Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The company, which was founded in 2015, is something like a new-age bank: Users can create accounts in the Revolut app and deposit and send money with it. 

Revolut wants to bring in 100 million customers in the next five years and expand outside of Europe, CEO told TV on Tuesday.

The new round brings Revolut’s total funding to about , according to Crunchbase. Its last valuation was $1.5 billion, but with its new $5.5 billion price tag, it’s tied with Swedish payment installment startup for the title of Europe’s most valuable fintech startup, according to .

led the new round, and the company is also backed by investors like , and. It last raised a $250 million Series C, led by DST Global, in April 2018. 

Fintech startups are certainly hot right now–they’re getting plenty of funding and a couple have seen high profile exits. announced plans to acquire for $5.3 billion last month, and just yesterday confirmed rumors that it would be acquired by for $7.1 billion.

Revolut has more than 10 million customers and has processed more than 350 million transactions, according to the company’s website.

Illustration Credit:

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

and led the round, which also included participation from existing investors , and funds and accounts managed by .

The raise comes about eight months after Toast reached unicorn status when it brought in $115 million in a that included participation from Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price, and . (Read more about that here.) It also takes the Boston company’s total raised since its inception in 2011 to just .

While Toast did not give exact revenue numbers, it did note in its press release that revenue in 2018. The company isn’t releasing specific metrics around growth in ARR, but Toast Senior Vice President of Marketing told Crunchbase News that it was “roughly the same” last year. It’s that kind of impressive growth that new investor TCV found particularly appealing.

TCV General Partner said his firm has been watching the company over the past few years and has been impressed with its ability to move from a POS (point-of-sale) product to an operating system for a restaurant, with both front office and back office functionalities. The evolution has resulted in a number of different revenue streams for the company.

“Very few companies are able to scale at these rates while maintaining or improving their growth rate and efficiencies,” Yuan, who will join Toast’s board of directors, told Crunchbase News. “They’ve executed incredibly well, building a big go-to-market.”

Founded in late 2011 by , , and , Toast first launched its product in 2013. It currently boasts that “tens of thousands of restaurants” are powered by its platform. In 2018 alone, the number of restaurants more than doubled, according to the company.

The 1,500-person company said it plans to invest over $1 billion in R&D over the next five years “to continue building software and hardware designed specifically for the restaurant industry.”

Its products include Toast Go, a mobile point-of-service platform, and Toast Guest Feedback, which are both aimed at helping restaurants speed up service “by up to 40 percent,” boost revenue and get real-time customer feedback.

“The adoption of [Toast Go] really accelerated growth and has also had a big impact in terms of visibility for Toast,” Hamilton said. He also said that the on-demand economy represents opportunities to elevate the guest experience as well.

“Restauranteurs are increasingly having to navigate this on-demand economy both from a physical perspective in the restaurant and from a digital perspective,” Hamilton expressed.

“We’ll always look at different paths to growth. Historically we’ve focused entirely on building and releasing our own capabilities,” Hamilton said in response to our queries about future acquisitions.

Toast also plans to use the new capital to do more hiring in its R&D, customer success, and sales and marketing departments.

So far in 2019 Toast said it has hired on-the-ground employees across the U.S. in addition to engineering teams in Dublin, Ireland by recruiting from the software, financial technology, and food & beverage industries.

Illustration:

From Finland to Singapore to China, we found over $8 billion in funding has gone to women-led companies in 2019 so far.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Even though we’re seeing billions being invested into companies with female founders or co-founders, it’s worth noting that those totals pale in comparison to funding totals for startups with only male founders. And while there is more to come on that note, let’s first highlight the top five women-led companies that have raised so far this year.

Finland: RELEX Solutions

Solutions, a Finish supply chain optimization company, scored $200 million dollars in investment from Bay Area’s(TCV), showing that women-led companies can compete for cash in high tech, STEM fields.

, one of the company’s three founders, told Crunchbase News that her company began with a focus on automatic store replenishment. She said she wanted to take the “hands off” of filling shelves, restocking items and taking inventory. It then grew to cover the entire supply chain process, including workforce optimization.

TCV’s vote of confidence in the company emphasizes how the retail market is evolving, as retailers have to operate an online-digital world and competition continues to stiffen.

“Because that’s basically what TCV does…they look for business areas ripe for change, and as we all know, a lot of things are going on in retail in the moment,” Smaros told me on a call in her office from Finland.

The new funding round will help the company hire more data scientists and developers, specifically in the United States, which she said is the company’s “biggest growth market.”

Singapore: Zilingo

, a Singapore-based fashion company, landed $226 million in February in a round led by .  The deal brought Zilingo’s total funding to $308 million, the company said. Especially noteworthy is the fact that company founder , who used to work for Sequoia India, is the first Indian woman founder-CEO of a unicorn, according to .

Since starting in Singapore, the company has expanded to Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, India, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States. Zilingo is currently working diligently on its expansion in the Philippines and Australia, Bose told me. Additionally, it is investing in the “infrastructure and technology” needed to “digitise the fashion and beauty supply chain,” she said.

China: DaDa and Horizon Robotics

���󲹲Բ��󲹾�’s , led by co-founders and , is an e-tutoring for English that led by .

Fellow unicorn Beijing-based , a Chinese AI semiconductor valued at up to $3 billion, also scored a Series B round of $600 million last month. Two of the company’s co-founders are women: and .

The Horizon Robotics round was led by, , and several other automotive groups. While technically a Series B, the round was large enough to constitute several Series B-focused funds, as we reported in February.

Singapore: Grab

Finally, we look at a company we’ve written about extensively and tops the list with the largest cash infusion: Grab. The company was responsible for three of the biggest funding rounds for female-led companies so far this year. In fact, this week the Singapore-based ride-hailing company scored $1.46 billion from SoftBank Vision Fund.

United States: Confluent And Andela

As far as our home turf—we did see some impressive capital this year. Top deals scored for U.S.-based companies with female leadership include, which raised a Series D of $125 million from , and , which raised a Series D (the same day) of $100 million, led by .

It Could Be Better

Despite the statistics and venture capital funds make to be better, the data still tells us that the number of VC-backed startups founded by women is staying  “stubbornly stagnant.”

In the wise (paraphrased) words of , change may only come when venture capitalists are convinced that women founders can bring in money. (I highly recommend checking out featuring here.)

(Note: I’d love to write more about women and diversity within the tech industry, so if you want to chat you can reach me at natasha@crunchbase.com)

From the venture capitalist perspective, this has always been a challenge. Finding the investors who want to back “underserved” founders is hard, said , the managing director of .

On a personal level, Francetic said her biggest allies when starting her own firm were the backers who loved the idea of a female-led, midwest, energy fund. These were selling points, not dealbreakers, she said.

Interestingly, it helped that her fund was in Chicago instead of Silicon Valley.

“We were outside the echo-chamber… we can provide a level of rationality that isn’t heavily influenced by the community of folks over there,” she said. Their fund is actively looking for female-led companies to invest in within the energy space. And by “actively looking” I mean that Amy said if you’re reading this and fit that definition, e-mail her.

To circle back to ’s podcast, Hamilton believes that people who have perfectly good ideas aren’t getting funded because they don’t look like Mark Zuckerberg. These underestimated founders, Hamilton said, will bring big returns. Thankfully, some investors agree.

Editorial update: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that ImpactAlpha raised $100 million. The reference has been removed.

Illustration Credit: