PYMNTS Innovation Investment Tracker
Here’s what happened in the first week of September:
The Big Takeaways for Payments and Commerce
- $638.4 Million in financial activity was observed across a variety of investment types – VC funding, private placements, etc. Of that total, $628.4 M was the driven by strategic or venture –backed investments. The biggest transaction was the acquisition of Location Labs by AVG Technologies for $220 M. The second was the acquisition of XRS Corp by Omnitracs for $178 M.
- 69 percent of the week’s activity was concentrated on the retail payments side and almost all was related to strategic or venture capital. On the commercial payments side the biggest movement was the acquisition of XRS Corp.
- Venture backed and strategic investments on the retail payments side accounted for $430.6M of the total investment activity in the first week of September. Of that, 80 percent was strategic.
- Interestingly, most of the venture and strategic backed investments were in the security/fraud and banking areas accounting for 76 percent of the total. Mobile money ($-), P2P ($- M), payments($ -) and Point of sale/payment acceptance ($-)reflected the least amount of investment activity.
- The most active VCs/PEs included Sequoia Capital ($33 Million), General Catalyst Venture Partners ($20 Million) and Dundee Venture Capital ($17 Million).
- From a geographic perspective US was the most active region, while China observed slow activity.
- The median investment amount was $6 Million.
The Retail and Commercial Payments Top 20
Here are the top 20 investments that drove 99 percent of the funding activity in first week of August 2014.
