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TechCrunch recently caught up with recent Y Combinator graduate Uiflow, a startup that is building a no-code enterprise app creation service.

If you are thinking wait, don’t a number of companies already do that?, the answer is yes. But what Quickbase, Smartsheet and others are working on isn’t quite the same thing, at least from the startup’s perspective.

Uiflow, a Bay Area-based concern that has been alive for far less than a year, has built an app creation tool that works with whatever backend a large company currently employs, and helps its development team build apps collaboratively. As the startup explained in a public posting, customer developers can import Figma files while their engineers can use existing UI libraries, and product managers can quickly vet an app’s logic.

The service is akin to a “cross between Unity and Figma,” Uiflow says.

Here’s what its own user interface looks like, per a screenshot the company provided to TechCrunch after an interview:

Per Y Combinator, the company has closed a pre-seed round of more than $500,000. The company told TechCrunch that it has been talking to investors lately — as essentially every Y Combinator-backed startup does after their public unveiling —  but appears to be holding off raising more capital until it fully launches self-service of its product; the company may also accelerate its hiring efforts once its self-serve GTM motion is more broadly available.

The startup told TechCrunch that after its Product Hunt launch it picked up around 1,200 signups. It’s vetting the group and letting in some as pilot customers. Those customers currently pay the company, so it has revenue, although the startup is more product-focused at the moment than centered around boosting its short-term revenues.

Uiflow thinks that its target customers are companies with 250 or more workers, the scale at which a company begins to start thinking about its own UI elements. However, Uiflow is talking to companies with 100 to 1,000 customers, it said.

The five-person team is building a service in a market that is more than active at the moment. As TechCrunch has explored, private-market investors are bullish on the no-code space, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic bolstered the pace at which companies large and small moved toward digital solutions. No-code and low-code services came into greater demand as accelerating digital transformation efforts met the market’s general dearth of available developer talent.

TechCrunch has covered the no-code space extensively in recent quarters, given both rising market demand for its products and what seemed to be growing investor demand for shares in startups pursuing the model. All that’s to say that there’s a reasonable chance that we’ll hear from Uiflow soon regarding a fresh capital raise. Let’s see how long that takes.

In the meantime, here’s a photo of the Uiflow team. In 2021-style, it’s a Zoom shot:

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Blade, the French startup behind cloud gaming service Shadow, has been acquired by Octave Klaba’s fund following a commercial court order. Klaba is better known as the founder of OVHcloud, a French cloud hosting company. He’s acquiring Blade (and Shadow) through his investment fund Jezby Ventures — not OVHcloud.

Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. People can pay a monthly subscription fee and gain access to a gaming PC in a data center. You can connect to this PC from your computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart TV. You can see a video stream of what’s happening on the screen and your actions are relayed to the server.

Unlike Google Stadia, Amazon Luna or even Nvidia GeForce Now, you can install whatever you want on your server. You get a full Windows 10 instance so it supports anything from Steam to Photoshop and Excel.

While the French startup has raised more than $100 million across multiple funding rounds, the company couldn’t keep up with pre-orders, didn’t generate enough revenue to be self-sustainable and couldn’t find cash to expand its service. Despite attracting 100,000 paid users, Next INpact reported that the company had no choice but to go into administration with the commercial court.

Several companies and a group of people submitted takeover bids. In particular, Blade CTO Jean-Baptiste Kempf teamed up with other employees, while Octave Klaba submitted his own offer. Klaba plans to keep all employees except Jean-Baptiste Kempf.

Now, it’s going to be interesting to see how the service changes over the coming weeks. Subscriptions currently start at €12.99 per month in Europe or $11.99 per month in the U.S. It’s unclear whether Shadow will remain available at this price point, how specifications are going to evolve and if the company is going to spin up more servers to attract new clients.

TC Early Stage is back in July and we have a fantastic lineup in store that’s laser-focused on marketing and fundraising. That includes, but is not limited to, Sequoia’s Mike Vernal, whose portfolio companies include Citizen, PicsArt, Whisper, Threads, Houseparty and more.

Vernal will be leading a discussion on tempo and product-market fit. The chat stems from Vernal’s experience as an investor, sharing the lesser-known keys to success to not only secure early investment, but to use it to secure a later-stage investment.

