Sheel Mohnot says the fintech market is ‘hot again’

“The fintech market is hot again,” said Sheel Mohnot, fintech investor and founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV). “And we are going to see some more exits in the near future.” According to recent reports, fintech funding is on the rise, with global investment hitting $60 billion in the first half of the year alone, marking a significant rebound from the previous year’s dip. Mohnot – whose X account you’ve likely come across if you follow fintech – has invested in over 100 deals throughout the years, primarily in fintech, and co-founded the accelerator program The Mint. On today’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Mary Ann Azevedo is catching up with Mohnot to discuss why he thinks fintech is “poised to have a lot of outcomes in the near future,” the potential of AI in fintech, particularly in accounting and underwriting, and highlights the impact of DeepSeek on the AI landscape. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Mohnot’s journey from founder to investor after co-founding companies like FeeFighters, which sold to Groupon in 2012. Who’s getting it right in 2025? Mohnot highlights players in the accounting automation space such as Basis, Layer, and InScope The optimistic outlook for fintech, with potential IPOs from companies like Chime, Klarna, and Stripe. How Sheel built his impressive online following, and what a Taco Bell metaverse wedding and Justin Bieber have to do with it. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Mary Ann Acevedo and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us hone in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. It's my first episode back after being away for a few months. I'm super excited to be back conducting interviews for Equity. And today, I'm especially excited to be talking to my friend and investor, Sheil. And Sheil, I should have asked you this before the recording.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  It's always tough. Manat, easy.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Sheel Manat, yes, thank you. Founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, fintech investor and startup founder. Sheel, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you on. How are you?

• 1:00Speaker 02

  I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, of course. So, last time I saw you was at Disrupt in 2022. I think we were sitting beside each other at one of those dinners. Yeah, so it's been a little while, but of course, we've talked plenty since then. We have lots to cover. We're going to talk about your very interesting background, what you're doing as an investor, and get your take on AI, among other things. So, let's start. You built and sold a company called Fee Fighters, which I love because I keep thinking of the band Foo Fighters.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  And that sold to Groupon in 2012 after only being around for about three years.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Kind of interesting. And then, is that when you became an investor after that?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I started investing my own capital after that, but I ended up starting another company in between called Innovative Auctions. So, it was Fee Fighters, Innovative Auctions, and then full-time investing. But I had a little bit of capital after the first exit of Fee Fighters. And so, I started doing some investing then.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  I see, okay. When did you actually co-found Better Tomorrow Ventures?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  That was at the end of 2019.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  So, five, a little over five years.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little over five years ago, exactly.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Right, so, over your career, would you say, how many deals have you invested in? Over 100?

