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Hey, fintech fam! 💜

I’m writing to you from snowy Chicago, where I’m taking a long weekend to spend much-needed time with family (on Anton’s side). Fun fact: he’s an original Midwesterner, and I’m an original Southern girl — two transplants who became New Yorkers building a fintech media company together. Life is funny like that.

This week’s Top 3 stories all circle back to a proverb I cannot stop thinking about — a line Susan Langer shared with me that’s become a quiet mantra inside Fintech Is Femme:

“Little by little… a little becomes a lot.”

In fintech, it’s easy to obsess over the big moves — the massive raises, the splashy partnerships, the headlines.

But the truth? It’s the small, consistent actions that compound. Today’s stories each show what happens when small, intentional momentum turns into something much bigger — whether it’s capital shifting, compliance reinvented, or SMEs finally getting paid on time.

A quick note as we look to 2026: our Humans of Fintech podcast inventory for Q1 is officially full (!!!).

But I’m actively meeting with founders, CMOs, and operators planning Q2/Q3 campaigns — the kind of storytelling that actually moves the fintech narrative forward and delivers value to this community.

If you want to explore a custom series, events, a co-branded Summit, or something we haven’t invented yet…

Reply to this email.

I read every response — even the rogue mean ones 😉

Let’s get into it. 💜

#TRENDING

#1 Female Founders Fund Raises $29M Fund IV — Here’s Why It Matters for Fintech Founders

On Monday, Female Founders Fund (FFF), led by Anu Duggal, announced its $29 million fourth fund — bringing its total capital under management to $140 million across five funds.

LPs include heavy hitters: Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, Olivia Walton’s Ingeborg Investments, and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation.

It’s a major milestone, first reported by Fortune, given that fewer than 15% of venture managers ever reach Fund IV. For a solo female GP, the odds are effectively nonexistent.

And yet — Duggal did it.

It only takes one person to show what’s possible. And Duggal’s results make the thesis unmistakably clear:

Female founders economically outperform.

A study commissioned by the firm found that female-founded companies deliver 2.5x more revenue per dollar than male-founded peers.

But let’s zoom in on fintech — because here’s where the data becomes a flashing red arrow:

FFF’s portfolio includes fintech standout Tala, used by millions globally.

And yet Tala is one of only a handful of fintech companies in the fund’s portfolio.

From the 60 companies listed publicly on FFF’s website, roughly 6% are fintech, including:

• Shivani Siroya, Founder & CEO, Tala (tune into my interview with Shivani here).

• Kate Kallot, Founder & CEO, Animi

• Christie Horvath, Founder & CEO, Wagmo (listen to my latest interview with Christie here).

• Kat Garcia, Co-founder & Co-CEO, Ground

Which is great — except it’s a drop in the bucket compared to consumer, which makes up 73% of the portfolio.

Why It Matters

Fintech has some of the lowest investment rates into women-founded companies despite being the sector with the highest capacity for outsized economic and systemic impact.

If we genuinely want to rebuild financial infrastructure for a global, digital, inclusive economy, then funding female fintech founders is a national economic strategy.

Women already outperform on every metric investors claim to value:

• Profitability

• Capital efficiency

• Revenue per dollar

• Customer trust

So while FFF’s Fund IV is big news, what it really exposes is the massive gap:

We need significantly more capital allocated to female fintech innovators, because that is where the next wave of economic transformation will come from.

Women are returning capital — and now deserve a far bigger slice of fintech’s future.

Zoom out to the macro signals:

• Fintech revenues grew 21% in 2024 — 3x faster than traditional financial services.

• 69% of public fintechs are now profitable.

• Challenger banks with >$500M in revenue grew deposits 30% faster than incumbents.

• And yet… women-founded fintechs receive less than 2% of fintech VC dollars.

This is the moment where anyone who cares about the U.S. economy should pause.

Fintech controls the systems that determine:

• credit

• access

• financial mobility

• trust

• global outcomes

• AI-enabled decision-making

If women — the demographic shown to build higher-performing, higher-trust, higher-efficiency companies — are barely present in the companies shaping these systems, then we are not building a modern financial economy.

We’re rebuilding the old one with prettier UX.

Female Founders Fund is paving the way and sharing the blueprint — but the fund should not be one of a small handful backing women-led fintech companies like Tala.

