AXA Strategic Ventures Adds Mobile-First US Bank Bee to Its Portfolio | Let's Talk Payments

AXA Strategic Ventures (ASV), a global $250 million venture capital fund launched in February, focused on innovation in insurance and financial services, announced that it has added four new investments over the second half of 2015 to its portfolio in the US.

Source: AXA 

Among companies added to the portfolio are predictive analytics company PriceMethod, online stock picking firm GoldBean, marketing platform CoPromote and a mobile-first in-person US bank, Bee.

Bee was launched in New York in June and has over 3,200 clients. They will be operational in San Francisco and Oakland this month. Bee allows users to access their money anytime and anywhere. The mobile-first bank provides an opportunity to deposit checks, to perform a direct deposit, pay bills, mail a check, etc.

Source: Bee

ASV plans to continue a similar pace of investments in the coming year. Manish Agarwal, ASV US’s General Partner, commented in the official press release, “Our world is becoming more transparent, digitally enabled and customer centric. These developments are changing financial services and we are excited that our portfolio is helping shape this trend. Through these new companies, we want to capture innovation and invest in technologies that will tomorrow transform our industry.”

AXA Strategic Ventures invests in startups via seed funding and also provides venture capital for growth companies. The fund currently has offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Zurich and Berlin and will expand to the Asian market by opening a new office in Hong Kong later in 2016.

“Through AXA Strategic Ventures, we will leverage our global reach, capital and scale to serve as an accelerating force for start-up companies which have the potential to bring new approaches to the insurance model. We are aiming through this investment to better serve our customers and improve our daily interactions with them”, said Henri de Castries, Chairman and CEO of AXA.

AXA has already successfully seeded startups in Europe, with investments in five companies through the “AXA Seed Factory”, a seed fund launched in France in June 2013, which became a part of AXA SV. AXA SV will invest AXA Group money in various industries such as healthcare, peer-to-peer insurance, micro-insurance, data analytics,

via letstalkpayments.com