I’m writing this from Latvia, where I’m speaking this week at Baltic Fintech Days alongside founders and investors shaping the next generation of European fintech.

This week, I’ll share a guest dispatch from a Baltic-based writer before publishing my own full recap next week across Bear and the Bull and social media. I think US investors are still underestimating how much interesting infrastructure is emerging from this region.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Fitt’s “Health as an Operating System” report and how closely it overlaps with themes I’ve explored throughout this newsletter:

• wellness shifting from identity to infrastructure
• preventative care becoming embedded into daily life
• trust and access mattering more than optimization alone

Part of the reason I started Bear and the Bull was to build a living investment thesis in public. If you want to know what I spend time thinking about, where I think markets are headed, or what kinds of companies I’m drawn to, there’s now a year’s worth of writing across fintech, healthcare, infrastructure, consumer behavior, and global markets to look through.

That thematic work is increasingly informing what I’m building with Armada Ventures.

I’m interested in the infrastructure layer underneath these shifts: healthcare rails, preventative care, trust systems, experiential platforms, and AI-enabled coordination layers reshaping how people access and interact with services.

If you’re building in this area, investing in it, or interested in learning more about Armada, reach out.

A new section highlighting global rounds worth knowing

The big AI rounds are getting all the oxygen right now. These are not those. These are the infrastructure bets in regulated, overlooked markets that I think are more interesting to watch over the next decade.

Ebury | ~£550M | Cross-border payments | London / global

Santander's SME payments fintech secured a funding package led by Centerbridge Partners, with Santander retaining majority ownership and Vitruvian and 83North reinvesting. Ebury operates in 30 regulated markets, processes payments in over 140 currencies across 160 countries, and has grown revenues 30% per year since Santander came in. The cross-border payments layer for businesses doing real international trade is not a solved problem. This round confirms how much the infrastructure gap is still worth closing.

littlefish | $9.5M Series A | Merchant banking infrastructure | South Africa

The Johannesburg-based startup has built a merchant operating system that transforms acquiring banks into fintechs and small businesses into digital enterprises, integrating directly into POS devices and core banking systems at institutions including Standard Bank, FNB, and Absa.

Qover | $12M growth facility | Embedded insurance infrastructure | Belgium

The Brussels-based insurtech has crossed $100M in total funding and currently protects 15 million customers across 32 countries, with partners including Revolut, Mastercard, BMW, and Monzo.

Azos | $25M | Digital life insurance | Brazil

Brazil-based Azos secured $25M to expand its digital-first insurance offering in one of Latin America's most underpenetrated life insurance markets. Life insurance distribution in Brazil has historically been locked behind broker relationships and bank branch networks. Azos is building the direct-to-consumer infrastructure that bypasses both.

The through-line: capital flowing to regulated infrastructure in markets where the incumbents are too slow, too fragmented, or too expensive to serve the customer that actually exists.

Fitt Insider’s framing is correct: the wearable wars have moved from hardware to health OS.

But there's a hidden assumption baked into that framing. That is, that users are already in the ecosystem. Google Health, WHOOP clinical, Hims Labs AI: these are products built for people who were already engaged. They don't create access, but they do deepen the relationship.

The more interesting business problem, and the more durable investment thesis, is what happens in the layer below that. Not "how do we add AI coaching to the people who already have the ring," but "how do we get the ring, the care, the service, to the people who never thought it was for them." That's the work Oura, TwentyEight Health, and PetsVivo have each, in their own way, been doing.

Takeaway: The always-on health OS is a real trend, but its value compounds only for people already in the funnel. The larger commercial opportunity is removing the barriers to entry — in hardware, in care delivery, in hospitality — that keep the funnel narrow in the first place. Access architecture is not a charity story; it's a distribution strategy.

Oura raised $100M at a $2.55B valuation and now ships to over 100 countries.

Oura started as a recovery tool for male athletes and biohackers. Today, women are the majority of its users. They’re drawn to cycle tracking, readiness scores, and sleep features that treat hormonal fluctuation as meaningful signal rather than noise to be smoothed over.

That pivot happened because Oura built something useful enough that a different population than the one it originally targeted voted with their wallets. And then the company built the infrastructure to keep them. A $6/month subscription tier. A Dexcom glucose integration. Women's health features informed by research on how female bodies actually work. Retail distribution that brought the price within range for a much broader buyer.

Takeaway: Oura's most important design decision was building a subscription model that made continuous engagement affordable and a feature roadmap that took its actual users seriously. The hardware-to-platform transition works when you let your real customer base tell you what it needs. Oura accidentally discovered that building for recovery and readiness resonated more with women than the "performance tracker" category it launched into. The lesson for investors: sometimes the best PMF is found, not planned.