We need 20+ more funds to support the women who are:

• building credit and underwriting infrastructure

• rebuilding payments rails

• designing fraud + risk systems

• building wealth platforms

• deploying AI for compliance, identity, and trust

• reimagining global money movement

The fastest-growing sector in business can’t afford to exclude the best-performing founders.

BOTTOM LINE

FFF has delivered:

✔️ A fully returned Fund I

✔️ Three nine-figure exits

✔️ A decade of ecosystem building

✔️ A durable investment model with real outcomes

And now, Duggal is on track to deploy $500 million into female-founded companies over the next decade.

But here’s the story:

Women have already proven the thesis.

The bottleneck isn’t pipeline or performance — it’s allocation.

LPs claim to invest based on traction and returns.

Well:

Women are delivering the returns.

Fintech is delivering the traction.

FFF is delivering the durability.

It’s time for institutional investors to catch up to the math.

Women are raising. Women are delivering. Now the industry needs to meet them at scale.

FFF’s milestone reminds us what happens when women get capital.

But here’s the other side of the story:

What happens when women use that capital to rebuild financial infrastructure from the inside out?

Enter today’s second story — a female-founded fintech transforming compliance with AI at the exact moment the industry needs it most.

#2 AI Compliance Startup Raises $11M — And Signals a Bigger Shift in Fintech

On Wednesday, Kalyani Ramadurgam, CEO and cofounder of Kobalt Labs, announced the company’s $11 million Series A led by First Harmonic, with participation from Alloy Labs, Y Combinator, and others.

For anyone paying attention to the infrastructure side of fintech, this is a big deal — and a preview of where the industry is heading.

Kobalt is building AI agents that automate deeply manual, deeply painful risk and compliance workflows for financial institutions — starting with third-party risk management, internal audit, and marketing compliance.

Their customer list already includes some of the most influential players across fintech:

• Chime

• Bilt

• Emprise Bank

• Celtic Bank

• American National Bank

• Meriwest Credit Union

Why It Matters

Financial institutions are drowning in new regulatory pressure — especially around third-party risk.

Everyone wants to innovate faster.

No one wants to get hit with a consent order.

Legacy compliance is broken.

Bodies don’t scale.

Manual review does not protect consumers.

And AI — when built with caution and precision — is the only path forward.

Why Kobalt Matters for Fintech’s Next Chapter

At our Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit in NYC, Ramadurgam pitched Kobalt on stage, and the room felt it immediately:

This is not another thin AI wrapper.

This is infrastructure.

Kobalt’s platform:

• syncs with every relevant regulation globally in real time

• automatically flags issues in hundreds of pages of policies, procedures, and InfoSec documents

• identifies deficiencies before they become regulatory problems

• reduces review timelines by 80%+

• cuts operational costs

• accelerates onboarding

• improves risk posture

This is the kind of infrastructure upgrade that actually moves the financial system forward — not by replacing humans, but by making human judgment more accurate and less reactive.

And here’s the pattern I want you to notice:

Kobalt is another female-founded and led (Ashi Agrawal is company CTO) startup solving one of the most mission-critical problems in finance.

This is exactly where more investment dollars should be flowing.

The Founder Behind the Innovation

Ramadurgam isn’t just building a compliance tool; she’s building an AI-driven operating system for trust.

Her background tells the story:

• AI researcher

• Fraud + risk teams at Apple Pay and Affirm

• Engineering-led, data-driven, systems thinker

• A founder who saw people manually scanning 200-page documents and said:
  

   “This is not how the future of finance gets built.”

That combination — economic need + technical depth + lived industry experience — is exactly why Kobalt is breaking through.

And let’s be honest:

AI in compliance has been waiting for a founder like Ramadurgam.

Why This Raise Is Strategically Important

Zoom out to the macro picture we discussed in Story 1:

Fintech revenues grew 21% in 2024, 3x faster than incumbents.

69% of public fintechs are profitable.

Challenger banks are scaling deposits faster than traditional banks.

But all of that momentum depends on one thing:

Trust.

And trust depends on infrastructure, which means the next wave of fintech will be defined by companies that can:

• prove compliance

• move faster without breaking things

• navigate global regulation

• embed AI responsibly

• maintain customer trust while scaling

Kobalt sits at the intersection of all of it.

Why More Women Need to Be Funded in This Space

Kobalt’s raise is not just a win for them.

It’s a case study in what happens when women build core financial infrastructure:

• They choose problems that actually matter.

• They build systems that reduce risk instead of accelerating it.

