PennyWorks Secures $2M in Pre-Seed Funding

Happy Money, a leading consumer finance company dedicated to empowering individuals through responsible lending, today unveiled upgraded capabilities to its proprietary lending platform, Hive, which powers its borrower and funding partner ecosystem. Since enhancing the platform, Happy Money has driven faster credit decisions, reduced borrower friction and increased monthly loan originations more than 400% year to date.

Falcon Finance, the next-generation synthetic dollar protocol, today announced a comprehensive $10 million strategic investment from M2 Capital Limited (M2 Capital), the proprietary investment arm of M2 Group (M2), which is a UAE-headquartered conglomerate with a diversified portfolio in digital asset solutions. The partnership marks a major milestone in Falcon’s mission to redefine stability and capital efficiency in decentralized finance.

Meanwhileas raised $82 million in new capital to meet growing demand from individuals seeking to protect their families and established financial institutions seeking to offer bitcoin-linked savings

Block Street, a startup building an execution and lending layer for tokenized equities, said it raised $11.5 million in strategic funding to deploy its intent/RFQ-based trading infrastructure on Monad and major EVM networks. The round was led by Hack VC with participation from Generative Venture, DWF Labs, StudioB, and Bridge34, alongside angels from fintech unicorns and operators at Jane Street, Point72 and HRT, according to the company.

In the last 18 months the VCT has reported four exits, including selling breast cancer scanner Endomag to US listed Hologic, fraud detection business Ravelin to Worldpay and retail investment platform Freetrade to IG Group. While the portfolio still contains a handful of legacy holdings, the vast majority of the VCT’s money is now in the high growth tech companies typical of Molten Ventures.

Agio Ratings, the premier source of risk insights in digital assets, has closed a $6 million funding round led by AlbionVC, bringing the total raised to over $11M. The round, which also saw participation from Portage Ventures and MS&AD, will enable Agio Ratings to expand its research and engineering teams, broadening the scope of its risk ratings and supporting major banks as they enter the digital asset market.