In a press release Wednesday (April 23) Swedish startup Froda announced it has raised 20 million euros (about $22 million) in a Series B funding round to support its expansion across Europe and increase access to financing for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB). The company has already established a presence in the Nordic nations, the U.K., Ireland and Germany, the release said.

The funding round was led by Stockholm-based investment firm Incore Invest, with continued participation from Froda’s existing investors, according to the release.

Embedded finance means financial services are directly available from the software solution. In the case of Froda’s platform, it connects SMBs with banks, neobanks and payment providers — leveraging data-driven processes to potentially reduce the time required for loan approval from months to minutes.

In a PYMNTS TV Washington Weekly chat, QED Investor Amias Gerety told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that early-stage companies need to focus on customer acquisition and product development, and not the economic uncertainty.

Perhaps that’s why some of these startups — particularly in the embedded finance space — are finding ways to meet their goals.

According to the Froda press release, embedded finance is gaining traction in Europe, where the SMB funding gap is estimated at 400 billion euros (about $453 billion).

In addition to expanding into new European markets and scaling the business, the release said that Froda plans to use the new capital to onboard additional embedded finance partners. Current partners include Mimo in the U.K., Lunar in the Nordic nations and Kontist in Germany, according to the press release.

According to Froda, the company achieved 30% year-over-year customer growth in 2024 and is adding approximately one new embedded partner each month.

The release also mentioned the company’s recent expansion of its partnership with the European Investment Fund to launch a “pan-European microfinancing guarantee.”

The company claims that SMBs using its platform grow up to 12 times faster than the national average.

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The company, which is a brand owner that develops, manufactures and distributes consumer products and entered the cryptocurrency industry to diversify its business, plans to use $5.3 million for working capital and debt reduction and the remainder to establish its Solana treasury operations and accumulate Solana, it said in a Monday (April 21) press release.

“The closing of the offering is expected to occur on or about April 24, 2025, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions,” Upexi said in the release.

GSR, the crypto trading and investment firm that is the lead investor in Upexi’s private placement, said in a Monday press release that it sees this move as a part of its mission to bridge the gap between traditional capital markets and the digital asset ecosystem.

“This investment highlights the growing demand for efficient, secure access to high-quality crypto assets in public markets,” GSR Head of Research Brian Rudick said in the release. “Solana’s speed, scalability and vibrant developer ecosystem make it an ideal foundation for long-term growth and we are honored to help accelerate the integration of digital assets into institutional portfolios.”

Solana Foundation President Lily Liu said the two companies’ announcements signal greater interest in using Solana for real-world financial applications and a growing intersection of traditional finance and DeFi.

“It’s encouraging to see institutions exploring blockchain infrastructure in meaningful ways,” Liu said.

Companies such as MicroStrategy — which is now doing business as Strategy — and Block have added bitcoin to their balance sheets, while other firms across industries are exploring its potential as both an investment vehicle and a transactional asset, PYMNTS reported in February.

Janover, a platform that connects the commercial real estate industry, said April 7 that it planned to accelerate its acquisition of digital assets in the Solana ecosystem through U.S. public markets after raising $42 million in an offering of convertible notes and warrants.

In March, retail gaming destination GameStop said that a portion of its cash or future debt and equity issuances may be used to accumulate bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset.

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Pillar Security’s solution is designed to meet the needs of a new age in which “software has gained agency and data itself has become executable,” Pillar Security CEO and Co-founder Dor Sarig said in a Wednesday (April 16) press release.

“Pillar’s technology, backed by real-world AI threat intelligence, is built with this understanding, delivering a new class of protection designed explicitly for AI-related security risks,” Sarig said. “We are redefining application security to match the agentic and autonomous software of the Intelligence Age.”

The company’s security platform is specifically designed for AI-integrated software systems and addresses AI-specific risk areas like evasion attacks, data poisoning, data privacy and intellectual property leakage, according to the release.

The platform integrates with an organization’s existing code repositories, data infrastructures and AI/ML platforms, automatically maps all AI-related assets across the organization, tests AI models and deploys guardrails that proactively prevent failures, the release said.

Elias Manousos, lead investor at Shield Capital, which led the funding round, said in the release that Pillar understands that it takes more than incremental improvements to secure software at a time when more agentic AI solutions are being deployed within businesses and the threat surface is expanding.