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm happy that you didn't ask me for a specific number, but I think over 100 is a safe guess.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, I can think of plenty of funding rounds I've covered. We're Better Tomorrow Ventures has been an investor since you you do primarily invest in fintech out of your funds, right?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  That's right. The way we call it is we do invest in fintech, but we also think a lot more things are fintech than other people do. So as an example, we think about vertical SaaS as being fintech. And if you think about like the Toasts and Shopify's of the world, over 80% of their revenues are financial services. So we think of those as fintech companies. And then also B2B marketplaces, we think of as fintech companies too.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also, you all started an accelerator, right, called The Mint? How's that going?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  It's been great. We've had three cohorts so far. We are starting the fourth next month in New York City. The first three have all been in San Francisco, and now the fourth is going to be in New York. It's gone really well. We work with six to eight companies at a time, in person in our office, with a lot of programming and just support at the earliest stages of building a company, stuff that we wish we had when we were founders.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really cool. I want to get back to your investing strategy. But first, I'd like to talk about your social media strategy, because wow, it's impressive. You have over 151,000 followers on X. I follow your content. It's highly entertaining, and it is not always at all related to investing or fintech or any of that. It's just entertaining stuff to read. I think the appeal is you come across as very authentic, and people seem to like it. It seems to resonate. So how did that come about? How did you become kind of a social media star?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'm a star, but I I do enjoy it. So I first signed up for Twitter, I think, a long time ago, like 2006 or '07. But I really was not very active until the pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, I was active on Clubhouse, which, if you recall, was a voice-based social network.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yes, I remember Clubhouse, yes.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  And in the early days of the pandemic, I was so bored at home and I really found an amazing outlet on on Clubhouse and I became super active on there and ended up over time accumulated a crazy number of followers, I think like 3.3 million followers.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  What?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  But of course, it's not really that relevant anymore.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  That's crazy, though. Wow.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  So what happened was you would be talking to people on Clubhouse, but the only way to write to them was via Twitter because you signed on via Twitter and it had everyone's Twitter handle. So that naturally led to doing stuff on Twitter and more followers on Twitter. And then I ended up starting to just write and I found that I really liked it and I liked sharing ideas and getting feedback from people. And those were things that honestly I had done previously on Facebook. Like I was active on Facebook Blue, the OG Facebook.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  What would you say has been your most viral post over the years?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Oh, I have no idea what the actual answer is. Actually, I know my wife actually posted about herself being in a meme and I remember that got 250,000 likes. So basically, there's this meme of my wife at Folsom Street Fair with an expression on her face where she's like, how did I end up here? There are all these like gay guys in leather around her and she's just like a normal woman. And it's this like classic fish out of water meme that's like you see on the internet like every day.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I have to see this.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Totally happened randomly.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Crazy. You've got to share it with me.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  I will share with you.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  And I remember that getting 250,000 likes when she tweeted like, this is me. But the one of mine that I remember, and this could totally be wrong, I think it was in the midst of me seeing a lot of pitches for web three founders trying to solve some sort of problem that didn't really exist.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  I saw a video of a guy who had sliced the back wheel of his bicycle into two and made it still ridable. And I was like, why would you do this? It doesn't make any sense.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  So I captioned it like, web three founders solving problems that don't exist.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Ah, good analogy.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  It went wild, huh?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  I'll have to look up both these things.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  I'll send them to you.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Please, yeah. Also, on a personal level, you've made headlines for some interesting things. Your wedding in 2023, let's see, Taco Bell Metaverse. Tell us a little bit more about that.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Okay, so backstory, I got engaged in August of 2022. And we had like a pretty fun engagement story, which was a series of surprises, which I posted on Twitter. So I think a lot of people saw that I was engaged. And then Taco Bell had a contest that said, hey, we'd love to find one lucky couple to marry in the Metaverse. And a bunch of people, you know, I think saw that I was engaged and also knew that I liked Taco Bell and said, hey, Sheel, this is perfect for you. So people kept tagging me on the post from Taco Bell, saying like, Sheel, this is for you, this is for you. And I was thinking, okay, like, I do love Taco Bell, I am engaged, I would love Taco Bell to sponsor my wedding.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  I don't know about this Metaverse thing, but like, whatever, let's see what happens.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  So like you entered or how does that work? You applied?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  What you had to do was submit a two minute video of like the two of you talking about why you wanted to win this contest. So we were actually on a road trip, we were driving to Burning Man. And on the way, I brought it up to my wife and I was like, hey, wouldn't it be funny if we applied to this thing from Taco Bell? Just thinking, just like gauging her response. And she was like, hey, you know, to her credit, she said, it might be fun to create a two minute video. Like, why not? Let's try the video and then we won't actually submit it. This is what kind of what we decided. You know, we were on this road trip anyway, so I think we like came up with a script for a two minute video in literally like 15 minutes. And then we stopped at the next Taco Bell and filmed us.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  And I think we, we only, we did like two or three takes of it. So the whole thing was like half an hour of effort and we submitted it. I submitted it, actually, I should say. But I was thinking like, okay, they're not going to pick us. If they pick us, we don't have to say yes. And so then what happens is like a month later. Yeah, they picked us. And then we said, actually, no, like, we're not sure this is the right fit for us. And we had already started planning another wedding and all this other stuff. And then they said, you know what, why don't you just get into Zoom call with us? And we'll try to convince you. And so we got in a Zoom call with them with the great folks at Taco Bell. And they said, this is going to be your wedding, it's going to be customized to whatever you want. We'll bring in a celebrity that you want. And you're

• 9:18Speaker 02

  going to be part of the Taco Bell family for life. When they said Taco Bell family for life, I was sold.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. So here we are, members of the extended Taco Bell family. And it's been great.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, that is so funny, though. Another thing that I would have to try to look up after we're done here, if possible.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the video?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  I'll share that with you.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. Speaking of videos, you somehow ended up in a Justin Bieber video back in 2021. All right. How did that happen? Oh, my goodness.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Okay, so it started out, I was on this dating show during the pandemic called The Zoom Bachelor. So like, like The Bachelor, but at home on Zoom. It was really fun. It was actually The Zoom Bachelorette. So there were 12 men competing for the interests of this one lovely woman. And I did not win. But I think I got the audience's vote. And in the audience was Scooter Braun, who is or was Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande's manager. We ended up chatting on Clubhouse. And he said, hey, I had this on in the background while I'm editing this video. Why don't you submit a video to be on this video? And so

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I did. And he put me in.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  That is so funny. Wow. Okay, so you you were in the video, actually, another thing, adding to my list of things I get to view after we're done with this recording. So funny. So, wow. Now, let's back up a little bit to your social media strategy. One thing that I'm curious about, I know not all of your posts relate to investing or fintech. But I'm sure it's somehow impacted it. Can you talk a little bit about that? Has it helped you attract founders you may not have otherwise attracted or helped you win deals?

