Welcome to the February installment of Fin Capital's Monthly Wave. It’s been a busy month for the team and our portfolio companies.

• Fintech SaaS Isn't Dead in the Water: The bear case on SaaS misses what makes fintech structurally different from other software plays. Every transaction processed, every underwriting decision rendered, every workflow executed feeds proprietary models that sharpen over time — measurable in approval rates, fraud detection accuracy, and risk-pricing precision. The data moat widens with every basis point of improved performance. When you layer on the embeddedness factor, these platforms aren't nice-to-have dashboards. They sit in the critical path of money movement; powering reconciliation, compliance reporting, ledger management, and payments orchestration. This in turn is making rip-and-replace not just expensive but operationally risky. Then there's the moat that’s perhaps most undervalued: regulation. Money transmission licenses, banking charters, and broker-dealer registrations require years of operational track record, dedicated compliance infrastructure, and ongoing regulatory relationships. The most compelling fintech SaaS businesses in our portfolio compound all three advantages simultaneously while also embedding AI deeper in their tech stack. 

• COBAL Modernization - Not an Easy AI Fix: Claude recently published How AI Helps Break the Cost Barrier to COBOL Modernization, arguing that tools like Claude Code can dramatically reduce the effort required to modernize legacy systems. By mapping dependencies across thousands of lines of code, documenting forgotten workflows, and surfacing hidden risks, AI can compress months of analysis into weeks. That promise addresses a real constraint: the high cost of understanding decades-old systems. But COBOL modernization has never been just a translation problem. Success requires faithfully replicating embedded business logic, fixed-point calculations, data structures, and countless integrations—followed by a near-perfect cutover with minimal downtime. The hardest challenge isn’t discovering what the code does; it’s reproducing everything it touches with 100% fidelity. This is where our portfolio company, Mechanical Orchard, takes a different approach. Mechanical Orchard’s platform, Imogen, deterministically parses legacy systems, captures real data flows, and creates exact behavioral replicas. By running new systems in parallel with legacy workloads during incremental cloud migrations—and verifying equivalence at every step—Imogen makes modernization not just faster, but safer. Learn more about Mechanical Orchard here. 

• Unchartered Territory in Agent Identity: Every major tech company is shipping AI agents to act on behalf of humans, both for internal employees or customers. However, the entire identity stack (KYC, authentication, authorization, etc.) was designed for humans. It breaks down when agents need to transact at scale, and few seem to have answers to some of the most fundamental questions. Who authorized this agent? What's its scope of authority? Who's liable when something goes wrong? This is precisely why the space warrants serious attention. Agentic identity occupies a critical chokepoint in the financial stack — the player that cracks it becomes deeply embedded infrastructure, with high switching costs and a natural runway into delegated authority management, agent-level fraud detection, and programmable spending controls. The parallels to how Plaid and Okta became foundational by solving identity at prior platform shifts are hard to miss. Plus, with regulatory frameworks for agent-mediated finance still unwritten, early movers have a genuine opportunity to shape the standards rather than react to them. Timing risk exists, but the asymmetry here is hard to ignore. If you are building in this space, please reach out! 

Join Us at Fintech Meetup

• We’re headed to Las Vegas in March! Join us, alongside TTV Capital & PayPal Ventures, for cocktails & light bites on Tuesday, the 31st. Reach out to [email protected] to request your spot!

Portfolio News

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

• Congratulations to Vestwell for their $385M Series E raise!  

• AnChain.AI partners with NUVA, the chain-agnostic marketplace provider or real-world assets, to integrate their blockchain security and compliance solutions.  

• Array acquires Chimney & Penny Finance to help expand their financial education and money management capabilities. 

• Circle announces partnership with Polymarket to strengthen onchain financial markets, as Polymarket plans to transition to native USDC in the coming months.

• Conduit partners with Onafiq which will help boost stablecoin payments in Africa and streamline cross-boarder payments across 40 countries.  

• Healthee expands their PEO market reach through an exciting, strategic partnership with PrismHR. 

• Ternary partners with Alvin to help companies continue to control Google cloud costs. 

• Turbine announces their goal to unlock liquidity for venture capital and private equity firm investors. 

• Vestwell announces a more streamlined retirement solution for high-growth businesses as they help to power Carta 401(k) alongside Morgan Stanley. 

What We’re Reading

INDUSTRY RESEARCH 

• The SaaS CFO: Finance & Ops SaaS Tech Stack Report of 2026 (Read More) 

• Cornerstone Advisors: AI, Crypto, and Fraud Report (Read More)  

BLOGS, PODCASTS AND VIDEOS 

• Kard: Growth Hacks for Martketers in 2026 (Read More) 

• Lina’s Newsletter: Software Ate the World, Is AI Eating Software Now? (Read More) 

• SaaStr AI Insider: 10 Months Ago, We Were Barely Using Salesforce. Now It’s Our AI Agent Hub (Read More)  

• OnlyCFO’s Newsletter: Should Your Company Reprice Underwater Stock Options? (Read More) 

• Fintech Wrap Up: How SumUp Takes on Square and Clover in the US Payments Market (Watch Here) 

• GoodBetterBest: Loveable, Datadog, Canva and More (Read More)  

Spotlight on Hiring

• The Fin Capital team is growing and we would welcome any referrals (Fin Capital Jobs).

• Our companies are hiring! There are hundreds of jobs on our jobs board (Fin Family Jobs).  

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.}