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Building a Unified Payments Platform: Our Investment in ConnexPay
Building a Unified Payments Platform: Our Investment in ConnexPay
Following two years of lockdowns and travel restrictions brought by COVID-19, “revenge travel” has been sweeping the…
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Adam Hallquist reposted thisAdam Hallquist reposted thisToday, FTV Capital announced a $155 million investment in TabaPay. Below I explain more about our thesis and why we're thrilled to partner with Rodney Robinson, Manoj Verma and the entire TabaPay team. Cc: Robert Anderson, Adam Hallquist, Nicholas Tuzinkiewicz, Brandon EltejaeinPowering the Shift to Instant Money Movement: Why We Invested in TabaPayPowering the Shift to Instant Money Movement: Why We Invested in TabaPay
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Adam Hallquist reposted thisAdam Hallquist reposted thisThe market assumes the biggest AI winners will be the biggest companies. I don’t think that’s right. And I don’t think it will be AI-native startups either. In Crunchbase today, I argue that the companies who stand to gain the most from AI will be the scrappy middleweights. AI is shaking up the technology ecosystem, but no one should mistake size for an advantage. Heavyweight enterprises are often weighed down by technical debt, governance bottlenecks and 10 layers of approval for every initiative. The featherweights, AI-native startups, have speed but lack customer trust and domain depth. Middle-market growth companies sit in a sweet spot: they typically have real market position, proprietary data, embedded workflows and the organizational agility to move quickly and take advantage of AI experimentation. This means they can transform internal teams and offerings, and they are also well positioned to capture meaningful market share from other companies. At FTV Capital, we believe the winning middleweight technology companies have five attributes that reinforce each other: • Disciplined self-assessment • Agility • Workflow ownership • Technical capacity • A well-capitalized balance sheet Leaders of middleweight companies who want to win should have a coherent AI vision that they’re rallying their organizations around each day. The greatest pound-for-pound boxer of all time, Sugar Ray Robinson, was a middleweight who won not with brute force but with a kind of completeness: speed, footwork, tactical intelligence, stamina, all at once. That’s the sweet science of the AI era too: agility and depth beating size, every time. https://lnkd.in/eWj6ZnA3
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Adam Hallquist reposted thisAdam Hallquist reposted thisToday, FTV Capital announced our investment in COR. Here, I explain a bit more about our thesis and thinking behind the investment. Congratulations to Santi Bibiloni, José Gettas, Gabriel Marin and the entire COR team. We could not be more excited to partner with you!Getting to the COR of Agency Profitability: Why We Invested in CORGetting to the COR of Agency Profitability: Why We Invested in COR
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Adam Hallquist shared thisThe payments industry used AI and machine learning in production long before most people had heard of ChatGPT. But being early doesn't mean you are safe. So who actually wins? It’s not necessarily the first movers. Rather, it’s the companies with structural advantages that compound: proprietary transaction data, an embedded spot in the workflow, or the regulatory standing to operate at scale. In this short video, I’ve tried to capture my thoughts on where the biggest opportunities will be in the coming years. Three decades of investing in payments companies, and we've never been more excited about this space.
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Adam Hallquist shared thisA huge congratulations to my FTV Ascend colleagues Michael Cichowski Angus Wilson Kevin Zhang on the exciting new investment in Valitana!Adam Hallquist shared thisStructured credit is a $1.5T+ market, yet much of it still runs on fragmented data, spreadsheets and manual workflows. As complexity and volatility increase, the need for real-time analytics and modern, purpose-built technology is only growing. That’s why we’re excited to announce that FTV has led a significant growth investment in Valitana, a leading analytics, workflow and portfolio management platform for structured credit professionals. 👏 Serving more than 90 institutions globally, Valitana combines best-in-class deal analytics with a front-to-back trade and portfolio management platform that helps investors and managers analyze risk, improve decision-making and automate critical workflows. Our investment will support continued product innovation, deeper AI capabilities and expansion into adjacent areas of structured credit. Valitana represents our latest investment in capital markets and private markets technology, extending our experience in complex financial workflows through companies such as Enfusion, FundApps and Validus. We’re proud to support the Valitana team in this next phase of growth. 📰👇 Read the full press release in the comments. #fintech #capitalmarkets #structuredcredit #workflowautomation #PoweringGrowthTogether CC: Alex Belgrade, Thomas Majewski, Michael Cichowski, Angus Wilson, Kevin Zhang
