceptional in order to get additional capital,” he said. “And if you’re truly treating this like all investments that you make then that shouldn’t be the case.” 

‘Huge blue ocean’

Pocket Sun is the co-founder and managing partner of SoGal Ventures, a VC firm devoted to supporting women and diverse entrepreneurs. Since the firm opened in 2016, it has seeded multiple unicorns, or startups that grew to have valuations over $1 billion. The businesses include Function of Beauty and Everly Health.

“From a financial investment perspective, this remains a huge blue ocean for people to dive in,” said Sun. 

“Venture capital is a very privileged and exclusive industry, and has always been that way. And it has such disproportionate decision-making power on the future of technology, the future of innovation, the future of quality of life in many ways,” said Sun.

While investing in diverse teams can often be seen as a moral imperative and something that’s done because it’s the right thing to do, studies have shown it can lead to higher returns for investors, said John Roussel, the executive director of Colorwave. 

Honey Pot Company products

Courtesy: Honey Pot Company

“And somehow, we’re still stuck in this situation where we’re trying to convince people of that,” said Roussel, whose organization connects early stage founders to mentors and capital. “It really takes, you know, strong players taking a lead and showing people that there is opportunity here and there is generally the same success rates regardless of someone’s skin color.” 

Dixon, the founder of The Honey Pot, pointed to her own success as an example. “Clearly, it’s safe to bet on Black businesses,” she said.

Products from the company are now in 4.6 million homes, nearly double the number from two years ago. They are also sold nationally in retailers such as Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and more. The Honey Pot didn’t share its current valuation or how much it makes in annual sales. 

Dixon called on investors to put their biases aside and see companies for their basics: balance sheets, innovation strategies and business goals, not the skin color of its teams.

“My skin color shouldn’t be a part of the conversation, period,” she said. “And yet, it still is, right?”

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‘We’re alive and kicking’: CEO of banking app Dave wants to dispel doubts after this year’s 97% stock plunge


Mobile banking app provider Dave has enough cash to survive the current downturn for fintech firms and reach profitability a year from now, according to CEO Jason Wilk.

The Los Angeles-based company got caught up in the waves rocking the world of money-losing growth companies this year after it went public in January. But Dave is not capsizing, despite a staggering 97% decline in its shares through Nov. 18, Wilk said.

Shares jumped as much as 13% on Monday and closed 7.9% higher.

“We’re trying to dispel the myth of, ‘Hey, this company does not have enough money to make it through,'” Wilk said. “We think that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Few companies embody fintech’s rise and fall as much as Dave, one of the better-known members of a new breed of digital banking providers taking on the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Co-founded by Wilk in 2016, the company had celebrity backers and millions of users of its app, which targets a demographic ignored by mainstream banks and relies on subscriptions and tips instead of overdraft fees.

Dave’s market capitalization soared to $5.7 billion in February before collapsing as the Federal Reserve began its most aggressive series of rate increases in decades. The moves forced an abrupt shift in investor preference to profits over the previous growth-at-any cost mandate and has rivals, including bigger fintech Chime, staying private for longer to avoid Dave’s fate.

“If you told me that only a few months later, we’d be worth $100 million, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Wilk said. “It’s tough to see your stock price represent such a low amount and its distance from what it would be as a private company.”

Employee comp

The shift in fortunes, which hit most of the companies that took the special purpose acquisition company route to going public recently, has turned his job into a “pressure cooker,” Wilk said. That’s at least partly because it has cratered the stock compensation of Dave’s 300 or so employees, Wilk said.

In response, Wilk has accelerated plans to hit profitability by lowering customer acquisition costs while giving users new ways to earn money on side gigs including paid surveys.

The company said earlier this month that third-quarter active users jumped 18% and loans on its cash advance product rose 25% to $757 million. While revenue climbed 41% to $56.8 million, the company’s losses widened to $47.5 million from $7.9 million a year earlier.

Dave has $225 million in cash and short-term holdings as of Sept. 30, which Wilk says is enough to fund operations until they are generating profits.

“We expect one more year of burn and we should be able to become run-rate profitable probably at the end of next year,” Wilk said.

Investor skepticism

Still, despite a recent rally in beaten-down companies spurred by signs that inflation is easing, investors don’t yet appear to be convinced about Dave’s prospects.

“Investors haven’t jumped back into fintech more broadly yet,” Devin Ryan, director of fintech research at JMP Securities, said in an email. “In a higher interest rate backdrop where the cost of capital has been materially raised, we don’t see any abatement in investors challenging companies toward operating at cash profitability … or at the very least, demonstrating a clear and credible path toward that.”

Among investors’ concerns are that one of Dave’s main products are short-term loans; those could result in rising losses if a recession hits next year, which is the expectation of many forecasters.

“One of the things we need to keep proving is that these are small loans that people use for gas and groceries, and because of that, our default rates just consistently stayed very low,” he said. Dave can get repaid even if users lose their jobs, he said, by tapping unemployment payments.

Investors and bankers expect a wave of consolidation among fintech startups and smaller public companies to begin next year as companies run out of funding and are forced to sell themselves or shut down. This year, UBS backed out of its deal to acquire Wealthfront and fintech firms including Stripe have laid off hundreds of workers.

“We’ve got to get through this winter and prove we have enough money to make it and still grow,” Wilk said. “We’re alive and kicking, and we’re still out here doing innovative stuff.”



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