In essence, tempo is everything. At the earliest stage, investors are looking more at the team than the product, knowing that the likelihood of the product changing and evolving is high. That means that the ability to adapt — including the systems in place to collect feedback and willingness to continue iterating — are incredibly important factors.

Vernal will not only stress the importance of tempo and product iteration (and how it relates to fundraising success), he’ll also share how both enterprise and consumer companies should go about creating these feedback loops with customers and how to iterate quickly.

Vernal joined Sequoia as a partner in 2016. He currently sits on the boards of Citizen, Jumpstart, rideOS, PicsArt, Rockset, Threads and Whisper. Before Sequoia, Mike was VP at Facebook, where he led a variety of product and engineering teams. He co-created Facebook Login and the Graph API.

In other words, he’s seen and participated in success, and has done the work of product iteration himself.

Vernal joins a stellar lineup of speakers at TC Early Stage in July, including Norwest Venture Partners’ Lisa Wu, Greylock’s Mike Duboe and Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst, among many others that are soon to be announced.

One of the great things about TC Early Stage is that the show is designed around breakout sessions, with each speaker leading a chat around a specific startup core competency (like fundraising, designing a brand, mastering the art of PR and more). Moreover, there is plenty of time for audience Q&A in each session.

Pick up your ticket for the event, which goes down July 8 and 9, right here. And if you do it before the end of the day today, you’ll save a cool $100 off of your registration.

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With the Coinbase direct listing behind us and the Robinhood IPO ahead, it’s a heady time for consumer-focused trading apps.

Mix in the impending SPAC-led debut of eToro, general bullishness in the cryptocurrency space, record highs for some equities markets and recent rounds from Public.com, M1 Finance and U.K.-based Freetrade, and you could be excused for expecting the boom in consumer asset trading to keep going up and to the right.

But will it? There are data in both directions. While recent information could indicate that some of the most lucrative trading activity at companies like Robinhood could be slowing, there’s also encouraging app download information that paints a more bullish picture regarding the durability of the boom in consumer interest regarding savings and investing, which The Exchange has had an eye on for some time.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Our question today is this: How bullish are companies in the space about continued consumer interest in equities and other asset trading? And why? We’ll also put similar questions to their backers.

We’ve compiled notes from Accel’s Sameer Gandhi about views concerning Public as one of its backers and Index’s Jan Hammer about Robinhood and its market, as well as comments from Public.com and M1 Finance about what they see regarding consumer trading interest in the future. Thoughts from Robert Le, PitchBook’s senior emerging technology analyst, cap things off.

We’ll start with a short look at some data to help ground ourselves regarding where consumer trading demand appears to be today, then consider what the companies in the ring and their backers are thinking. We’ll close with a synthesis of all the perspectives to come up with hype-adjusted expectations for the rest of 2021.

Bullish data, bearish data

Coinbase executed its direct listing on the back of one of the most impressive quarters we’ve ever seen in the realm of business results, meaning it began to trade when it looked just about as good as a company can. Will the same hold true for Robinhood and company?

Platforms like Shopify, Stripe and WordPress have done a lot to make essential business-building tools — like running storefronts, accepting payments and building websites — accessible to businesses with even the most modest budgets. But some very key aspects of setting up a company remain expensive, time-consuming affairs that can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses — but that, if ignored, can result in the failure of a business before it even really gets started.

Trademark registration is one such concern, and Toronto-based startup Heirlume just raised $1.7 million CAD (~$1.38 million) to address the problem with a machine-powered trademark registration platform that turns the process into a self-serve affair that won’t break the budget. Its AI-based trademark search will flag if terms might run afoul of existing trademarks in the U.S. and Canada, even when official government trademark search tools, and even top-tier legal firms, might not.

Heirlume’s core focus is on leveling the playing field for small business owners, who have typically been significantly out-matched when it comes to any trademark conflicts.

“I’m a senior-level IP lawyer focused in trademarks, and had practiced in a traditional model, boutique firm of my own for over a decade serving big clients, and small clients,” explained Heirlume co-founder Julie MacDonell in an interview. “So providing big multinationals with a lot of brand strategy, and in-house legal, and then mainly serving small business clients when they were dealing with a cease-and-desist, or an infringement issue. It’s really those clients that have my heart: It’s incredibly difficult to have a small business owner literally crying tears on the phone with you, because they just lost their brand or their business overnight. And there was nothing I could do to help because the law just simply wasn’t on their side, because they had neglected to register their trademarks to own them.”

