Recently, we saw that Amsterdam has been ranked among one of the top 20 fintech ecosystems by Startup Genome’s Global Ecosystem. The cities were ranked based on the performance of the startups, talent, focus, legacy, and funding rounds. This shows that the Amsterdam-based fintechs are growing and receiving funding to expand their footprint in the global market.
What’s interesting is that these fintech startups have not ceased to raise funding even during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left an impact on the global economy. Having said that, here we list the fintech startups in Amsterdam that secured investment in 2020 as sourced from Dealroom.
Finom
Founder/s: Konstantin Stiskin, Andrey Petrov, Oleg Laguta, Yakov Novikov
Founded year: 2019
Total Funding: €16.8M
Finom raised €6.5M seed funding in April this year from Target Global along with participation from General Catalyst and other investors including FJlabs, the Raisin founders Tamaz Georgadze, Frank Freund, and Michael Stephan as well as Ilya Kondrashov, the founder of MarketFinance. The company had plans to use this funding to develop its product and to expand further into Italy and France in the summers of 2020.
Following the investment round, in September, Finom raised an additional $12M (nearly €10.3M) funding as an extension to its previous €6.5M seed funding round. The investment came from Target Global, Avala Capital, Cogito Capital, Entrée Capital, Adfirst Ventures, Tal Capital, Raisin founders and FJ Labs. This investment was to be used to grow across Europe, extend its licensed activities, enter new European markets and for product development.
Since Fall 2020, the startup has been active in Germany and in France with the full banking product. While in Italy, it already has thousands of clients for the e-invoicing product. Banking will arrive in Italy in 2021.
Orderchamp
Founder/s: Ruud Stelder, Dennis Cuijpers
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: €3M
The Amsterdam-based online wholesale marketplace Orderchamp raised an undisclosed amount of funding. The investors include Stefan van den Berg (former owner and CEO AfterPay), Thomas Plantenga (CEO Vinted), and Zhong Xu (former Lightspeed and current CEO Deliverect) along with existing venture capital investor henQ. The company had plans to use this funding to expand its operations globally through the help of its new investors, who are industry experts.
Factris
Founder/s: Brian Reaves
Founded year: 2017
Total funding: €7.9M
Factris, a fintech company that buys unpaid invoices from businesses and provides instant capital closed €5M Series A funding in September this year. The investment round was led by AB Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Arab Bank along with participation from existing investors – Speedinvest and Optima Investments. Factris had intended to use the investment to continue its expansion and business reach.
Mollie
Founder/s: Adriaan Mol
Founded year: 2004
Total funding: €121M
Amsterdam-based payment services provider Mollie becomes a fintech unicorn after raising a whopping €90M in a Series B funding round. The funding round for the startup was led by TCV, a prominent growth equity investor focused on technology. As per the company, it caters to about 100,000 merchants across the continent and is expecting to process transaction volume worth over €10B this year and doubling it on a year-on-year basis.
Dusk Network
Founder/s: Emanuele Francioni, Mels Dees, Fulvio Venturelli
Founded year: 2018
Total funding: €840K
Amsterdam-based fintech Dusk Network is a company that offers innovative financial products and services in the blockchain ecosystem. In September, this year, the startup secured over €840,000 from iFinex Inc for its project of bringing new innovative technologies to the market.
The funding round for Dusk Network was led by iFinex Inc and the company invested over $1M (nearly €0.82M). With this funding round, the startup was poised to create a regulated Security Token exchange.
Being a privacy blockchain for financial applications, Dusk Networks aims to set a new standard for compliance, control and collaboration. The company was founded back in 2018 by tech entrepreneurs Emanuele Francioni and Fulvio Venturelli who joined forces with business experts Jelle Pol, Pascal Putman and Mels Dees. The company went public in the first half of 2019, after raising €7.4M in 2018.
Kinder
Founder/s: Mathys van Abbe
Founded year: 2016
Total funding: €2M
Amsterdam-based Kinder is a tech-for-good startup that thoroughly vets the performance of charitable organisations and allows donors to act instantly when confronted with the world’s problems. In this case, ‘vet’ means examining or checking. In other words, gathering information on an organisation to determine its soundness.
In August, this year, we reported that Kinder raised almost €500K in funding. The very next month, the startup raised an additional €525K in a funding round led by a group of angel investors. In fact, Mathys van Abbe, founder of Kinder, also joined the round. With this funding, Kinder has, so far, raised €2.1M to date
The company intended to use the funding to expand its global network as well as accelerate product development for innovative fundraising features including Kinder Appeals and Kinder Fundraiser platforms. These platforms would allow users to donate towards effectively solving society’s most urgent problems and organise fundraisers to maximise their support.
Payaut
Founder/s: Ernst Van Niekerk, Gillis Haasnoot
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: €3.7M
In December 2020, fintech startup Payaut announced that it raised €2.6M seed funding led by LocalGlobe along with Finch Capital, Global VC fund Entrée Capital. This investment comes after the €1M pre-seed investment it secured earlier this year from the same set of investors. The fresh investment will be used by Payaut to scale its payment service for online marketplaces. Also, it will focus on expanding its service to the rest of Europe.
Several notable angels from the fintech and payment industry, including Robert Kraal (ex-Adyen), former Mollie-CEO Gaston Aussems, Jan-Joost Rueb, and Onno Bakker (founders eBuddy), also participated in this round.
Cobase
Founder/s: Jorge Schafraad
Founded year: 2017
Total funding: €17.6M
In June, this year, Cobase raised a notable sum of €10M in Series A round from Nordic and French banks, who joined the main shareholder ING as its shareholders. The two new shareholders share the objective of becoming Cobase’s commercial partners. This investment was to be utilised by the company for further development of its offerings and expansion of its network and connected banks.
Cobase offers a one-stop, end-to-end solution for corporate customers who manage multiple bank accounts at various banks. The company’s offering provides access to all the various bank accounts via a unified single platform, making it extremely easy to manage them.
TerraPay
Founder/s: Viktor Stensson, Mikael Eliasson
Founded year: 2014
Total funding: €16.1M
In March this year, the Amsterdam-based fintech company TerraPay announced that a consortium of investors, including Prime Ventures, Partech Africa and management acquired the company for an undisclosed sum. In addition, the same investors, joined by IFC, invested €8.3M in TerraPay to fund the company’s expansion.
TerraPay, a company incubated by Comviva, the India-headquartered mobile solutions provider, provides Payment Infrastructure Services that help more people around the world to transfer money quickly, safely, and affordably. The company does this by enabling payment service providers such as banks, mobile money operators, money transfer operators or other payment providers to instantly connect to each other at a low cost. Since its start in 2015, TerraPay has acquired more than 25 licenses to operate in over 60 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe and is expanding globally.