It was a diverse week for investment in fintech automations, headlined by the largest-ever funding round targeting AI-driven tech from Asia. Here in the U.S., investors threw their support behind an intelligent document processing technology firm and an altruistic startup aiming to help millennials and others progress toward homeownership.

Advance Intelligence Group

In the biggest funding news this week, Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) tech startup Advance Intelligence Group closed a $400 million series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Warburg Pincus to raise its valuation to more than $2 billion.

Advance offers AI-powered financial products and services, including Asian buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform Atome. Among its other businesses are identity verification, fraud prevention and risk management platform provider ADVANCE.AI.

The tech company noted in a release that it plans to use the funding to fuel the growth of its BNPL and digital lending presence across Asia, deepen AI and big data analytics capabilities, expand enterprise client coverage and grow its global talent pool.

Advance’s vision “is an AI-powered and credit-enabled marketplace ecosystem driving both digital commerce and digital financial services across Asia,” co-founder, Chairman and CEO Jefferson Chen said.

Ocrolus

In the U.S., document automation platform provider Ocrolus raised $80 million in series C funding from Fin VC, Thomvest Ventures, FinTech Collective, Laconia, Cross River Bank and others, bringing its valuation to more than $500 million, the company said in a release.

Ocrolus has raised $127 million over six rounds, according to Crunchbase.

New York-based Ocrolus, founded in 2014, makes what it calls “human-in-the-loop” document recognition and processing technology that can analyze financial documents and supporting materials like bank statements, pay stubs and drivers’ licenses, harvesting their data to automatically populate back-end systems.

“Human-in-the-loop machine learning can be thought of as attended machine learning applied to unstructured content, ” Ocrolus Director of Strategy John Guerci wrote in a March 2020 blog post. “The model employs predictive modeling and valuation metrics with a defined feedback loop based on human supervision. [It] produces continuously better results and is a drastic improvement over static machine learning or post-process correction.”

Ocrolus works with financial services clients such as PayPal, Plaid, SoFi and Brex and said in its release that it plans to use the new funding “to more aggressively build products for the mortgage lending and banking industries and expand its U.S. operations.”

More specifically, the company said it has onboarded 75 new staffers this year and will “further ramp up hiring into 2022,” particularly for its machine learning and data science teams. Ocrolus also said it plans to open a new data quality control facility in Florida.

Bilt Rewards

One of entrepreneurial and activist organization Kairos HQ‘s companies, Bilt Rewards, raised $60 million this week in its third round of funding, attracting investments from Wells Fargo, Mastercard and real estate owners including Blackstone, AvalonBay Communities, Equity Residential, Morgan Properties, Starwood Capital Group.

Bilt secured the funding in less than 90 days from its June inception, bringing its total funding to $63.3 million, according to Crunchbase.

“What if paying rent could fund your next vacation? Gym class? Night out? New home?” reads the home page banner on Bilt’s website.

The Bilt Rewards program is available to tenants living in a network of more than 2 million rental units across the U.S. It includes the Bilt Mastercard, with no annual fee, 1x points up to 50,000 annually on rent payments, 2x points on travel, 3x points on dining and 1x points on other purchases.

In addition, in what the company called “a first of its kind,” Bilt will now pay members’ interest on their monthly points accumulation, based on the FDIC-published national savings rate.

Bilt stated in its release that it will use the funding to expand its real estate and loyalty partner networks and distribution channels, as well as open the Bilt Rewards platform and Bilt Mastercard “more widely to the public.”