In part, there’s a lack of awareness around what it takes to actually register and own a trademark, MacDonell says. Many entrepreneurs just starting out seek out a domain name as a first step, for instance, and some will fork over significant sums to register these domains. What they don’t realize, however, is that this is essentially a rental, and if you don’t have the trademark to protect that domain, the actual trademark owner can potentially take it away down the road. But even if business owners do realize that a trademark should be their first stop, the barriers to actually securing one are steep.

“There was an an enormous, insurmountable barrier, when it came to brand protection for those business owners,” she said. “And it just isn’t fair. Every other business service, generally a small business owner can access. Incorporating a company or even insurance, for example, owning and buying insurance for your business is somewhat affordable and accessible. But brand ownership is not.”

Heirlume brings the cost of trademark registration down from many thousands of dollars to just under $600 for the first, and only $200 for each additional after that. The startup is also offering a very small business-friendly “buy now, pay later” option supported by Clearbanc, which means that even businesses starting on a shoestring can take the step of protecting their brand at the outset.

In its early days, Heirlume is also offering its core trademark search feature for free. That provides a trademark search engine that works across both U.S. and Canadian government databases, which can not only tell you if your desired trademark is available or already held, but also reveal whether it’s likely to be able to be successfully obtained, given other conflicts that might arise that are totally ignored by native trademark database search portals.

Heirlume uses machine learning to identify these potential conflicts, which not only helps users searching for their trademarks, but also greatly decreases the workload behind the scenes, helping them lower costs and pass on the benefits of those improved margins to its clients. That’s how it can achieve better results than even hand-tailored applications from traditional firms, while doing so at scale and at reduced costs.

Another advantage of using machine-powered data processing and filing is that on the government trademark office side, the systems are looking for highly organized, curated data sets that are difficult for even trained people to get consistently right. Human error in just data entry can cause massive backlogs, MacDonell notes, even resulting in entire applications having to be tossed and started over from scratch.

“There are all sorts of data sets for those [trademark requirement] parameters,” she said. “Essentially, we synthesize all of that, and the goal through machine learning is to make sure that applications are utterly compliant with government rules. We actually have a senior-level trademark examiner that came to work for us, very excited that we were solving the problems causing backlogs within the government. She said that if Heirlume can get to a point where the applications submitted are perfect, there will be no backlog with the government.”

Improving efficiency within the trademark registration bodies means one less point of friction for small business owners when they set out to establish their company, which means more economic activity and upside overall. MacDonell ultimately hopes that Heirlume can help reduce friction to the point where trademark ownership is at the forefront of the business process, even before domain registration. Heirlume has a partnership with Google Domains to that end, which will eventually see indication of whether a domain name is likely to be trademarkable included in Google Domain search results.

This initial seed funding includes participation from Backbone Angels, as well as the Future Capital collective, Angels of Many and MaRS IAF, along with angel investors including Daniel Debow, Sid Lee’s Bertrand Cesvet and more. MacDonell notes that just as their goal was to bring more access and equity to small business owners when it comes to trademark protection, the startup was also very intentional in building its team and its cap table. MacDonell, along with co-founders CTO Sarah Ruest and Dave McDonell, aim to build the largest tech company with a majority female-identifying technology team. Its investor make-up includes 65% female-identifying or underrepresented investors, and MacDonnell says that was a very intentional choice that extended the time of the raise, and even led to turning down interest from some leading Silicon Valley firms.

“We want underrepresented founders to be to be funded, and the best way to ensure that change is to empower underrepresented investors,” she said. “I think that we all have a responsibility to actually do something. We’re all using hashtags right now, and hashtags are not enough […] Our CTO is female, and she’s often been the only female person in the room. We’ve committed to ensuring that women in tech are no longer the only woman in the room.”

Last call, founders. Today is your last chance to save $100 on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising. Our last founder bootcamp event of the year takes place July 8-9, and it’s time to call on Saint Expeditus — the patron saint of procrastinators and programmers alike. He’ll help you kick procrastination to the curb, save some cash and gain access to a bevy of top-tier investors, famous founders, marketing magicians, financial wizards and other startup savants. And they all want to help you build a better startup. But you need to buy your pass by 11:59 p.m. (PT) today, April 30.

