Every month, founders and investors close rounds that signal where capital is moving, and where the world is heading. March 2026 had a particularly wide spread: from an Uzbek super-app at a $2.3 billion valuation to a Swiss startup building kick stages for satellites. Here are the ten that stood out.
These are not necessarily the largest rounds of the month. They are the ones with an interesting market angle, an unusual investor thesis, or a structural innovation worth paying attention to.
1. Ualá — $195 million
Country/Region: Argentina (operates across Latin America)
Sector: Neobank / Embedded insurance
Round: Growth equity (Series F)
Founders: Pierpaolo Barbieri (Founder & CEO)
Lead investors: Allianz X (lead)
Why it caught our attention
Pierpaolo Barbieri founded Ualá in 2017 with a thesis rooted in his own experience of Argentina's 2001 financial crisis — that a reliable digital financial product could change how ordinary people relate to money. Nearly a decade later, Ualá is at a $3.2 billion valuation and doing something genuinely interesting: not just offering banking, but embedding insurance directly into the product.
This round deepens an existing strategic partnership with Allianz, with the two firms already having launched digital life and personal accident insurance products inside the Ualá app. The embedded insurance model is the structural signal worth paying attention to — distribution and product are built simultaneously, rather than sequenced.
2. Uzum — $131.5 million
Country/Region: Uzbekistan
Sector: Super-app / E-commerce / Digital banking
Round: Growth (pre-Series B)
Founders: Djasur Djumaev (Founder & CEO), Nikolay Seleznev (Co-founder, Chief Strategy)
Lead investors: Sovereign entities of the Sultanate of Oman (lead)
Why it caught our attention
Djasur Djumaev and Nikolay Seleznev built Uzum from zero to Uzbekistan's first tech unicorn in under four years. The country's challenges made the opportunity: 50% of adults had no bank account in 2020, and Islamic finance norms meant conventional credit products didn't work.
Their solution was a debit card with a pre-approved credit limit that is not framed as credit, which carries religious baggage, but as a debit experience that provides spending power when needed. Backed by Tencent, VR Capital, and now Oman's sovereign wealth funds, Uzum reaches 20 million users (more than half of Uzbekistan's adult population) and processed $11 billion in payment volume in 2025. The $2.3 billion valuation establishes a reference point ahead of a targeted $250–300 million pre-IPO raise.
3. Zeno — $25 million Series A
Country/Region: Kenya and Uganda (East Africa)
Sector: Electric mobility / Climate tech
Round: Series A
Founders: Michael Spencer (Co-founder & CEO)
Lead investors: Congruent Ventures (lead), Active Impact, Lowercarbon Ventures
Why it caught our attention
Michael Spencer's Zeno makes battery-swap electric motorbikes in East Africa – specifically targeting bodaboda operators, the motorbike taxi and cargo sector that is a cornerstone of transportation across the region. The Emara motorcycle offers 50% lower operating costs than internal combustion bikes, with over 800 bikes across four cities in Kenya and Uganda, 150+ swap stations, and a waitlist of 25,000 customers.
The battery-swap model is the key insight: rather than waiting hours to charge, riders swap batteries in under a minute. The $25 million Series A (comprising $20.5 million equity led by Congruent Ventures and $4.5 million debt) will accelerate production from 70–80 bikes per week toward fulfilling that demand.
4. Sistema.bio (FarmCarbon) — $53 million first close
Country/Region: Kenya / Global (35 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America)
Sector: Climate finance / Agtech / Carbon markets
Round: First close of a dedicated carbon finance vehicle
Founders: Alexander Eaton (CEO & Co-founder)
Lead investors: BNP Paribas Asset Management (lead), British International Investment, Shell Foundation
Why it caught our attention
This is the most structurally interesting raise of the month. Alexander Eaton did not raise a traditional equity round. He launched FarmCarbon which is a dedicated carbon finance vehicle, and closed its first $53 million tranche. The model: institutional investors fund biodigester deployment on smallholder farms, farmers receive the hardware at reduced cost in exchange for assigning carbon credit rights to the fund, and those credits are sold through long-term offtake agreements to corporate buyers.
The round will fund 90,000 biodigesters, expected to generate over 9 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions reductions over the next decade. The end customer cannot bear the full hardware cost, so the product becomes a blend of equipment financing and carbon monetisation. Carbon finance is the business model itself, not an afterthought.
5. littlefish — $9.5 million Series A
Country/Region: South Africa
Sector: Merchant infrastructure / B2B fintech
Round: Series A
Founders: Brandon Roberts (Co-founder & CEO), Neha Kumar (Co-founder)
Lead investors: Partech (lead, Matthieu Marchand, Principal), TLcom Capital, Flourish Ventures, Proparco
Why it caught our attention
Brandon Roberts and Neha Kumar co-founded littlefish in Johannesburg in 2021 with a counterintuitive thesis: the best way to serve Africa's small businesses is through the banks they already trust, not around them. The platform is a unified merchant operating system, POS, back-office CRM, merchant portals, payments, and API into one layer, sold as white-label SaaS to financial institutions, including Standard Bank, FNB, and Absa.
