Klar has raised USD $257M in funding, including from Prosus Ventures, FJ Labs, General Atlantic, and Quona Capital, to help Mexico’s unbanked population. With around 36% of adults lacking access to basic financial services, Klar sees a lot of opportunities for growth in Mexico’s fintech market, which is still relatively untapped.
Malaysian artificial intelligence (AI) startup, VOX, had bagged a US$250,000 investment in pre-seed funding from Silicon Valley. VOX is described as a “conversational AI company whose focus is to solve issues related to human-to-machine interactions (HMI)”. It does this through a linguist approach, enabling computers to communicate with users and vice versa.
Z1, a digital banking app for teenagers and young adults, has raised US $10.8 million. By using the Z1 app and a prepaid card linked to their account, users can begin their road to financial independence by learning to manage and spend their money, as well as having a place to receive money they earn through jobs and small businesses.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)