This TC Early Stage experience goes deep on fundraising and marketing fundamentals. On day one, you’ll choose from a range of presentations and breakout sessions — all interactive, with plenty of time for Q&As. Plus video on demand, available after the event ends, means you don’t have to worry about schedule conflicts.

Speakers at Early Stage bring a wealth of experience, coupled with authenticity. You’ll walk away with actionable advice for immediate use and an unvarnished look at what it takes to build a startup. No sugar-coating here.

Vlad Magdalin, founder of Webflow, was very candid about the challenges he faced on his journey to success. “You always hear about startups that raise millions of dollars, but you don’t necessarily hear about the ups and downs it takes to get to that point. It’s important for early founders to see that side, too.”

We recently added Lisa Wu, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, to our speaker roster, and we can’t wait to hear why she thinks founders should think like a VC. We’re adding more amazing speakers every week, and the full agenda is coming soon!

On day two, get ready for the Early Stage Pitch-off. Applications open next week! Throw your hat in the ring and maybe you’ll be one of the 10 early-stage startup founders chosen to pitch live in front of a panel of VC judges and all the Early Stage attendees around the world. Valuable exposure and pitch feedback for all competitors and special prizes for the winner. Stay tuned!

Read about Nalagenetics, the April TC Early Stage Pitch-off winner right here.

You procrastinated, dragged your feet and delayed taking action on this one simple, opportunity-filled task. For the love of Saint Expeditus, buy your pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising before 11:59 pm (PT) tonight, save $100 and build a better startup.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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A U.S./Israeli startup, Sorbet — which is tackling what companies do with the financial risks as employees accrue paid time off (PTO) — has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Viola Ventures, with participation by Global Founders Capital and Meron Capital.

The economics of paid time off is relatively hidden in the business world, but essentially, Sorbet takes on the burden of this PTO from employers and then allows employees to spend it. This gives the employers far more control over the whole process and the ability to forecast its impact on the business.

Sorbet says that in the U.S., employees use only 72% of PTO balances, even though it’s the most sought-after benefit. But this, effectively, comes out at 768 million unused days off a year, worth around $224 billion. This creates a difficult problem for CFOs and accountants because its creates balance sheet liabilities on the company’s books, says Sorbet. If the employee doesn’t use all of their PTO, the employer can end up owing them a lot of money, which creates a cash flow liability on the company’s books. So Sorbet buys out these PTO liabilities from employees, then loads the cash value of the PTO on prepaid credit cards for the employees.

Speaking to me on a call, CEO and co-founder Veetahl Eilat-Raichel, said: “We researched this whole idea of paid time off and found this huge, massive market failure and inefficiency around the way that PTO is constructed. It’s kind of one of those things where, on the face of it, there’s this boring bureaucratic payroll item that turns into a boring balance sheet item. But under it is a $224 billion problem for U.S. businesses… If you think about it, employers are borrowing money from their employees at the worst terms possible and employees aren’t benefitting either. So everyone’s hurting here.”

She said: “Sorbet assumes the liability on ourselves and so then we can allow the company to control their cash flow and decide when they want to pay us back. They gain a lot of financial value because we are able to be very, very attractive on our funding. So it saves costs, it provides them with complete control of their cash flow and it allows them to give out amazing financial benefits to employees at a time where we can all use some extra cash right now.”

The platform Sorbet has built will, it says, sync with calendars, HR and payroll systems, identify habits and then proactively suggest personalized, pre-approved 3-6 hour “Micro Breaks”, 1-4 day “Micro Vacations” and +1 week Vacations. This, says the startup, increases PTO used by as much as 15%.

Employers can constantly renegotiate the terms of the loan with Sorbet, thus matching future cash flow, insulating themselves against salary raises (wage inflation), and take advantage of other benefits.

The co-founders are Eilat-Raichel, who previously worked at L’Oréal, Lockheed Martin and a fintech entrepreneur; Eliaz Shapira, co-founder and CPO; and Rami Kasterstein, co-founder and board member.

Once the uncool sibling of a flourishing fintech sector, insurtech is now one of the hottest areas of a buoyant venture market. Zego’s $150 million round at unicorn valuation in March, a rumored giant incoming round for WeFox, and a slew of IPOs and SPACs in the U.S. are all testament to this.

