The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | Feb 21st

By Gaia Lamperti

The Monday Roundup sets the scene for the week’s biggest news stories, industry deals, and upcoming events. For Prime subscribers only.

Payroll tech

Revolut‘s ambition to turn into a financial superapp is getting more and more real and the latest step in this direction is the introduction of integrated payroll management software. Called Payroll, the new feature keeps track of salary, taxes, pay runs, National Insurance, and pension contributions for Revolut Business customers and is neatly rolled up into a single app. Payroll affords business owners the flexibility to make real-time salary adjustments, such as awarding bonuses, including benefits, and adjusting deductions, for individuals and teams across their businesses.

Stripe has led a $75 million Series C funding round for payroll infrastructure startup Check and was joined in the round by Bedrock, Thrive and Index. Check offers companies the building blocks to embed payroll directly into ERP systems, HR, or time-tracking platforms, removing the need to institute manual data workarounds in typical standalone systems. Publicly launched just a year ago, the firm has partnered with a host of vertical SaaS, workforce management, financial services, and staffing outfits that collectively serve more than 250,000 businesses and four million employees.

LatAm’s big funding rounds

Brazilian digital bank Neon, and one of the largest financial institutions in the world, has raised a $300 million Series D from Spain’s BBVA, whose chairman Carlos Torres Vila said that Neon “has proven to have an offering that is connected to Brazilians’ financial needs, as its customer acquisition figures demonstrate.” In addition, the company continues to grow quickly, considering that it keeps launching products with agility in a market with great potential like Brazil.

Also in Brazil, Sao Paulo-based Trace Finance announced a $4.3 million seed funding round. The company says it enables faster and more streamlined cross-border banking for LatAm startups aiming to “significantly improve” the process for Latin American companies to get financing in the US and vice versa.

Where is the buzz

Warren Buffett’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway has sold a combined $3.1 billion worth of shares in Visa and Mastercard to buy a $1 billion stake in Brazil’s biggest digital bank, Nubank, which went public in December at a $40 billion valuation. Hathaway had previously invested $500 million in Nubank as part of a Series G funding round last summer.