“Their visionary approach sets a new standard for how organizations secure and manage intelligent systems,” Manousos said.

AI agents are different from rules-based bots, where actions are pre-determined, PYMNTS reported in March. AI agents built on top of generative AI models can dynamically generate responses, understand, adapt and learn while having autonomy and decision-making capabilities to complete a task given by the user.

That means chief financial officers should approach agentic AI like past forms of automation they’ve incorporated — evaluating what processes can benefit, identifying costs that can be removed, finding potential benefits from accelerating work, and assessing risks to finance and reputation, George Westerman, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told PYMNTS in March.

Fifty-five percent of chief operating officers say their companies have already implemented AI-based automated cybersecurity management systems — a threefold increase from earlier in the year — according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “COOs Leverage GenAI to Reduce Data Security Losses.”

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“Going from seed to Series A in just 9 months is wild — but it reflects something we’ve known all along: the world needs better infrastructure for user-permissioned data,” the company said in a Wednesday (April 16) post on LinkedIn.

The sorts of user-permissioned data that businesses can access with Deck’s platform include electricity, water, gas and waste usage from utilities; invoices, vendors and financials from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems; order history, fulfillment status and customer interactions from storefronts and marketplaces; point-of-sale data, in-store transactions and product-level data from retail sales; and phone, internet and cable services data from telcos, according to Deck’s website.

Businesses can use utility data, for example, to power use cases like energy management and billing automation, the website said.

Deck enables users to tap into user-permissioned data from more than 100,000 providers in more than 40 countries, per the website.

The company said open data will “come in many waves,” starting with utilities, and that Deck aims to provide the infrastructure that gives businesses access to it.

“We started in utilities (because we felt the pain ourselves),” Deck said in the LinkedIn post. “But now, Deck is powering data access across verticals — from eCommerce to music to retail analytics.”

Deck’s latest funding round was led by Infinity Ventures, according to the company’s post.

“Deck is building developer APIs for user-permissioned read/write access to any website — bringing Plaid-like access to the 95% of platforms that don’t offer APIs, from utility portals to payroll systems to government services,” Infinity Ventures said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn. “Their vision: Unlock the data users already have, without the friction.”

Golden Ventures, which participated in the funding round, said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn that Deck is “moving fast, solving real problems and delivering the kind of developer experience we wish more platforms offered.”

“Deck is solving a massive, overlooked problem: accessing user-permissioned data across verticals,” Golden Ventures said in its post. “Not just finance — everything else. Utilities, eCommerce, music and more.”

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The company was founded in 2018 and is one of the five largest corporate travel management firms in Brazil, with its platform serving more than 2,000 companies, Onfly said in a Tuesday (April 15) press release.

In addition to supporting its international growth, Onfly will use the new funding to accelerate its technology development, integrate artificial intelligence, and expand its marketing and sales efforts, according to the release.

“Today’s workforce expects the same seamless, intuitive experience from corporate software that they get from consumer apps,” Onfly CEO and co-founder Marcelo Linhares said in the release.

Onfly’s platform offers fully digitized travel options that include flights, hotels, buses and rental cars, according to the release. It is also adding short-term rentals for corporate travel.

The platform also provides real-time auditable data, enterprise resource planning (ERP) integrations and a corporate card, per the release. The corporate card is now used by 65% of Onfly’s customers and has processed $35 million in total payment volume in the past two years.

Dave Yuan, founder and partner at Tidemark, which led Onfly’s latest funding round, said in the release that the company’s platform is redefining a corporate travel space that suffers from “clunky systems, opaque pricing and a reliance on service-heavy, fee-driven models.”

“Onfly is changing all of that,” Yuan said in the release. “They’re creating a magical flywheel in corporate travel: lower costs for businesses; a smoother experience for travelers; and more valuable customers for suppliers.”

Corporate cards and expense management systems are being linked to help streamline the efforts to monitor and reconcile the costs of business travel, PYMNTS reported in January.

In another development in the space, Mesh said April 9 that it added a guest travel solution to its global travel and expense management platform, streamlining the process associated with the booking and reimbursement of contractor, candidate and guest travel.

In January, TravelPerk said it took a step toward its goal of building an integrated travel and expense management platform by acquiring spend management platform Yokoy.

