With an aim to bring the bank to their customers, rather than send its customers to their bank, London-based Weavr, an online platform for creating, integrating, deploying, and running digital payment flows, has raised $4M (approx €3.3M) in its Seed round of funding.
The investors in this round include venture capital firms focused on the fintech and digital industries including Anthemis, QED Investors, and Seedcamp. Yann Ranchere, partner at Anthemis, and Yusuf Ozdalga, partner at QED Investors have both joined the Weavr board.
With this funding, the company has also announced the launch of its first suite of embedded banking tools designed specifically for the services sector.
About Weavr
Founded in late 2018 by Adrian Mizzi and Alex Mifsud, Weavr provides an open publicly-accessible cloud-based platform that connects payment networks and financial providers, and tools for innovators to define, deploy and consume digital payment flows.
It is an embedded banking provider that enables businesses to integrate financial services into their products. It claims that business of all sizes and industries, use its solution to issue and accept payments and to move money around the world.
According to the company, the platform relies on a proprietary technology stack to simplify and speed up the process of building, deploying and running complex payment solutions. The stack has been developed in collaboration with partners from the global card schemes, programme managers, card issuers, and startup accelerators.
Alex Mifsud, co-founder, and CEO of Weavr says, “The need for simple and accessible embedded banking products could not be more urgent. As the world starts to look beyond the Covid19 crisis and the possibilities stemming from lasting changes in consumer and business behaviour, embedded banking offers extraordinary potential for the future of work, the move away from cash, and the integration of financial services into all manner of digital businesses.”
Market overview
The digital transformation of services industries such as education, employment, and logistics have boosted after the Covid19 pandemic, according to the company, and services sold and delivered over digital channels are expected to hit $2.1T (approx €1761B) in 2020 globally – to grow at 17% CAGR over the next 3 years.
The company believes that innovators in the services sector are driving a radical new trend: embedding financial services into their digital applications. It predicts that financial services will increasingly be embedded into the process of buying and consuming other services.
As per Weavr, “Innovators face a formidable barrier of complexity and burden of compliance when looking to integrate financial services into their offerings. Weavr’s new embedded banking tools are specifically designed for such innovators, who want to be able to build, integrate, and run embedded banking solutions without specialist knowledge in financial services.
Earlier in February, the company had raised £500K (approx €560K) in funding. The round’s investors included Anthemis, Force Over Mass, and UFP Fintech. Financial services industry veterans Alan Morgan, former Head of McKinsey’s Financial Services Practice in EMEA, and Craig Dewar, co-founder of Global Processing Services, also supported the round as angel investors.
Image credit: Weavr