• 11:13Speaker 02

  So first of all, I would say like, I'm not doing it for those reasons. Like, I'm just having a good time and posting what I think is interesting and thought provoking and might get people to teach me something after the fact. But I do think it has been helpful. And I think the first time I realized it, I did not realize it for a very long time. The first time I realized it is I emailed a founder that I was really excited about. The company's called India Gold. It's based in India. What they do is they help folks who have a lot of gold at home, which is very common in India, by storing their gold securely for a low fee and then giving you a loan against your gold that's stored in their lockers.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  A pretty interesting idea that I was really into. So I reached out to them and I know a bunch of other investors have been reaching out too. But I reached out and they responded immediately and they said, I think we have the same workout regiment. And they were responding to a tweet I had posted that went viral, which was Shamat had posted

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I remember that.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Him with his shirt off.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And I was just making fun of myself and him.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  By posting a reply to it. So these guys were like, hey, we really like your style. Let's be in touch. And so we did and we ended up investing in the company.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  And you got the deal.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  And I thought, oh, wow, that's pretty powerful. Like, they know who I am.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  And it's gone on to be super valuable. And I think a lot of our portfolio companies will tell you that they have gotten benefits where a lot of inbound customers have come from just viewing the tweets or listening to a podcast or something like that. In some cases, top recruits have joined companies because they found out about the company through my Twitter.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  And so it's super valuable to a founder, like those things. If you can get people, customers and employees, that's like extremely, extremely valuable. I think it's super helpful.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  That's really interesting, though.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And then with the Mint, we try to cast a wide net and bring in people from all over who, you know, we might not have an easy connection to, apply to the Mint. You know, having that top of funnel of my 150,000 followers, I think really helps. And so each time we're getting more and more applicants to the Mint, now it's like in the thousands that we get, and we only choose like six or seven companies, but we want to make sure we don't miss any great companies. So it's great to have all these applications.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  That's really cool. Now, when it comes to Better Tomorrow Ventures, how many funds have you raised so far?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  We're investing out of our second fund now. We'll soon be investing out of our third fund.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Okay. So you're only a few years old. I know it may be too early to have a lot of exits, but have you had any so far?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have had some exits. What I'll say is in the early years, so exits in VC terms are DPI, which is dollars to paid in. Sort of DPI is the ratio of dollars to paid in capital. The way I like to think about it is in the first five, six years, the DPI is usually what we call bad DPI, which is companies sold, we got money, but it wasn't necessarily the outcome we'd hoped for, because the outcome we hoped for usually takes a lot longer to achieve.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  So we do have DPI, but it isn't super significant.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  But you anticipate some other types of exits in the coming years?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, the fintech market is hot again. We are going to see some more exits in the near future. We actually had an exit in Q4 of last year that was somewhat meaningful, and I think there's going to be a lot more coming. Yeah, the fintech world is, I think, pretty poised to have a lot of outcomes in the near future.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a roller coaster for sure over the past years in the fintech world, no doubt.

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• 15:48Speaker 01

  So when you say fintech's hot, again, what are you bullish about? Like, what do you think is really exciting happening in fintech right now?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  I think a lot of the stuff that we always believed in, which is the everything is fintech story persists today. So vertical SaaS and B2B marketplaces are becoming fintech companies. And there's a lot of opportunity to enable those folks. But I think a couple of areas that I'm particularly excited about. Number one, accounting, accounting in general. We have three companies behind this thesis. And the thesis is there's a big shortage of accountants in this country. It's a lot fewer people offer the major, there are fewer graduates, way fewer CPAs than ever before, and the CPAs are retiring. If you talk to the large accounting firms, they all say, yeah, we're facing a shortage. We need help. Help is coming in the form of technology. We have a few companies I mentioned.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  We have a company called Basis that sells into large accounting firms. And what they do is they're able to do a lot of the work that a junior accountant does with AI. We have a company called Layer that sells into vertical SaaS companies and plugs into your vertical SaaS like Toast, and then automates the accounting work and ultimately the bookkeeping work as well. And then we have a company called InScope that works with late-stage private companies and automates the audit process. So those are a few companies in that accounting thesis that we believe pretty strong in. Another thesis we have, there's software as a service. There's also now services as software. We have a bunch of companies that are primarily AI companies that are