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The company will use the new funding to deepen its in-person payments offering, bolster its online payments suite and move into the acquiring space, Stitch said in a press release emailed to PYMNTS.

Stitch has raised $107 million in total funding since it emerged from stealth in February 2021, and the company serves the payments needs of enterprise businesses in South Africa, including multi-line retailers, telcos and other omnichannel businesses, according to the release.

“We feel we’ve earned the right to work with clients across the board — not just for online or in-person payments, but with any money movement needs,” Stitch said in the release. “It felt like the right time to more aggressively expand our offering so we can further serve our clients.”

With its access to all local online payment methods and in-person payments, Stitch offers fraud prevention; flexibility and customization; technical and integration support; 24/7 customer support; and built-in redundancies and automated routing, according to the release.

So far in 2025, the company has launched its in-person payments solution after acquiring ExiPay and introduced a simple checkout solution called Stitch Express that is designed for online businesses of all sizes that use Shopify, WooCommerce and other eCommerce platforms.

Stitch is now expanding its in-person payments solution and said it will add acquiring to its services list soon.

The company’s latest funding round was led by QED Investors, per the release.

When Stitch acquired in-person payments provider ExiPay in March, Stitch said its solution serves retail merchants operating primarily in-store; retail merchants with an online and in-store presence; omnichannel merchants looking to unify their offering across channels; and merchants in the financial services or gaming spaces looking to accept payments or wallet top-ups in person and online.

The company’s latest funding round came about 18 months after it raised $25 million in a Series A extension in which PayPal Ventures, The Raba Partnership and CRE Venture Capital joined the earlier investors.

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The company gained its U.K. trading license in November, has over 800,000 U.K. trading customers, and already offers U.S. and European equities, Bloomberg reported Friday (April 11).

“We are including U.K. stocks in our offering as we’ve seen interest from our U.K. customers to get exposure to the local economy and diversify their portfolio further,” Yana Shkrebenkova, CEO of wealth and trading U.K. at Revolut, said in the report.

When Revolut received its U.K. trading license from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in November, the company said it planned to offer its U.K. customers new trading products and features.

The receipt of the license made Revolut Trading an authorized investment firm, allowing it to introduce U.K. and European Union stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The company had already operated a trading feature as an appointed representative with a principal in the U.K. since 2019, allowing it to offer an investment service through its app and enable retail customers to buy and sell shares listed in the U.S.

“Having launched our successful investment product five years ago, we strive to bring best-in-class investment products to our customers in the U.K.,” Shkrebenkova said in a November press release. “We know that there is so much more our Revolut Trading customers want from our platform, and we are working hard to deliver this, rolling out new features safely and considerately.”

It was reported March 13 that Revolut was hiring 100 new staffers while preparing to expand its U.K. banking business after receiving its British banking license last summer.

The FinTech had already begun building that side of its business and expects to have a staff of around 200 by the end of the year.

On March 18, it was reported that Revolut is working to build out its banking operations in the U.K., expand globally and then launch an initial public offering (IPO).

The company aims to become a global financial services app. It currently lets users make payments, trade assets and hold money, and it aims to expand this offering to include loans, overdrafts and mortgages.

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The platform currently supports 45 French brands and aims to support 150 brands across Europe within four years, starting with expansion in the U.K. and Italy, Faume said in a Thursday (April 10) press release.

Faume recently signed its first partnership in the U.K., with fashion house Victoria Beckham, and expects to add several heritage brands in Italy later this year, according to the release.

The company helps its existing clients sell in not only France but also Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Italy, per the release. Since its launch in 2020, the company has enabled the sale of 300,000 secondhand premium fashion pieces, 40% of which were sold outside France.

“At Faume, we show daily that resale is a lever for brand resilience — combining sustainability and profitability across the board,” Faume CEO Aymeric Déchin said in the release. “Our solution, already adopted by more than 45 leading brands, proves that building a resale model is not only possible and valuable, but also drives long-term performance.”

Faume enables premium brands to enter the second-hand market without compromising their image or losing their control over distribution, according to the release.

The platform allows them to launch resale channels under their own name and branding; deliver a premium customer experience; retain control over pricing, image and inventory; and embed this circular model into their own ecosystem, the release said.

With this solution, brands can launch their own branded resale channels in four to eight weeks, per the release.