• They create technology that protects consumers and strengthens institutions.

We don’t just need AI founders.

We need AI founders who understand the cost of getting it wrong.

Compliance isn’t sexy — until it’s the reason your fintech survives.

And founders like Ramadurgam are showing investors exactly where the opportunity is:

Trust infrastructure is the new frontier of fintech.

#3 A New Fintech Mavericks Episode Drops — And It’s a Masterclass in Building Profit-First Fintech

For the final story today, I’m thrilled to share a brand-new Fintech Mavericks episode — recorded live at Money20/20 Las Vegas — featuring a woman who is rewriting the playbook for sustainable, hype-free fintech: Garima Shah, Co-Founder & President of Biller Genie.

If you care about the real infrastructure of small business success — not the glossy headlines — this one is essential listening.

The Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About — But Every Small Business Feels

Shah tackles one of the least glamorous but most existential problems in financial services: Getting small businesses paid.

And the numbers are brutal:

• The average SMB waits 47–50 days to get paid.

• 64% of SMEs facing delayed payments say it directly threatens their survival.

• Many invoices are so small, no one in traditional finance prioritizes solving for them.

Biller Genie changes that — radically.

Once the platform goes live, payment cycles collapse from ~50 days to about a week.

One utility customer even collected $400,000 of tiny overdue invoices in 24 hours.

That’s not “nice-to-have infrastructure.”

That’s economic lifeline technology.

A Fintech Growing the Old-School Way: Through Trust

Shah breaks down how Biller Genie’s strategy defies current trends:

• Zero customer acquisition cost

• Sub-5% attrition

• Growth fueled by bank and processor partnerships, not performance marketing

• A profitability mindset from day one

In a market obsessed with AI headlines and CAC burn, Shah is building a fintech the way financial systems are supposed to be built:

Slow. Strong. Sticky.

Through trust, not hype.

A Leadership Blueprint — Without the Burnout

We also go deep on Shah’s philosophy as a leader:

• Saying no to deals that look good but aren’t good for you

• Bootstrapping discipline vs. venture-fueled pressure

• Building a team culture where people openly own mistakes

• Running a personal SWOT analysis to stay aligned with your “zone of genius.”

If Story 1 showed us why women deserve more capital…

If Story 2 showed us how women are redesigning financial infrastructure…

Story 3 shows us what it looks like in practice when women build resilient, revenue-first fintech.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Fintech Mavericks with Garima Shah here.

📺 Watch the video version on YouTube here.

_{MARK YOUR CALENDARS}

Join us every Thursday to stay up to date on our fintech events! We are announcing the next Fintech Is Femme in-person event in next week’s newsletter. For now, join us virtually as we give a fintech founder the spotlight she deserves…

If you’re looking for a meaningful way to pay it forward this season — one that takes 30 seconds but can change the trajectory of a founder’s career — start here:

✨ Nominate a brilliant woman in fintech to pitch at the Fintech Best-In-Showcase, powered by Empire Startups.

Each virtual event features five exceptional founders pitching live, with real-time feedback from decision-makers at FIS, TruStage Ventures, Artemis, Fiserv, and others shaping the next wave of financial innovation.

And yes — one founder walks away with Best in Show. 🏆

But every founder walks away with something far more valuable: visibility across the global fintech ecosystem.

Because visibility becomes credibility.

Credibility becomes momentum.

And momentum is how global companies are born.

So — are you the best-of-the-best CEO in fintech?

Or do you know a powerhouse woman ready for her moment on the global stage?

And if you want to see the next generation of fintech before everyone else…

💻 Join us from anywhere.

Ring in the New Year with the leaders defining what’s next.

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_FINTUNES

🎶 SZA - Seek & Destroy

Naturally, everyone is posting their end-of-year playlists now that 2025 is somehow almost over. I’m not a Spotify girlie, but Apple Music did slide into my notifications to let me know SZA was one of my most-played artists of the year — which, honestly, feels spiritually accurate.

_{LET’S CONNECT}

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📚 Increase your expertise by ordering your copy of my book, Fintech Feminists: Increasing Inclusion, Redefining Innovation, and Changing the Future for Women Around the World.

⭐️ P.S. If you’ve read Fintech Feminists (or listened to the audiobook!), I’d be so grateful if you could take 30 seconds to leave a review or rating on Amazon here. Your support means the world to me. A million thanks in advance!

That wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading!

Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo. See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