Why We’ve Invested in Fintech for 25 Years
When we founded TTV Capital in 2000, the world looked vastly different. The term “fintech” hadn’t yet been coined. There were no mobile payments, no apps, and no cryptocurrencies. It was an entirely different era.
It would be understandable if our approach to fintech investing had evolved in tandem with technological developments.
Yet what hasn’t changed over the past twenty-five years is our laser focus on the challenges facing the financial services industry and the companies that have the potential to solve them. When a company applies an emerging technology to solve a known problem, then we have a clear market need and a compelling reason to invest.
As investors, we’ve seen time and time again that the real money is made not on the technology itself, but on the industry applications. This has been true across tech cycles: Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix were the winners from the internet era, rather than broadband companies; Uber and Instagram built mobile applications that captured market share when hardware became commoditized; cloud-native applications and enterprise platforms such as Salesforce, Shopify, and Snowflake were more profitable than the underlying cloud technology.
We believe that fintech – which serves a massive, complex, and completely virtual industry – is one of the greatest opportunities for venture capital investment. From the early days of the internet to the proliferation of mobile devices and the shift to the cloud, financial technology impacts businesses and consumers across multiple touchpoints. It’s impossible to imagine a day without it. Even in developing markets and nascent industries, if there is a need to move money and transact, there is a need for fintech.
There are numerous examples of successful fintech applications built on top of new technologies. Bill.com was among the first to create a network for cloud-based business payments. Cardlytics pioneered banking rewards and loyalty programs delivered inside a bank’s mobile app. Greenlight’s debit card for kids and mobile app replaced cash at the household level. Featurespace developed adaptive behavioral analytics (an early form of machine learning) and applied it to identify fraudulent transactions.
As we witness exponential advancements in AI, we have a massive opportunity ahead of us. It’s not an understatement to say that we believe AI will be the most transformative technology of our lifetime, and we are still in the early days. In the past year, we have invested in companies that are applying AI to solve longstanding industry challenges: Worth is using AI to streamline onboarding and underwriting; SimpleClosure relies on AI to automate the company dissolution process; and OneAM leverages AI to value fragmented receivables at scale, turning them into an investable asset class. We are incredibly optimistic about the future of fintech as 2025 draws to a close – perhaps more so than we’ve ever been in our twenty-five-year history. Today’s iteration of AI is just the beginning, and we don’t take for granted our position in this new era of innovation. As we look ahead to 2026, we are already hard at work identifying the next generation of transformational fintech companies, and we look forward to making more investments that will shape the future of fintech.