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Adam Hallquist shared thisFew investment theses are as intuitive as this one: waste is bad, and someone will get paid to eliminate it. Alex Mason does a great job articulating why healthcare's back office is one of the most compelling places to look right now.Adam Hallquist shared thisInteresting problems often share three qualities: they’re large, persistent and technically solvable. Healthcare’s administrative waste problem checks all three boxes. In a new essay in MedCity News, FTV Partner Alex Mason makes the case that administrative inefficiency is the single most fixable driver of America's healthcare cost crisis. This year, as healthcare costs surpass groceries and rent as the single thing Americans worry about most, Alex argues it’s the perfect time to dig into healthcare’s broken infrastructure. Nearly every stakeholder in healthcare – payers, providers, self-insured employers – will have both a public mandate and economic pressure to act simultaneously. Where to start? Not with clinical AI solutions that regularly make headlines but with the ancient technology in healthcare’s back office: the billing systems, claims workflows, interoperability tools and records management platforms that process trillions of dollars but still require shocking amounts of manual labor. In this essay, Alex points to prior authorization and Release of Information (sharing medical records with approved parties) as two of the clearest areas for near-term wins. FTV has backed healthcare technology and services businesses for decades, investing nearly $700 million in companies focused on exactly this layer. The pattern holds: companies that tackle these problems, reducing friction for both providers and patients, will solve a problem that nearly all parties in healthcare should be motivated to fix. Read Alex's full analysis in the comments. 🔗👇 CC: Bipul Khadka Justin Levine Anshita Khandelwal Harrison Goodkind Matthew Loebel #growthinvesting #healthcaretechnology #healthcareAI #privateequity #PoweringGrowthTogether
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Adam Hallquist posted thisI’m excited to be a Partner at FTV Capital, joining Michael Cichowski, Alexander Malvone, and the rest of the the Ascend team as part of FTV Ascend I, a $651M fund focused on making $20 to $60 million investments in high-growth companies. I’ll continue to focus on vertical software, payments, and financial technology — sectors in which I’ve spent my career investing and building conviction. Over the years at FTV, I’ve had the opportunity to partner with exceptional founders and management teams across these markets. Ascend is a natural extension of that work, allowing me to engage even earlier with companies at a pivotal stage of growth. Last week, I visited a rapidly scaling vertical software company, and it reinforced why this stage is so energizing. Being in the room with founders and leadership teams while strategy is still taking shape, working through ideas on a whiteboard, and helping build disruptive platforms in emerging markets is exactly the kind of partnership I’m passionate about. I’m grateful for the opportunity and excited to continue working alongside ambitious teams who are redefining their industries.
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Adam Hallquist reposted thisAdam Hallquist reposted thisLast week Managing Partner Brad Bernstein and I had the pleasure of hosting FTV Capital’s inaugural Portfolio GTM Leadership Forum in Miami. I led a highly interactive discussion with the legendary John McMahon, where we leveraged John’s five-time CRO experience and board leadership, along with some key themes from his book “The Qualified Sales Leader.” Our topics included: - How to recruit and retain A-players - Understanding and optimizing the B2B sales process - How to perfect qualifying and sales forecasting - GTM leadership in scaling $100M + and beyond We also hosted Jack Freker, a five-time CEO, who led a thoughtful session providing insights on how to improve the CEO-CRO working relationship. Huge thank you to John and Jack as well as all our attendees, who came from Europe and cities all over North America for this event. I’m pleased we nailed the event’s goals: - Share and learn from one another - Learn and apply (2-3 things within the GTM leader’s companies) - Further build an FTV GTM Community - Have some fun! Lastly, a big congratulations to FTV’s Winner’s Circle GTM leaders Kenneth Shaun Rodgers, Joe Deklic and Haakon Blakstad for a blockbuster 2025 – let’s keep it rolling in 2026!
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Adam Hallquist reposted thisAdam Hallquist reposted thisThe green industry has long excelled at growing things. Now it’s entering a new growth phase itself. 🌿 Green companies, those 700,000 landscaping and arborist operations that transform our green spaces, are highly complex businesses that have slowly yet steadily adopted technology to gain efficiencies. That tech adoption cycle is accelerating after three major green-industry software brands have joined forces. FTV invested in SingleOps four years ago, then backed its merger with Landscape Management Network (LMN) two years later. Last fall, Granum united three brands – SingleOps, LMN and Greenius – under one umbrella, creating an end-to-end platform designed specifically for green businesses that supports everything from estimating and scheduling to budgeting and crew development. Granum’s CEO, Mark Sedgley, who started his career mowing lawns, says there’s never been a more exciting time to build for the green industry as a vertical. In our latest Think Forward, Mark discusses: → the biggest challenges facing the green sector → the strategy behind Granum’s three-company merger → why AI will be critical in a traditionally hands-on business 🔗👇 Check out our full interview in the comments. #PoweringGrowthTogether #innovation #growthequity #greenindustry #verticalsoftware CC: Robert Anderson, Payam Vadi, Andreas Katsis, Brandon Eltejaein
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisLightyear Capital's Jacobo Ochoa, Zach Lavin, and Brendan Lenhard will be attending InsureTech Connect Vegas 2026 from September 29 - October 1 in Las Vegas, NV. We hope to see you there!
