Visa Ventures

New data privacy regulations have opened up space for a new wave of compliance-focused startups.

Digital Privacy Tools

Very Good Security (VGS) enables companies to offload the sensitive data they collect from consumers to VGS’s secure storage infrastructure. This liberates organizations from storing data on their own or setting up their own processes, thereby saving them from the repercussions of potential data breaches and making them compliant with relevant privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, etc. This makes VGS the only disruptor that acts as a custodian for sensitive data.&nbsp;The solution also aids in designing consent-gathering mechanisms, communicating with users concerning data collection, and allowing them to exercise their data subject rights.VGS’s platform enables organizations to securely take advantage of their sensitive data while residing on VGS servers. It achieves this by aliasing the data and making it unreadable by humans in the event of a data breach.Key customers and partnershipsThe company provides its solutions predominantly to the financial services sector and is backed by giants such as Visa and Goldman Sachs.&nbsp;

Democratizing financial technology with a suite of API-based solutions

FinTech Infrastructure

NovoPayment offers a multi-currency, multi-country, banking-as-a-service (BaaS) infrastructure platform for financial institutions, merchants, neobanks, and marketplaces. The infrastructure covers digital banking, payments (via Visa Direct, Mastercard Send, ACH, and SWIFT), and card solutions (to issue and manage prepaid, debit, and credit cards). The Miami-based company primarily focuses on the Latin American region and is present in 14 markets (as of April 2022). It generated around 85% of its revenue from the region as of September 2021, with the remainder coming from the US. Its revenue in 2021 reportedly amounted to “tens of USD millions.”NovoPayment is connected to over 60 endpoints (as of April 2022) and claims that users can build banking solutions in under a month, using the platform. The company’s customer base grew by 40% in 2021 and then reached about 50 customers in April 2022.NovoPayments <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9812?industryIds=53">raised USD 19 million in Series A funding </a>in April 2022 co-led by Fuel Venture Capital and IDC Ventures to invest in product development, broadening its partner network, expanding its customer base in the US and Latin America, and recruitment.

Buy Now, Pay Later

Behalf is a B2B BNPL platform that offers solutions for e-commerce transactions as well as invoice financing to SMEs. Merchants are charged a 2% commission on B2B transactions and late fees amount to 1.5% of the outstanding balance per month. The monthly fee for invoice financing ranges from 0% to 3% of the transaction value, based on purchasing limits and repayment terms. The platform also offers payout factoring for Amazon sellers, allowing them to access their payouts daily for a commission on net sales. Behalf claims its solutions allow B2B customers to increase average order values by 50%–80%. As of September 2021, Behalf had over 19,000 merchant partners and 95,000 business customers, and had facilitated over USD 1 billion in financing. Behalf’s partners include Visa (August 2018), Newegg (November 2020), and Lenovo (September 2021).In July 2021, Behalf raised USD 19 million in a funding round led by existing investors MissionOG, Viola Growth, and Vintage Investment Partners, with new investors Migdal Insurance and La Maison Partners also participating. Behalf also raised USD 100 million in debt funding from Ares Management Corporation. The fresh funds are expected to be funneled into product development and expansion of its merchant partner network.

Creating safer digital communities with AI vigilance

Automated Content Moderation

Hive is a project management software company that offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to streamline team collaboration and workflow management. The platform provides various features to visualize project scopes, track progress, and simplify stakeholder communication. Hive's interface includes multiple views such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, calendars, and portfolio overviews, allowing users to manage tasks and projects according to their preferences. The software also incorporates functionalities like forms for creative requests, document proofing and approval processes, and integrated chat for team communication. Hive emphasizes customization, offering a range of add-ons and integrations through Hive Apps to tailor the workspace to specific needs. The company positions itself as a cost-effective solution, providing a "no-risk Hive Adoption Guarantee" and offering discounts to registered non-profit organizations.
Key customers and partnerships
Hive's content moderation services, which utilize artificial intelligence to identify and block unwanted content, are used by prominent companies including Visa, Netflix, and Reddit. The company has also collaborated with corporations such as GE, Dell/EMC, eBay, and McKesson to co-create startups. Additionally, Hive has partnered with various corporations like IBM, SAP, Intuit, TIBCO, CSAA, Microsoft, Cloudera, and Visa as sponsors for its innovation ecosystem and thought leadership forum.

