You can’t stop fintech startups. After raising staggering amounts of capital through 2021, the financial technology startup industry hit a valuation wall this year as public markets pulled back, taking many previously high-flying fintech giants. Late-stage fintech startups got caught up in the wave of revaluations.
Smaller fintech startups appear to be equally vulnerable, recently data from the seed market showed. And yet, if you look again at the recent cohort of startups that went through the American accelerator Y Combinator, you couldn’t really tell that fintech had lost much of the founder’s favor.
Of the 223 companies that participated in the latest Y Combinator batch — not counting the companies that participated while operating under the radar — 79 had a fintech theme of enough weight to place them in the category, according to a Demo Day page. sorted by the accelerator. That’s a big portion.
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There is no shame in being optimistic against the market; you could argue that startups by definition need at least some of it to get off the ground. But we were a little surprised to see not only so many fintech startups in general in the group, but also new names in categories that felt too full, or maybe even passé, in our view. Again, optimism against the market is not an offense – it is a gamble.