45% of American women seeking reproductive health services face significant barriers to care. 19 million live in contraceptive or maternity care deserts, which are places where the infrastructure that should exist simply doesn't. TwentyEight Health's response was to build a different kind of infrastructure: not clinics, but coverage.

TwentyEight operates across 43 states, covering 93% of American women. Half of its users earn less than $20,000 per year. Through Medicaid partnerships with Aetna, AmeriHealth, and Molina, it can often deliver care with a $0 copay and $0 prescription cost. Before joining the platform, 65% of its users did not have access to birth control.

Takeaway: The hardest thing to replicate in healthcare distribution is the payor relationships. TwentyEight spent the capital-intensive years building Medicaid and commercial insurance integrations that now function as a near-impenetrable distribution moat. Any competitor that wants to reach women under $20K in annual income has to run the same multi-year payor negotiation gauntlet. The $0 copay is a structural barrier to competitive entry. Investors should be pricing those payor rails, not just the TAM.

Here's where I want to slow down, because PetsVivo is the one on this list that most people would hear and think: "cute, but not really the same conversation." I want to push back on that instinct directly.

Luis Zamora, PetsVivo's founder, described his company's pitch dynamic to me in a way I haven't stopped thinking about since:

The access problem in pet-friendly hospitality is more about availability and information asymmetry than price. Pet owners, particularly those traveling with larger animals, multiple pets, or pets that aren't small and hypoallergenic, face a hospitality market built around a policy framework invented decades ago and never updated. The result: families willing to spend significantly more for pet-inclusive accommodations can't find them, or can't find trustworthy information about which properties actually mean it.

That's a marketplace problem with a platform solution. PetsVivo is building the infrastructure: the verification layer, the trust signals, the discovery experience, that lets pet-inclusive properties find the customers who have always been willing to pay a premium for them.

Takeaway: Hospitality's pet policy problem is a classic two-sided marketplace failure: the demand has always existed but the supply, verified, trustworthy pet-inclusive properties, is fragmented and hard to discover. PetsVivo's moat will be built not on technology but on the supply-side network. Once enough quality properties list and get reviewed, the data flywheel creates a trust signal that no new entrant can shortcut. Watch supply-side growth metrics more than demand-side. That's where the durable advantage either forms or doesn't.

Oura solved access through hardware pricing and a subscription layer that made the platform sticky. TwentyEight solved it through insurance infrastructure that turned payor relationships into distribution. PetsVivo is solving it through a marketplace that creates trust and discovery where both were missing.

Three different mechanisms. The same underlying insight: the people most underserved by existing markets are often willing to pay. They just need a product that fits their life, a price that fits their budget, or a trust signal that fits their risk tolerance. That's not a demographic bet. It's a product strategy.

The Fitt Insider framing of always-on care is right about the direction of travel. But that vision only lands for the people already inside the platform. The more interesting question, and the better long-term business, is who builds the ramp that gets the other 50% of the market into the building in the first place.

The companies worth watching in the next wave of consumer health and services aren't the ones adding features to customers who are already engaged. They're the ones building the infrastructure that brings a new population into the market. Access architecture, pricing, payor rails, trust signals, discovery, is the product, not a precondition to the product. When you find a company that has genuinely solved one of these structural access problems, the defensibility is high and the word-of-mouth is organic. Those businesses don't need to outspend incumbents on marketing. The access itself is the growth engine.

I’ll be mostly in LA next week with a detour to San Diego. Email me if you’d like to grab coffee!

Riga | 14 May | Baltic Fintech Days: I’ll be moderating a fireside chat with a prominent Latvian fintech, and sharing my recap in this newsletter + my social media platform.

Tallinn | 15 May - 17 May | Completing my Baltic travel trifecta

Amsterdam | 26 - 30 May | Say hi if you’re around for Unfold

🎧A new episode of Money Memories is live featuring Nicole Ingham, and it might be one of the funniest conversations we have recorded yet. We talked ambition, identity, career twists, and the money moments that shape us in ways we do not always realize at the time.

After recording in New Orleans, I am leaning further into the next chapter of Money Memories: more in-person conversations, more audience-submitted money memories, and more honest stories about the experiences that shape our financial lives long before spreadsheets and salaries enter the picture.

Excited to share the incredible guests and stories ahead.

👉 Listen on NPR, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts

📌Data Centers in Space: A Pipe Dream, or AI’s Next Big Thing?

📌 The clipping economy: How short-form video 'clippers' are overrunning the internet

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Till next week,
Ilona