The 50 Hottest FinTech Startups That Are Driving The Industry

The past year has been painful for the financial technology industry, with publicly traded fintech stocks languishing 50% below their late 2021 peak, even as the S&P 500 has surged to new highs. Venture capital funding for fintech startups is even more depressed–it fell more than 70% from $141 billion worldwide in 2021 to $39 billion in 2023, according to CB Insights. Both layoffs and fire sales have spread. 

Yet Forbes' new 2024 Fintech 50 list is packed with extraordinary entrepreneurs who have adapted and flourished in this environment. Three categories that primarily serve other businesses—Payments, Wall Street & Enterprise and Business to Business Banking–made the strongest showing, accounting for 27 of our 50 picks and seven of the 13 first-time honorees on this year’s list, Forbes ninth annual honor roll of the most innovative private businesses in fintech. 

Forbes Senior Editor, Jeff Kauflin, and reporter Emily Mason sat down in studio to break down this year's list and highlight some of its newcomers and trends.

Fintech's 50 Hottest Startups

Despite the industry’s funding woes, some startups–particularly those serving others business—are thriving. Here’s the Forbes Fintech 50 for 2024.

Get the details HERE.

Startups Are Shutting Down!

Big startups are shutting down. More than 3000 private venture backed startups failed in the last year. Of the startups raising money, 19% were funded at a lower valuation than in prior funding rounds. 38% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking last year and more than a quarter of a million workers at tech companies lost their jobs over the same period. US corporate bankruptcy filings closed out 2023 with the most filings since 2010. The year has been described as a mass extinction event for startups in the press.

VC Funding: Why Startups Are Failing to Raise Cash

After years of venture capital flowing freely into early-stage tech companies, investors are getting pickier.

That’s forcing founders to make tough decisions and causing more of them to shut down. 

WSJ Pro Venture Capital reporter Yuliya Chernova joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss the landscape for startup funding and what it's like to be a founder these days.

Silicon Valley Bailout

A number of things went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank over the last days, weeks and years, there were huge failures of risk management. The risk manager would have some tough questions to answer, except that it appears that they didn’t have a risk manager on staff for almost nine months of the last year. There were issues tied to the different regulations applied to community banks when compared to national banks in the United States. There were investment decisions that were made that are difficult to understand, and the final stroke was a capital raise attempt that had next no chance of succeeding. You can’t raise capital from investors on the same day that you announce a close to two-billion-dollar hole in your balance sheet and the equity is tanking in value. Anyhow, let’s go over the issues at Silicon Valley Bank, try and understand how banks work, look at the latest news (at date of publication), and try to imagine how things might work out going forward.