Insurtech goes niche

And last but certainly not least, I wrote about how engineer Mark Shaw — who co-founded activity and fitness tracking app Strava and insurance software company Guidewire — raised $15 million for his latest venture: Inclined. Now, it’s taking steps to supercharge its growth…The central bank is working to expand UPI to ‘several nations in Asia and the Middle East and other parts of the world,’ and is setting up an international subsidiary.” From Anna Heim: “In 2021, we wondered whether Brazil could be in for an IPO bonanza. It hasn’t happened: Not only is Latin America’s largest economy going through the same IPO drought as the rest of the world, but also one of its highest-profile public listings, Nubank, is coming to a sudden end.” From Alex Wilhelm: “In late 2020 and 2021, companies offering consumers savings, investing and trading products were hot shit. The added benefit comes on the heels of the Fed rate hike earlier this week.” HR startup Rippling announced last week that it was branching out into fintech by getting into the increasingly crowded spend management space. With this product, merchants can get paid immediately while also giving their business customers the option to get 60 days of interest-free financing…In practice, merchants need only add a ‘Pay in 60 days with Flexbase’ button to their checkout to enable the Flexbase Pay option, and then Flexbase handles the underwriting process and offers the merchants’ customers financing within five minutes.” The Information reports that while “Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison have indicated the payments software pioneer, valued in its last fundraising at $95 billion, is in no rush to go public…a new listing could solve one looming problem for the 13-year-old startup: Stock awards to some of its earliest employees face a deadline next year…If those original Stripe employees exercise the options before they expire, they’ll need to come up with cash to pay a steep tax bill based on the private value of Stripe’s shares.