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisGreat to have Chris Weekley of David Weekley Homes in our Fayetteville, AR office last week. David Weekley Homes is one of the largest private builders in the country, and the family has never sold shares to public shareholders. Instead they put a third of the company's ownership in the hands of employees and another third behind charitable causes. It is a remarkable story run by remarkable people! Chris, we're proud to call you a friend. Your intentional approach to building a business shows in the outcomes, and even more in the team around you. Patrick Clark Micky Pagel Patrick S. Tennant Ray Flores Erin Ternes #LandDevelopment #Homebuilding #PropTech
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisThe traditional professional services model has always linked growth to headcount. More people meant higher productivity and (ideally) higher revenue. But AI is shaking up that equation, creating a new set of rules for how work gets measured. In our latest In Focus interview, Alexander Malvone, FTV partner and co-lead of FTV Ascend, describes how AI's push into professional services means enterprises need a new control layer showing how people and AI are dividing work. He also discusses what that means for productivity and profitability. Alex points out that: → Wrong assumptions often underpin whether or not AI replaces humans → Traditional metrics for hours and utilization no longer capture the real value companies create → Perfecting the tech-enabled services company model, which blends human expertise with technology, is even more important as AI takes over a meaningful share of work 👇🔗 Read the full conversation at the link in comments. #FTVInFocus #PoweringGrowthTogether #AI #EnterpriseTechnology
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisThe hardest part of running a services business used to be managing headcount. Today we think the even harder part is managing headcount alongside AI and agents, and bringing all that together to understand the real profitability of projects. That's why earlier this year we backed the AI-powered project profitability platform COR, and it's why FTV Capital is so interested in a new control layer for the enterprise, one that paints a more accurate picture of how people and AI are dividing work. More thoughts on this in the interview below. https://lnkd.in/gZVdRhbq
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisExciting things happening in my world. Welcome to the world, Googlebook! https://googlebook.google/Googlebook: A Laptop Designed for Gemini IntelligenceGooglebook: A Laptop Designed for Gemini Intelligence
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisCongratulations to FTV Capital on its strategic growth investment in TabaPay, a leading money movement platform. We are proud to have advised FTV Capital on this transaction.
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisMost software companies have people using AI on their own, but few have built a team that runs on it. That gap was the focus of our recent webinar with Nick Olsen (Head of AI Innovation at Mainsail), Bill Simpson (CTO-in-Residence at Mainsail), and Michael Boord (President & COO at ServiceCore). Six takeaways for any leadership team trying to make the shift: 1. Model the behavior you want to see. Michael opens Claude and works problems live with his team instead of solving them the old way himself first. 2. Hold people accountable for what they submit. If someone hands you an 18-page document, read it and ask about the vague parts. That's the coaching moment. 3. Treat agents like hires. Before approving new headcount, require proof, backed by a real measurement period, that an AI-enabled workflow can't do the job. 4. Say your AI expectations out loud to your current team, not just in new job postings, and back that up with training and tooling. 5. Have the fear conversation one person at a time. For people who spent years building one specialized skill, what they're feeling is often closer to grief than anxiety. 6. Build a simple, team-specific fluency rubric. ServiceCore's five-level AI fluency rubric gives every team a specific target for what daily AI use should look like.
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Adam Hallquist liked thisAdam Hallquist liked thisLast week, we hosted our 5th Annual Big Sky Private Tech Summit, bringing together approximately 40 investors and 35 companies for 400 one-on-one meetings over the span of three days in Montana ⛰️🚵🚠🐴🤠 Thank you to everyone who made the trip out and made this summit another one for the books! Our last panel of the event, "Funding the Future: Investing in an AI-First Landscape" moderated by Greg Thomas, featured panelists Weston Gaddy of Radian Capital, Adam Hallquist of FTV Capital, and Aaron Darr of Lead Edge Capital. To receive key takeaways from our event, make sure you're signed up for our newsletters (https://dadvdsn.co/ECMTech) or leave your email in the comments below 👇 Rory McKinney Greg Thomas Aalap Merchant Amy Seach Johnson Zach Rosen Tim Meyer George "Toby" Albright, III Matt Cautero Brad Gevurtz Michael Maxworthy Tom Selby David Douglas Derek Heinonen Al Sisca Joseph Tamburello Jason Evezard Gianni Orlando Erik Paustenbaugh Saunder Saffran Shan Singh
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