Infinity Ventures, led by former PayPal Ventures executives Jeremy Jonker, Jay Ganatra, and Mario Ruiz has just recently announced its inaugural fund, with $159M dry powder. This fund aims to invest in founders building fintechs as well as commerce enablement infrastructure.
“Fintech has been proven to be the great enabler of our generation. At PayPal we saw firsthand how digital payments could transform businesses, communities, and most importantly, individuals’ lives,” explained Mario Ruiz, partner & co-founder at Infinity. “Our vision with Infinity Ventures is to expand the reach of commerce and fintech utility. To deliver on that, we are assembling a diverse team focused on global opportunities with the potential for the greatest impact.”
Striking out to apply decades of investing experience
The co-founding trio left Paypal as they wanted to expand beyond simply investing in payments-focused startups, not only backing payments infrastructure but also commerce enablers. The team expects to apply decades of operating & investing experience to de-risk strategy execution, accelerate scale and support product development as well as go-to-market strategies for its portfolio companies.
While at Paypal, the team oversaw investing deal volumes in the billions, bragging notable venture investments in companies such as Plaid, Paxos, Acorns, TaxBit, Toss, Happy Returns and Paidy, just to mention a few. The team furthermore led the transformational and impactful M&A transactions of Venmo, Braintree, Honey, Hyperwallet, Xoom, Swift Financial and iZettle. They also executed growth equity investments into companies such as MercadoLibre, GoJek, Pine Labs and Uber.
Investing as Infinity
Ever since its first close in June 2021, Infinity Ventures has gone on to fund eleven companies working on solutions which address some of the biggest hurdles in today’s financial infrastructure: access, utility, flexibility and cost. Addressing these issues presents a lucrative opportunity for VCs as fintech companies.
According to the World Bank, the financial services market currently accounts for $27Tn in global annual GDP. With the increasing proliferation of e-commerce and internet banking, fintech companies are increasingly acquiring capital to build the technology required to support the transformation. CBInsights data revealed that since 2021, nearly 170 fintechs have become unicorns, a rate 3.1x higher than in the past 15 years combined.
“Over the last decade the fintech industry has innovated consumer and business applications at a rapid pace, with intuitive design and sleek functionality that have been truly life-changing in terms of access, transparency and convenience,” stated Infinity’s co-founder and Partner Jeremy Jonker.
Infinity expects to participate in pre-Seed rounds through Series A rounds with initial cheques ranging from $500K to $8M. Some of its deployed capital investments since the firm began investing from the fund in the summer of 2021 include businesses spanning the U.S., Asia, Latin America, and Europe such as Mexican corporate spend management startup Mendel; Glean, which describes itself as “accounts payable with a brain”; and Neo.tax, a company that wants to help other companies get R&D tax credits.
“We see a massive opportunity investing in key infrastructure, making fintech apps and services more scalable and secure. Our team has the experience, and isn’t afraid to get our hands dirty helping founders build this core, underdeveloped layer, from negotiating contracts, formulating the product roadmap, and delivering on partnership and client opportunities,” added Infinity’s partner Jeremy Jonker.
Infinity Ventures will invest globally in approximately 25 companies, tackling worldwide problems, from this inaugural fund. The team also plans to recruit additional talent to support the investment efforts and portfolio companies’ needs.
