Document artificial intelligence (AI) technology company Base64.ai last week raised $1.8 million in its first funding round. Long Journey Ventures and Data Community Fund led the investment.

New York City-based Base64.ai automates document identification, recognizing IDs, invoices, checks and forms in more than 60 languages. The platform leverages AI to translate any document into standard key-value pairs using a single API call with 99% accuracy, according to the announcement. The company uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to recognize text, data, tables, faces and signatures.

In keeping with its SOC-2 bank-level security compliance standards, Base64.ai offers scalable cloud and offline on-premise solutions, the company said. The streamlined automation solution supports all common file formats, such as images, PDFs, Word, Excel and ZIP files.

The company partners with robotic process automation (RPA) vendor UiPath and Microsoft.

Base64.ai said it will use the money to grow its product offering, sales and marketing. It also plans to expand operations in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Personal finance tool Acorns raises $300M to reach almost $2B valuation

Fintech Acorns announced that it raised $300M in series F funding on Wednesday. Lead investors were private investment firm TPG, BlackRock, Bain Capital Ventures and Galaxy Digital. This fund raise brings the company’s valuation to almost $2 billion.

Acorns is a savings and investment app that lets consumers round up purchases and automatically invest the change. Its pre-money valuation was $1.6 billion, according to Crunchbase.

The Irvine, Calif.-based company had planned to go public with a $2.2 billion special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with Pioneer Merger Corp. earlier this year but changed direction six weeks ago, according to reports.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan leads $275M for Lendable

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan made headlines this week for leading a $275 million funding round for U.K. fintech Lendable, bringing its valuation to $4.6 billion.

The London-based company’s technology platform connects global institutional investors with borrowers across all major products lines, including loans, credit cards and vehicle finance. The cash infusion will allow Lendable to develop new products and drive growth internationally, according to a release.

The pension plan made the investment through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, which was started to focus on late-stage venture and growth equity investments in technology companies across the U.S., Europe and Asia, according to reports.

Sibling-founded payment platform Stax raises $245M for $1B valuation

The software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based Stax payments platform announced Tuesday that it raised $245 in a series D funding round. The firm is led by sibling co-founders Suneera Madhani, CEO, and Sal Rehmetullah, president.

The fund raise was noteworthy for achieving unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation, as well as that “less than three percent of venture capital goes to minorities and less than one percent of venture capital goes to businesses with women of color CEOs,” the company said in a release.

Stax is a subscriptions-based payments processor that charges merchants a flat fee for both in-person and digital transactions, according to Fortune, which profiled the company’s CEO this week.

The company has grown 500% in the past three years and processed more than $23 billion in payments for 22,000 businesses nationwide. Investors for the series D included Greater Sum Ventures (GSV), HarbourVest Partners and Blue Star Innovation Partners. Rob Wechsler, founder and CEO of Blue Star, will join Stax’s board of directors.

Stax also raised a $2.2 million seed extension round for its app, which allows Africans to buy airtime, send and request money, and transfer funds between accounts via automated USSD codes, according to the company. U.S.-based VC firms World Within Ventures and Noemis Ventures co-led the round, joining Anthemis Group, Orange DAO, 500 Startups, Garuda Ventures and GAN Ventures on the cap table.

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