It’s not difficult to see why. The insurance market is enormous, but the sector has suffered from notoriously poor customer experience and major incumbents have been slow to adapt. Fintech has set a precedent for the explosive growth that can be achieved with superior customer experience underpinned by modern technology. And the pandemic has cast the spotlight on high-potential categories, including health, mobility and cybersecurity.

This has begun to brew a perfect storm of conditions for big European insurtech exits. Here are four trends to look out for as the industry powers toward several European IPOs and a red-hot M&A market in the next few years.

Full-stack insurtech continues to conquer

Several early insurtech success stories started life as managing general agents (MGAs). Unlike brokers, MGAs manage claims and underwriting, but unlike a traditional insurer, pass risk off their balance sheet to third-party insurers or reinsurers. MGAs have provided a great way for new brands to acquire customers and underwrite policies without actually needing a fully fledged balance sheet. But it’s a business model with thin margins, so MGAs increasingly are trying to internalize risk exposure by verticalizing into a “full-stack” insurer in the hope of improving their unit economics.

This structure has been prevalent in the U.S., with some of the bigger recent U.S. insurtech IPO successes (Lemonade and Root), SPACs (Clover and MetroMile), and more upcoming listings (Hippo and Next) pointing to the prizes available to those who can successfully execute this expensive growth strategy.

R.I.P. Madefire, a startup that recruited high-profile artists to reinvent comics for new formats and platforms.

An announcement on the Madefire website states the company entered into “an assignment of benefit for creditors” (explained as “a state-level insolvency proceeding similar to bankruptcy”) earlier this month, which was then reported this morning in The Beat. As a result, no new books will be published, users will not be able to purchase any additional books and they’re also encouraged to download all their purchased content before the end of the month.

This news affects other apps built with Madefire’s technology. The Archie comics app has shut down as well, with the publisher writing, “We realize this comes as a surprise and we are making every effort to do right by our loyal customer base,” specifically by offering readers a free one-month subscription to Comixology Unlimited. (Amazon acquired digital comics platform Comixology in 2014, launching an Unlimited subscription service two years later.)

Madefire first launched in 2012, back when publishers were experimenting with formats like motion comics. The company described its titles as “motion books,” combining the animation and effects of motion comics with a more traditional reading experience.

“Motion comics are a passive experience, a watching experience that is tantamount to bad animation – it’s like watching a movie,” co-founder and CEO Ben Wolstenholme said at the time. “Motion Books is a reading experience, actively controlled by the reader – it’s like reading a book. Our goal is to be the best reading experience developed for the iPad.”

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the company was the artists it had enlisted before launch, including Dave Gibbons and Bill Sienkiewicz.

More recently, Madefire announced partnerships with other tech platforms, including Snapchat and troubled augmented reality company Magic Leap.

According to Crunchbase, Madefire had raised $16.4 million in funding from investors including True Ventures, Plus Capital, Kevin Spacey (yes, that Kevin Spacey) and Drake, but The Beat reports that the total was “even more than that.”

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.

Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.

This is your chance to put Delft, Eindhoven, Rotterdam and Utrecht on the TechCrunch Map!. We covered Amsterdam here.

If you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out the survey form here.

We are particularly interested in hearing from women founders and investors.

This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.

These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for Extra Crunch, our subscription service that unpacks key issues for startups and investors.

In the first wave of surveys, the cities we wrote about were largely capitals. You can see them listed here.

This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.

We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19 and, generally, how your city will evolve.

We leave submissions mostly unedited and are generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answers to the questions.

So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher.

Google today announced the launch of 40,000 new developer scholarships in Africa. Google will offer the scholarships — created in partnership with tech talent companies Pluralsight and Andela — to developers spread across mobile and cloud development tracks.

According to the statement released by the company, Google will give full scholarships (with certifications in Android and cloud development) to the top 1,000 students (beginner and intermediate developers) at the end of the training.

The announcement, which took place from a virtual event, was also detailed in the company’s blog post. The company hosted key stakeholders in Africa’s tech ecosystem and “reviewed opportunities unfolding throughout the internet economy, paying special attention to the support of developers and startups in the region.”

In addition to the opportunities presented to developers, Google announced the continuation of its accelerator program for African startups. Going into this year, the Google for Startups Accelerator program will be hosting its sixth cohort. The three-month program is expected to start on June 21; applications are open until May 14. A virtual affair, this cohort will be a continuation of how the previous cohort panned out. 

