CB Insights: fintech startups across the world raised $33.9B across 1,912 deals in 2019, which is down from $40.8B raised across 2,049 deals in 2018
Financial services startups raised less money in 2019 than they did in 2018 as VC firms looked to back late stage firms and focused on developing markets, a new report has revealed.
Context & Ripple Effects
CB Insights' 2019 tally captured a sector mid-contraction: fintech funding fell to $33.9B across 1,912 deals from $40.8B across 2,049 the year before, with VCs pulling dollars toward late-stage companies and toward developing markets. The follow-on coverage shows this was the trough of a cycle, not a trend line — global fintech funding went on to hit a record $131.5B in 2021 before collapsing again.
What makes the 2019 report durable is how precisely its two shifts — late-stage concentration and developing-market focus — reappear in every subsequent reading of the same dataset, from the 46% drop in 2022 to the Q1 2024 low.
First-order effects
- Early-stage fintech founders faced a thinner market in 2019: deal count fell while total dollars fell less, meaning average check size grew as capital concentrated in late-stage rounds.
- Developing-market fintechs gained relative share of investor attention as developed-market checks slowed, a shift the related coverage confirms persisted into 2020, when India overtook China in quarterly fintech funding [[a:953644]].
Second-order effects
- The late-stage tilt pushed pressure onto portfolio companies to reach scale or exit rather than raise another growth round — a dynamic that inverted violently in 2021, when funding more than tripled off the 2019 base.
- India consolidated its position as the developing-market battleground for fintech capital, though broader Indian startup funding still fell from $14.5B in 2019 to $9.3B in 2020 [[a:961518]], showing the regional focus did not shield it from the wider slowdown.
Third-order effects
- The 2019–2024 sequence forms a complete boom-bust cycle in CB Insights' own series: contraction in 2019, a record $131.5B peak in 2021, a 46% fall in 2022, and by Q1 2024 the lowest quarterly funding since 2017 [[a:862330]] — evidence that fintech venture activity is structurally cyclical, not secularly rising.
- In every downturn in the series, deal counts compress faster than dollar amounts, which structurally advantages fewer, larger, later-stage companies and squeezes the seed-stage pipeline that feeds the next cycle.
The trend: Fintech venture funding moves in multi-year concentration cycles — dollars retreat into late-stage and developing-market deals during contractions like 2019, then flood back — making each annual tally a phase marker rather than a trend line.