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Replacing the tedious work that humans do with technology and doing a better job of it. I mentioned Basis as one of them in the accounting space. We have a company called Kaj that does it in the loan origination space. A company called Indy that does it in the mortgage loan officer assistant space. And so these companies are really taking the work of humans and totally automating it and doing a better job than humans could.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  I'll get back to AI in a minute. First, I want to touch on the accounting. So at the end of last year, an accounting startup called Bench shut down unexpectedly. Couple of days or a few days later, it got acquired by this company called employer.com. I won't get into all the details of that because it's a little complex. But that kind of put the accounting world in the spotlight. And a lot of people can debate what went wrong with Bench. But it sounds like what happened there doesn't seem to be impacting your overall views on the space as a whole.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  It's interesting. I think of Bench as really a accounting firm. It was a venture backed accounting firm. Like they had a bunch of humans doing accounting work. A problem with that is it's really hard to build like a venture scale business and continue to grow at venture scale. And so I believe I've heard from customers like they ended up cutting corners. Things didn't really go as people had wanted. So they had a bunch of challenges as a human powered accounting firm that scales by adding more people. With technology, we want to scale without necessarily adding more people. And that's the beauty of the types of businesses we invest in.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  So I think that's a big fundamental difference between these technology companies and an old school accounting firm is what I would say Bench was.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Okay, that's an interesting perspective. And then on the AI note, so yeah, lots we could unpack there. We don't have time to go over everything, but last week, of course, the big news that kind of dominated was DeepSeek. It was everywhere. Everybody's talking about it. OpenAI freaking out. What do you think? Is DeepSeek really this big threat? Or is it just a bunch of hype?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So first of all, there are a number of things to unpack within DeepSeek. One is it's from China. Another is that it's open source. And then another is it's supposedly done very cheaply. Now, open source, I think that is the most interesting fact, actually, is that they launched an open source product that is very good. It's not as good as the most up to date models from OpenAI, but it's as good as the last generation model, which is really good. I think we've always believed that the cost of inference, modeling costs, were going to come down. We weren't exactly sure how fast that would happen. We knew it was going to come down by an order of magnitude, so much so that for our AI companies, we never really asked,

