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Capital Gains: Fresh funds for Chinese bitcoin, lots of fintech, art shopping and more

Baidu makes a fintech bet against Tencent and Alibaba.

capital gains
capital gains
Todd Bernard / Recode

After a couple weeks of monster rounds from ride-hailing startups and other giant-sized unicorns, this was a relatively calm week on the funding front. Here are some of the headlines:

  • Social payments startup Circle is moving into China to take on Tencent and Alibaba’s Alipay, and it just raised a $60 million round from a group of investors that includes Tencent and Alibaba rival Baidu (Bloomberg).
  • The makers of InVision, a software service for product design, raised $55 million in a Series D funding round led by Iconiq Capital, the VC firm that invests the money of Silicon Valley heavyweights like Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg. FirstMark Capital and Accel Partners also kicked in some cash (TechCrunch).
  • Plaid, a financial technology startup that helps other fintech startups access their customers’ bank account info, raised $44 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from Spark Capital, NEA and others (Wall Street Journal).
  • German financial services startup Number26 has landed $40 million in funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s Horizon Ventures, Battery Ventures and others (Reuters).
  • SecurityScorecard, a startup that monitors the digital security of small businesses (you might say it helps them keep ... a scorecard), raised $20 million in a round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), with participation from Sequoia Capital, Evolution Equity Partners and Two Sigma Ventures (New York Business Journal).
  • Drones-for-business startup Kespry raised a $16 million Series B round from DCM Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners (San Jose Mercury News).
  • Juniqe, a Berlin-based digital marketplace for art, raised $15.7 million from Highland Europe, Vorwerk Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds and Redalpine (VentureBeat).
  • “Real-time crash reporting” startup Sentry, which was born out of an internal tool used by the commenting platform Disqus, raised $9 million in Series A funding led by NEA, with participation from Accel Partners (TechCrunch).

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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