“Last year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first virtual class of Google for Startups Accelerator Africa was launched. It was the first all-online iteration of Google’s accelerator program for Africa and saw 20 startups from seven countries undergo a 12-week virtual journey to redefine their offering while receiving mentoring and attending workshops,” said Onajite Emerhor, head of Google for Startups Accelerator Africa in a statement.

“This year, with the 6th cohort, we want to continue to play our part by supporting developers and startups within the Africa tech ecosystem, ensuring they get all the access and support necessary to see them continue to grow.”

Formerly known as Google Launchpad Accelerator, Google for Startups Accelerator Africa has worked with up to 50 startups across 17 African countries. In 2020, it selected 20 startups into the program (eight from Nigeria, six from Kenya, two from South Africa and one each from Ghana, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe). It expects to also select startups from additional countries, including Egypt, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda, for this sixth cohort.

“The growth of entrepreneurship is crucial, especially in the African context. African developers and startups play a critical role in the transformation of the African economy, creating new opportunities and paving the way for the economic and social development on the continent that we want to see. We recognize Africa’s exceptional digital potential, and that is why Google is committed to providing this critical support for African startups,” says Nitin Gajria, managing director of Google Sub-Saharan Africa.

Developer communities remain one of the most vital aspects of Google’s operations in the continent. It currently has more than 120 communities across 25 African countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Besides the just-announced scholarship program and other communities like Google Developer Groups and Developer Student Clubs, Google has provided an intersection between developers and other tech players by building a Google Developers Space in Nigeria.

While waiting for full first-quarter venture capital results for fintech startups to drop, we knew that they were going to be outsized. The Exchange previously explored the pace at which huge venture rounds were invested into the startup niche, noting that by mid-March the fintech market had already recorded a record number of $100 million rounds.

But the largest venture capital rounds are only part of the fintech investing picture, so we were looking forward to getting a deeper look into what happened in the critical startup sector more generally. We’ve now got the data, so today we’re digging in with both hands.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Per a CB Insights compilation of Q1 2021 fintech venture capital data from around the world, the first three months of the year were the most valuable period for fintech investing, ever. Somewhat shockingly, the first quarter beat the infamous second quarter of 2018, when Ant Group raised a $14 billion round, so skewing the category’s longitudinal data that some analyst groups simply discount it for analytical purposes.

It wasn’t necessary this time: The 614 tracked fintech deals in Q1 were worth a total of $22.8 billion, per the report, enough to set an all-time high, Ant Group be damned. Per CB Insights, the quarter’s fintech VC deal volume rose a modest 15% compared to the year-ago quarter, while VC dollar volume in the sector shot 98% higher over the same interval.

The boom in funding was a global affair, as we’ll get into shortly. We’re also going to chat subsectors in the fintech world, parsing where there’s the most venture activity to track, and, critically, where VCs are pushing — or pulling back — their attention and capital.

So, where did the fintech venture capital market push the most money in the first quarter, and why? We’ll be chatting data as we go, but The Exchange also enlisted VCs from three continents who have made fintech investments to help provide context: We’ll hear from Jesse Wedler, a partner at CapitalG based in North America; Kola Aina, a general partner at Ventures Platform based in Africa; and Shiyan Koh, a general partner at Hustle Fund based in Asia.

Let’s talk a few key fintech numbers, and then rip into venture results by geography and focus.

Huge checks, myriad exits

While we’re looking beyond the largest checks today to get a more holistic perspective on the state of the fintech venture capital world, we cannot discount them. So, briefly, what matters from the mega-round space, or the funding category of rounds worth nine figures and more? Some 57 were raised by fintech startups around the world in the first quarter, or about 4.5 per week. That number was 30 in Q4 2020, and just 21 in Q1 2020.

The first quarter’s 57 mega-deals were worth a huge 69% of total venture capital in the fintech space during the quarter. Don’t be shocked by that figure; a single mega-round can add up to the value of 50 seed deals pretty easily.

The huge results should also not be a complete surprise, CapitalG’s Wedler told TechCrunch in an email, as “the reality is that fintech has been a hot category for years.” What could be driving the recent acceleration in capital disbursement into financial technology startups? Wedler mused it’s a combination of “the ubiquity of smartphones and the modern internet, the development of modern cloud technology, and advancements in APIs and modular services.”