I recently wrote about the “Embedded finance” trend, citing Intergiro’s recent fundraising in the space as an example. In the form of HUBUC, we now have yet another illustration of this trend. The firm, which was founded in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, and bills itself as “AWS for financial services,” has now raised a $10 million seed investment round headed by WndrCo and Runa Capital.
WndrCo is a big win for HUBUC since it puts Jeffrey Katzenberg, WndrCo’s managing partner and former co-founder and CEO of DreamWorks Animations, on the company’s cap table. This is an extremely useful ally to have. However, the list of powerful investors does not end there. Y Combinator and Village Global, which are supported by Jeff Bezos, Kenneth I. Chenault, Abigail Johnson, and Bill Gates, as well as a number of angel investors, participated as well (listed below).
HUBUC claims to undertake the heavy lifting of embedding financial services into business offerings via an API with no-code solutions, having been founded in 2021 by a pair of fintech entrepreneurs (Hasan Nawaz, CEO, and Ignacio Javierre, COO). Because HUBUC acts as a layer between the financial partners it works with and the company’s offering, it may offer bank accounts, payments, virtual and physical cards, as well as real-time FX rates and digital wallets. That is, it is in charge of contracts, regulatory requirements, anti-money laundering (AML), other integrations, risk, and so on.
“Embedded finance is no longer the sole domain of huge technology businesses,” Nawaz said in a statement. Our goal is to provide a platform that allows any company to integrate financial services into their products. And we’re achieving it by streamlining a voluminous process and encapsulating everything in a single contract and API.” In 2017, he says they looked at numerous financial industries before deciding on an API approach that would work across the board.
HUBUC claims to presently operate in 58 countries, specializing in travel booking payments, marketing and media spending, and employee benefits. Mastercard, Wagestream, PayFlow, OkTicket, and Declarando are among the clients. Of course, they aren’t the only ones in the game. FIS, Temenos, Adyen, and Wex are among them. According to certain estimates, integrated fintech’s payments segment revenue might reach $141 billion by 2025.
“Embedded finance is going to disrupt banking in every single vertical sector, from retail, mobility, logistics, and insurance,” stated Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of WndrCo. However, getting there necessitates a large investment – and thus risk – in terms of development and deployment. We can see the tremendous benefit HUBUC provides to its consumers by providing a comprehensive set of services.”
“We regard fintech infrastructure as one of the most promising themes for the next 10 years, as the need for introducing financial products is rapidly rising,” said Andre Bliznyuk, general partner at Runa Capital. Sujay Jaswa (Dropbox), John Lilly (ex-CEO Mozilla), Immad Akhund (CEO Mercury), Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen (ex-VP Uber), Bo Jiang (CEO Lithic), John Bautista (Partner Orrick), and Anthony Saleh were among the angel investors in the round (angel investor in Coinbase and Robinhood).
