Welcome to the January installment of Fin Capital's newsletter. It’s been a busy month for the team and our portfolio companies as we wrap up the first month of 2025!

DeepSeek – Transient or Tidal Wave?: Our Head of AI, Fan Wen, and our team view it as a transient but important signal. We have been and continue to be bearish on foundational proprietary LLMs and have seen a convergence of capabilities from open source players. DeepSeek may be hiding the ball on the size/scale of infrastructure and training investments that were made along with the other LLMs that were utilized in building the capabilities. Nonetheless, this importantly points to the democratization (and inevitable commoditization) of foundational LLMs and the importance of application layer and middleware/orchestration opportunities in the space. Stratchery and others have provided strong coverage here – more to come!

Addressing Debanking Concerns: Increasing pressure could force banks to rethink account closures, with regulators investigating whether accounts are shut down due to political or crypto-related risks. We believe this will be a positive tailwind for companies in the compliance and fraud space focusing on KYC/KYB, AML, and risk management at large. Read more here.

Digital Asset Playbook: We expect a clearer U.S. regulatory framework for digital assets as Trump's executive order establishes a Presidential Working Group on Digital Financial Technology to explore oversight and a potential national crypto reserve. This may lead to a significant uplift on the bridge from DeFi/Crypto Native to TradFi to playout, starting with Stablecoin use cases. Read more here.

AI in Banking: While the legacy banking industry has long been seen as lagging behind it’s digital competitors, we are seeing POCs and full commercial deployments of AI for customer service and engagement, internal search, tech debt remediation, cloud migration, fraud detection, and workflow automation. All of these use cases focus on a tangible ROI where business impact can be quantified and scaled. Successful bank deployments will need to manage “on prem” deployments, which will require middleware/orchestration providers, data encryption, AI governance, and other critical new aspects to the legacy architecture. Read more here.

The Latest GTM Navigator

Check out our latest GTM Navigator video where Fin Capital Managing Director, Stephanie Perez, discusses how to capture and map buyer signals with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO of Common Room.

We hope this episode of GTM Navigator enables you to deepen your understanding of potential customers to accelerate growth.

Fundraising Announcements

Portfolio company, OneVest, announced this week they have secured $20M in Series B funding. We extend our congratulations to OneVest founders, Amar Ahluwalia & Jakob Pizzera, and the entire OneVest team!

Portfolio Spotlight

It’s been a busy month, sharing some of the latest moments from across portfolio…

• Articul8 has released “A8 Essential”- a new GenAI product that enables enterprises to rapidly explore insights from their complex data to unlock value.  

• BANYAN has partnered with the Ethoca team at Mastercard to stand up the infrastructure to enable merchants to connect directly with Ethoca’s network of financial institution partners.  

• Bridge has partnered with Choice International Hotels to help provide hotel owners with access to affordable financing solutions. 

• Caplight has teamed up with Morningstar to launch their PitchBook Unicorn Index, a big step to towards making private markets more transparent & accessible.  

• Greenlight has partnered with Affinity Federal Credit Union to help parents raise financially smart children & teens.   

• Ternary has introduced MSP Bill Splitting, which will enable MSPs to easily separate billing data for each end customer. 

• Congratulations to Tunic Pay on receiving a spotlight feature in the Startups 100 list, a definitive list of the most promising new UK businesses for their fight against financial fraud in real-time payments.  

• Vestwell has partnered with John Hancock Retirement to launch FutureStep, which will help advisors scale their practices while providing a simple, modern interface for seamless interactions across the advisor, employer, and saver portals.  

What We’re Reading

INDUSTRY RESEARCH 

• Circle: 2025 State of the USDC Economy (Read More) 

• Capgemini: The World’s Payments Report 2025 (Read More) 

• Fintech Brainfood: State of FinTech 2025 (Read More) 

BLOGS, PODCASTS AND VIDEOS 

• The VC Corner: The Ultimate Data Room Template for Startups (Read More) 

• Elena's Growth Scoop: The Price of Your Product is Wrong (Read More) 

• Mostly Metrics: Board Materials, The Metrics that Matter (Read More) 

• Synctera: Guide to Projecting Revenue from Embedded Banking Products (Read More) 

• Growth Unhinged: Moving Beyond Founder Led Sales (Read More) 

• GoodBetterBest: 10 Ways to Price & Package AI (Read More) 

• Elena’s Growth Scoop: When Should You Invest in Paid Marketing? (Read More) 

Thanks for reading!

We are grateful for your partnership and support, and welcome any feedback you have. We’ll see you next month with more!

-The Fin Capital team

_Disclaimer

_{This material is provided for informational purposes, and it is not, and may not be relied on in any manner as, legal, tax or investment advice or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any fund or investment vehicle managed by Fin Venture Capital Management LLC (“Fin”) or its affiliates. Content obtained from third-party sources, although believed to be reliable, has not been independently verified as to its accuracy or completeness and cannot be guaranteed. Fin has no obligation to update, modify or amend the content of this post nor notify its readers in the event that any information, opinion, projection, forecast or estimate included, changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate.}