Since 2001, Volante has been focused on addressing the challenges of financial message integration and payments on-boarding, processing and orchestration. With a broad range of over 85 financial institutions and corporates as clients in 26 countries they provide the business agility needed to be competitive and thrive in the digital payments age by quickly dealing with the complexities of change, and taking advantage of business opportunities as they arise. All Volante products are born from a heritage of payments and financial message integration, and are rich with innovative functionality as a result of best practice driven R&D over the past 16 years. This means that their products coupled with their growing and maintained library of hundreds of international and domestic message standards plugins and transformations enable projects to be completed in months not years, or weeks not months, while insulating core systems from change.

NovoPayment accelerates financial innovation globally via API-enabled banking as a service platform. It enables digital financial and transactional services in support of varied use cases. NovoPayment utilizes APIs and other flexible delivery models to help banks, financial institutions, merchants, networks, marketplaces, neo banks, and other financial service providers to leverage their existing systems to generate new deposits, transaction streams, and customer experiences.

GoodData provides the platform and expertise for enterprises to create Smart Business Applications that harness your existing data to help you automate, recommend and take better business actions faster and with more reliability. They drive competitive value, performance, and profit by significantly enhancing the data-driven business processes across the enterprise and its business ecosystem by bringing analytics to the point-of-work. Their clients include enterprises like Penton that need to deliver revenue-generating data products to their clients and software companies like Zendesk that market their own Smart Business Applications using GoodData. It was founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Very Good Security provides a secure payment environment, tracks PCI, and optimizes payment services. They decouple and insulate customer systems and applications from sensitive data. Their security protects data in formats including pdfs, images, emails, and voice calls. They also provide card payment data security solutions in the markets. They design a solution that helps card payment issuers protect payment card industry data.

Hive is the leading provider of cloud-based AI solutions to understand, search, and generate content, and is trusted by hundreds of the world’s largest and most innovative organizations. The company empowers developers with a portfolio of best-in-class, pre-trained AI models, serving billions of customer API requests every month. Hive also offers turnkey software powered by proprietary AI models and datasets, unlocking breakthrough applications for critical business needs with deep learning and generative AI. Collectively, Hive’s technology is transforming approaches to platform integrity / content moderation (including AI-generated content detection), brand protection, sponsorship measurement, context-based ad targeting, and more. Hive has raised over $120M in capital from leading investors, including General Catalyst, 8VC, Glynn Capital, Bain & Company, Visa Ventures, and others. In April 2021, Hive announced a $50M Series D at a $2B valuation. The San Francisco-based company has 175+ full-time employees globally, in addition to a distributed workforce of more than 2.5 million global contributors that supports data labeling operations. For more information, visit thehive.ai or follow on LinkedIn.

Dock is a provider of modern financial technology infrastructure in Latin America. Dock unlocks business value, innovation, and scalability for its customers by integrating card issuing and core banking services on one comprehensive platform.  Dock’s modular solutions enable mission-critical processes that accelerate a company’s ability to bring new digital payments and banking services to market. The end result is a wider array of innovative products, greater consumer access to financial services, and improved customer experiences. Dock’s cloud-based platform reduces the operational and regulatory burden on clients while offering other valuable tools through its partner ecosystem.

Behalf offers automated payment solutions, including financing and net terms, to merchants and their customers. Behalf integrates seamlessly into a merchant's b2b sales and invoicing process or into an online checkout, and provides access to financing regardless of invoice or transaction size. Behalf pays merchants on day one, increasing sales and improving cash flow for both merchants and their business customers. To find out more about how Behalf is transforming the way businesses buy and sell, visit www.behalf.com.

Visa Ventures is the corporate venture investment function of Visa, Inc. With a global focus, the team engages with innovative payments, fintech, and technology companies and seeks to identify and invest in the most attractive opportunities that give Visa early access to innovative technologies and emerging themes.

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