One of the companies using the platform is fashion brand Soeur, which launched Soeur Second Hand in collaboration with Faume, according to the release.

“We’re pleased with the rollout and proud to offer a premium in-store take-back service,” Soeur Managing Director Freja Day said in the release. “Already available in 14 countries, it reflects our commitment to circular and conscious fashion.”

Fleek, a London-based secondhand clothing platform that connects wholesalers and retailers, raised $20.4 million in November to expand its offerings. Fleek works with 10,000 resellers and retailers in 70 countries and moves 2.5 million secondhand clothing items from 1,000 wholesale suppliers.

In September, fast-fashion brand Zara said it was bringing its secondhand clothing marketplace, Zara Pre-Owned, to the U.S. Zara introduced its Pre-Owned business in 2023, part of a wave of other retailers providing similar services amid pressures to improve their sustainability practices.

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The round brings the company’s total funding to date to $2.2 billion, and it expects to add more Series E participants in the coming weeks, Nuro said in a Wednesday press release.

Nuro will use the new funding to scale its technology platform and advance its commercial partnerships, according to the release.

The company has a licensing-driven business model and offers its “vehicle-agnostic, cost-effective technology” to automotive manufacturers, suppliers and mobility companies that can integrate it into robotaxis, goods-delivery vehicles and personal vehicles, the release said.

“We’re excited to see strong investor enthusiasm for our Series E,” Nuro Co-founder and CEO Jiajun Zhu said in the release. “Our technology, years of experience with driver-out Level 4 deployments, and focus on licensing uniquely position us to help automakers, mobility platforms and commercial fleets accelerate their autonomy roadmaps.”

Nuro said in November that it expanded its deployment of autonomous vehicles in two cities in California — Mountain View and Palo Alto — and in Houston, Texas.

The company said it was ready to provide its autonomy platform to automotive OEMs and mobility companies.

“Our latest driverless deployment demonstrates the maturity and capability of our AI platform, and we’re excited for potential partners to capitalize on the performance, safety and sophistication of the Nuro Driver to build their own incredible autonomy products,” Zhu said in a Nov. 19 press release.

Nuro announced the expansion of its business model to include licensing in September, saying that its partnering with automotive OEMs and mobility platforms would accelerate the adoption of autonomous vehicles.

The company said its licensing model offers a “commercially independent, road-proven platform” that automotive OEMs and mobility platforms can use to speed up their development and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

“We believe Nuro is positioned to be a major contributor to this autonomous future where people and goods mobility are free-flowing, representing a significant increase in the quality of life for everyone,” Zhu said in a Sept. 11 press release.

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“With this funding round, we’ll continue our mission of giving acquiring banks, marketplaces and platforms the technology they need to automatically split payments and process payouts at a much lower cost than solutions offered by Stripe Connect, Adyen and others in the market,” Alex Mackenzie, co-founder and managing director at Ryft, said in a Wednesday (April 9) post on LinkedIn.

Ryft’s solution enables business to accept online payments from major credit cards and preferred payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay; ensure smooth marketplace payments by automating split payments, customizing commission rates and holding funds until conditions are met; generate revenue from online payment fees; and process payments with full regulatory compliance, according to its website.

The company’s latest funding round was led by EdenBase, with support from British Business Bank, Pembroke VCT, The SideBySide Partnership, GPOS Investments, Ingenii VC and some executives from PayPal, Sadra Hosseini, co-founder and CEO at Ryft, said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn.

“This means even bigger things ahead for Ryft; helping platforms, marketplaces and acquirers automate and scale payment flows efficiently, with full compliance,” Hosseini said in the post. “The funding will be used to help scale Ryft further internationally to really cater to our partners’ needs.”

Since its seed funding round of 1.2 million pounds in 2022, Ryft has secured a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) license, partnered with American Express and Visa, and become a Mastercard Network Enablement Provider, Pembroke VCT said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn.

“Ryft is transforming the payments landscape by providing businesses with a secure, compliant and scalable solution to process, manage and monetize payments with ease,” Pembroke VCT said in the post. “Already trusted by over 1,500 businesses, Ryft is streamlining the payment process and driving efficiency across several industries.”

When announcing its partnership with American Express in March 2024, Ryft said that move would enable its merchants in the U.K. to accept payments from Amex cards and gain Amex benefits.

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