How fintech startups are navigating the extension-round rush

As the fintech venture market goes, so goes the venture market itself. Why? Because fintech investment has historically made up around one-fifth of every venture dollar invested — at least in recent years. And after both fintech investing and venture capital itself went a bit bonkers last year, both are dealing with a new, more conservative reality.

For fintech startups, the downturn is real, and many upstart companies — we learned during our recent fintech investor survey — are looking to avoid de-novo rounds that include a new valuation (no one wants to raise a down round!). Therefore, extension rounds are an attractive option for many founders.

But as TechCrunch has reported, while extension rounds are popular even beyond fintech today, there are often more startups hunting for the round type than there are checks. So, to better understand the market for fintech extension rounds today, we have one more set of answers from a group of fintech venture investors we surveyed. Here’s the question we posed:

How popular are extension rounds proving? Are you seeing more companies opt to raise extensions rather than new rounds compared to, say, 2021 and 2020?

Eight investors answered: Paul Stamas of General Atlantic, Alda Leu Dennis of Initialized Capital, Michael Gilroy of Coatue, Justin Overdorff of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Addie Lerner of Avid Ventures, David Jegen of F-Prime Capital, Nik Milanović of The Fintech Fund, Jay Ganatra of Infinity Ventures. (Their answers have been lightly edited for clarity.)

Michael Gilroy, general partner and co-head of fintech, Coatue