• 20:18Speaker 02

  what is the margin here? Because we knew whatever the margin is today, it's going to be 10 times better a year from now and so on. I think we always knew that the costs were going to come down. But I think DeepSeek launching helped the costs come down pretty substantially.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And really quickly, right?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Really quickly. And OpenAI matched. And you know, you have a bit of a price worth at the foundational model level, which is great for our companies that are building on AI. It's phenomenal. It's the best thing you could possibly want. Their costs are just going down. So that's the open source piece. Then there's the like, okay, but it comes from China. And then number three, oh, it's so cheap. So on the cheap thing, I think people are overestimating, like what they said was the training cost for the V3 model, which is the previous generation model, were $6 million bucks. It's actually not that big of a deal. I think people were comparing the $6 million versus the billions that OpenAI are investing. But that's an apples to orange comparison.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  So training costs are a small portion of your overall costs. And the real thing, like you have a bunch of humans and it took you a long time to get to that final training piece. And so if it did indeed only cost some $6 million, it's actually not that big of a deal because OpenAI or Claude's equivalent training costs might have been less Than an order of magnitude more. Those models came out like seven to 10 months earlier. So it's actually not that big of a deal. Then there's a China question. And are they being honest with us about whether they have H one hundreds? Like H one hundreds are export restricted, theoretically not supposed to be in China. I think most people believe that DeepSeek does have H one hundreds.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  And it's pretty easy to see because if you look at Nvidia's quarterly reports, they talk about their sales since the export controls to China. They have an increasing number of sales to Singapore. And then they also say, although Singapore represents 22% of their revenue, the number of shipments to Singapore are de minimis. So like you have to assume that those shipments are getting to China. So I think they do have great chip technology. They made it clear that they are able to build AI models. There's a final question, which is, are they using distillations? Or are they using the work of OpenAI and Claude?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  And I think the answer is clearly yes, because you can ask DeepSeek questions about who it is. And once in a while, it'll say that it is OpenAI. So I think they're definitely cheating, so to speak. So that that makes it even more crazy to compare the costs between the two. Because if you're using the work that OpenAI has done, of course, it's going to be cheaper than if you didn't have that work to start work. Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, logically so. Interesting takes, indeed. In the fintech world, I bet you can relate to this. A lot of my pitches now include AI.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  In the subject line, right? Or in the the lead. And I think there's this perception that you're not going to get attention from reporters or investors if you don't mention AI. So then it becomes where you have to decide, okay, is this company truly using AI in a way that is innovative and unique? Or are they just saying it so they could try to get attention for being an AI powered company? So, I mean, would you agree with that? How do you wade through that?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Totally. There's so many companies that pitch us the same way that they pitch you. And they tell us that they're AI companies and you look and there's nothing AI about them or very little. I think very few companies are actually like AI companies. And then I think there are a lot more companies that are seeing tremendous value from AI but are not quote unquote AI companies. You know, we invest across the spectrum. I do think there's this perception that you need to be an AI company to capture attention. And I don't think that's true.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  I think it's just important to be honest about who you are and what you're doing.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  I'll be honest about that. Actually, if I see AI really prominently being pitched to me, it's almost a turn off. Because I'm thinking if you really have something amazing that you're building, you don't need to do that. You don't need to keep pushing AI on me to try to get me interested. So, you know, it's not necessarily going to always work, just FYI to the people out there listening.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Not always going to work. But do you think AI is really transforming things like underwriting, fraud detection?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  You know, stuff like that?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can give you some examples. So in the underwriting world, we have a company called Kaj, K A A J, that uses AI to help with SMB underwriting. What they do is pretty cool. It just automates the work of getting the documents back and forth from the SMBs. It's sort of like just simplifies small business lending overall. And what's cool about that is you might have previously, it might not have been profitable for you to underwrite a loan less than, say, $500,000 or $200,000. But now you're able to do it so much more cheaply and effectively than you can do a loan of $50,000. And if you think about what that unlocks for small businesses around the country, that's really powerful, making it cheaper for them to get loans.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  So I think that there are huge unlocks and we're already seeing the technology be better than humans at doing a lot of this work and it's only going to get better.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Now, last year was kind of a turbulent year in the fintech world. We saw Synapse implode. Lots of trickle down effect from that with so many startups that were impacted. There are customers that were impacted. I got a bunch of emails that made me very sad from people who, for example, their teens had put their savings in one of the digital banks that were a customer of Synapse.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  And they were telling me, oh, we lost, you know, $3,000 that he'd saved. Well, $3,000 doesn't seem like a lot to some founders or investors or whomever.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  But to this teenager, right? That's a lot of money.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Everything, yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, it was really, really sad to see. I feel like obviously some of that is still ongoing related to what's happening with Evolve. Not going to get into all of that right now, of course. But you mentioned, you know, fintech feeling hot again. What do you see for 2025? I think on my end, I agree with you that there does seem to be a little bit more of an optimistic take overall. There's a lot of IPOs that are possibly going to happen in the next year or two from a bunch of companies we've been waiting for, you know, to go public. There's Chime, there's Klarna, there's, I don't know about Stripe, but yeah, I mean, there's a bunch. So what do you think? What's going to happen in 2025 in the fintech world?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  If you look at like the public fintech companies, in 2021, they were riding high as ever. And then 22 and 23, they really overcorrected. It was like a whiplash where they overcorrected. And then now 2024 was good again. Like they had a pretty meteoric rise. And actually fintech companies beat the overall market pretty substantially in 2024.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  You mean publicly traded ones?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Public, yeah, publicly traded, yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  I think what we've seen from that is, okay, if the late-stage investors think about it from a public market comp perspective, like if this company went public, what would it be worth? And it was just really hard in 22 or 23. They would say, why would I invest in this late-stage private company? I can invest in the public company at a cheaper price.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  And now that those companies have, the prices have kind of normalized, it again makes sense for those late-stage investors to look at fintech companies and they say, oh, okay, well, this small Is actually quite good compared to some of the public markets. So that's just meant an overall interest in fintech again. We actually had a record number of financings in our portfolio in January. We had eight companies in our portfolio raise around. Nothing even close to that has happened before.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Really?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  And they all were like super successful, great investors. All that's great. And I think it's just investors are looking at fintech again.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, judging by my inbox, I would agree with you.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Looks like we are out of time, but this has been a blast, just like I knew it would. Chiel, thank you so much for joining us. So where can our listeners connect with you or find you online?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Probably the easiest way is Twitter X. I'm at Pitt Desi, P I T D E S I. And I'll echo Mary and this was super fun. Love to do it again sometime.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  It was. Thank you so much for joining us. And to our listeners, you can find me on X at Bay Area Rider and Equity at Equity Pod. So thank you again for listening. Talk to you next time. Bye bye.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.