Monthly recurring revenue has grown 30x since the seed round. Partech's Matthieu Marchand described the business as having built an indispensable infrastructure that convinced Africa's most powerful financial institutions to stake their merchant businesses on it. Expansion is targeted across 10+ African markets, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
6. Silverflow — $40 million Series B
Country/Region: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Sector: Payment processing infrastructure
Round: Series B
Founders: Anne Willem de Vries (Co-founder & CEO), Robert Kraal (Co-founder), Paul Buying (Co-founder & CTO)
Lead investors: Picus Capital (lead), Coatue, Crane Venture Partners
Why it caught our attention
Anne Willem de Vries and her co-founders built Silverflow to replace legacy payment processing infrastructure with a cloud-native, API-first alternative. The target customer is any payment service provider or acquirer that was never dependent on the old rails — typically newer fintechs and financial institutions that want to own their data and process at lower cost. The company is processing close to one billion transactions annually and plans to use the Series B to grow from 85 to 120 employees, with expansion into Southeast Asia and North America. The New York office will be bolstered specifically as part of the US push.
7. KAST — $80 million Series A
Country/Region: Singapore (expanding to Latin America, North America, Middle East)
Sector: Stablecoins / Payments
Round: Series A
Founders: Raagulan Pathy (Founder & CEO) — former CEO of Circle Singapore
Lead investors: QED Investors (lead, Nigel Morris), Left Lane Capital (lead, Matthew Miller)
Why it caught our attention
Raagulan Pathy built KAST after leaving his role as Circle's Singapore CEO — which means he had a front-row seat to stablecoin infrastructure before building a consumer and business layer on top of it. KAST offers USD-denominated accounts and debit cards built on stablecoin rails, processing nearly $5 billion in annualised volume across one million users in 190+ countries in less than 18 months from launch.
The QED signal is the one worth paying attention to as Nigel Morris and QED are among the most disciplined fintech investors in the world, and their conviction on stablecoin payments as a mainstream financial layer is not casual. The $600 million valuation implies a $100 million annual revenue run rate target for 2026.
8. Wonderful — €129.3 million Series B
Country/Region: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Sector: Enterprise AI agents
Round: Series B
Founders: Bar Winkler (Co-founder & CEO), Roey Lalazar (Co-founder & CTO)
Lead investors: Insight Partners (lead), Index Ventures, IVP, Bessemer Venture Partners, Vine Ventures
Why it caught our attention
Bar Winkler and Roey Lalazar founded Wonderful in 2025 with a specific thesis: enterprise AI fails when it is US-centric, because the language, cultural norms, and regulatory requirements of every other market require genuinely local deployment. In eight months since emerging from stealth, Wonderful has scaled to 30+ countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, deploying production-grade agents for enterprises in telecom, financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare.
The Series B — following a $34M seed and $100M Series A — brings total funding to $284 million within a single year. Winkler is scaling headcount from 350 to 900 by year-end. The velocity here is genuinely unusual even by current AI standards.
9. Candela — €30 million
Country/Region: Stockholm, Sweden
Sector: Electric vessels / Maritime transport
Round: Growth
Founders: Gustav Hasselskog (Founder & CEO)
Lead investors: International Finance Corporation (IFC / World Bank Group), EQT Ventures, Ocean Zero, SEB Private Equity
Why it caught our attention
Gustav Hasselskog founded Candela in 2014 with a bet that hydrofoil technology, which are vessels that lift out of the water on underwater wings to eliminate drag, could make electric maritime transport commercially viable. Candela's hydrofoiling electric ferries are already operating commercial routes.
The World Bank's IFC, participating in this round, is the signal worth noting — the IFC funds companies where the development thesis is credible enough to attract a multilateral institution alongside commercial venture capital. Building a second factory in Poland is the immediate use of capital, alongside expanded production capacity. Maritime is one of the harder decarbonisation problems; Candela's approach is one of the more elegant engineering solutions to it.
10. PAVE Space — €34.4 million seed
Country/Region: Lausanne, Switzerland
Sector: Space mobility / Orbital transfer vehicles
Round: Seed
Founders: Julie Böhning (Co-founder & CEO), Jérémy Marciacq (Co-founder & CTO)
Lead investors: Visionaries Club (lead), Creandum (lead)
Why it caught our attention
Julie Böhning and Jérémy Marciacq are childhood friends and EPFL engineers who built their reputation leading the Gruyère Space Programme – Europe's first student reusable rocket initiative – on a budget of CHF 250,000. Now they are building PAVE Space, which solves a problem most people don't know exists: after a rocket launches a satellite, getting it from its initial orbit to its actual operational orbit takes months. PAVE's orbital transfer vehicles can do it in under 24 hours.
They have already secured eight reservation agreements with satellite operators and are scheduled for an in-space avionics demonstration on a SpaceX Transporter-18 rideshare in October 2026. The €34.4 million seed is one of the largest in the global space sector in recent years.
What March 2026 tells us about where capital is going
Three themes run across this month's list. First, infrastructure over applications, whether that is payment rails (Silverflow), stablecoin payments (KAST), merchant operating systems (littlefish), or space transport (PAVE Space), the capital is going to the layer underneath the product. Second, emerging markets are getting serious capital. Uzum in Uzbekistan and littlefish in South Africa are not footnotes to a Western-centric funding story; they are headline rounds backed by institutional investors with genuine long-term conviction. Third, climate finance is becoming structurally sophisticated. Sistema.bio's FarmCarbon model is institutional capital deployed through a purpose-built vehicle with ex-ante carbon ratings and long-term offtake agreements. That is a different category from a standard equity round.
For founders currently fundraising, the bar for investor materials has risen across all of these categories. Institutional investors, development finance institutions, and sovereign wealth funds each bring their own diligence requirements. Managing that process without a controlled, structured document environment is how rounds slow down.
Pitchwise gives you a secure data room for your fundraising materials – organised by stage, gated by NDA, with real-time visibility into who is engaging with what. Start free at app.pitchwise.se
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