Venture funding

The venture capital arms of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Salesforce.com Inc. are investing in U.K. payments startup GoCardless, which has has raised an additional $75 million to fund expansion.

Stripe’s large and quickly expanding valuation enable it to forge connections among many sources of innovation, placing even more pressure on traditional technology providers and financial institutions.

The Salt Lake City company, which connects small-business owners with lenders like JPMorgan and BofA, plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships and customer base.

SendFriend has raised $1.7 million in a funding round to support the launch of its money transmission service for overseas Filipino workers to transfer U.S. dollars to the Philippines' pesos.

Venture capital-backed fintech funding surged 120% in 2018. Following is a summary of fintech milestones and potential future moves for the industry.

Technology investors are bulldozing cash into blockchain and artificial intelligence, but the “why” is just starting to emerge, as is the true nature of the innovation.

Featurespace wants to expand its fraud-fighting tool beyond its core audience of banks and payment processors to cover transactions across a broader industry spectrum including retail, gaming and insurance.

Just five months after first reaching a $20 billion valuation, Stripe has attracted another $100 million investment that's put it past $22.5 billion, allowing the fintech to put even more pressure on the legacy acquiring industry.

The U.S. e-commerce explosion is driving about $150 billion annually in returns, and Returnly is riding the trend with a service to eliminate the waiting time for consumers to receive funds from items they plan to return to the merchant.

The New York based Petal uses machine learning to optimize the limited financial data available for low-information consumer groups and millennials, who often turn to installment loans from companies such as Affirm, Klarna and PayPal Credit.