UK fintech funding round-up: Delio, Detected, Kolleno, Nosso, Strabo, & Yimba
Here’s a handy round-up of the recent funding endeavours of UK-based fintechs.
Delio, a start-up in Wales, has raised $8.3 million from Octopus Ventures and Maven Capital Partners (early backers), bringing the total equity funding raised by the firm to $15.5 million.
Delio’s technology digitises the private investment cycle from start to finish, thus playing “a central role in helping companies transform how they offer unlisted investment opportunities to their clients”.
Established in 2015, Delio has 90+ financial institutions worldwide on its client list, including Barclays, UBS and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank.
The latest investment will be used for the company’s further international expansion, it says, creating a “digital network that will connect capital raisers, financial institutions and investors on a global scale and share investment opportunities on an institution-to-institution basis”.
Know your business (KYB) specialist Detected has raised an additional £1.5 million in just three weeks, adding to the £2 million seeded in previous funding rounds.
Since its inception in mid-2020, London-based Detected has had three other funding rounds and several partnerships, including with Visa.
Among its earlier investors are Maropost Ventures, Huw Slater (COO of TravelPerk), Laurence Guy (founder and CEO of We Are Pentagon), Tink Taylor (founder and president of dotMailer and founder of dotDigital Group), Ed Hill (SVP EMEA of Bazaarvoice), Stephen Garland (chief technology and product officer of TrustPilot) and Rob Barnett (former COO at RBS and managing director at Southern Water).
The latest round was led by Love Ventures with its fintech advisor John Lunn (ex-PayPal and now CEO of cloud orchestration platform Gr4vy).
Detected says it “transforms KYB compliance into a competitive advantage”.
Its founder, Liam Chennells, noticed a significant gap in company data while working to transport cargo during the pandemic. He found it either very time-consuming or impossible to find reliable information. Shortly after, he founded Detected.
Using its unique “Find Company” algorithm, Detected can find and verify any registered company in the world, using just the company name and city. Companies can search and locate business credit, corporate and director information from around the globe in seconds. From there, ID verification, UBO information and company documentation can all be gathered and linked to the business’ profile.
The platform uses APIs so a business can plug in the software and add the infrastructure into its existing workflow.
Kolleno, a London-based start-up that specialises in accounts receivable (AR) management for SMEs, has attracted £4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Eurazeo and Stride, with participation from Euler Hermes, HubSpot and several angel investors including Michael Pennington, Mark Ransford and Will Neale.
Founded in 2020 by Dimitri Raziev, CEO (ex-Goldman Sachs and Fasanara Capital), and Ron Danenberg, CTO (ex-Expedia Group and Vatglobal), the company says it now has customers in the UK, Europe, the US, Canada and South Africa.
“Previously, businesses had to hire credit control specialists or give extra tasks to existing members of their team to manually monitor the payment dynamics of customers. An employee had to identify late payers, then prioritise, contact and follow up with individual clients to ensure late payments were received. This was not only time consuming, but also stressful for business owners and often prone to errors,” says Raziev.
“Kolleno has been designed to alleviate these challenges by automating manual legacy processes to eliminate errors, ensure that businesses get paid faster and improve cashflows for our clients, some of whom have reported greater than 90% recovery using our platform.”
Kolleno’s software also provides an open API integration with various ERP solutions (Xero, QuickBooks, Clio); utilises machine learning to automate and optimise the timing, method and delivery of client communications; and offers various efficiency improving features such as an actions board and payments portal to simplify the follow-up and receipt of payments.
London-based Nosso, a fintech helping parents invest and plan for their children’s financial futures, has raised £2.1 million in fresh capital. The round was led by Octopus Ventures and Anthemis with participation from additional investors, including Entrepreneur First, Ventures Together, Errol Damelin, Tracy Doree and Peter Hetherington.
“The financial services industry is dominated by single-user products, designed for individuals managing money on their own,” the start-up explains, but “more and more digitally native parents want a more collaborative approach to wealth management”.
Nosso addresses this by offering children investment accounts that two parents can track, manage and contribute to, together. The app also provides each user with a unique contribution link that they can share with anyone, so that other family and friends can contribute directly, with no additional paperwork or the need to open a Nosso account. They can also leave messages and pictures with their contributions.
Nosso was founded by Youssef Darwich (the second employee at the digital banking service Tide) and Sigurjon Isaksson (an early employee at Eigen Technologies) in 2020.
The company has been operating in beta over the last few months, working with a group of 1,000 families – 95% of which are investing for their children for the very first time – to hone and build out its product offering. The app is now live.
London-based Strabo, which claims to be “the world’s first personal cross-border wealth management platform”, has completed a €350,000 pre-seed funding round.
The round was led by SFC Capital, with participation from several angel investors.
Strabo says it is “committed to providing the most future-proof and user-friendly platform for users to get portfolio clarity in just one click”. Strabo’s dashboard provides live valuations, analytics and forecasting tools. It also plans to add new features, such as automated tax planning tools, in-app FX transfers and referral to financial advisory.
The company says it has already gone live with 10,000+ financial institutions across 12 countries since its inception in 2020. The full-scale launch is planned for this spring.
Chester-based fintech Yimba has received an investment of £500,000 from Maven Capital Partners.
Yimba has developed a digital wallet technology that allows banks to deliver personalised banking services to their consumers via mobile banking and payment wallet integrations.
The funding will enable the start-up to invest in product development and expand its team.
Yimba launched its product with Mastercard, Meawallet and Railsbank in Q3 2021 and says it “has quickly developed interest from Tier 1 and challenger bank organisations with a number expected to launch in 2022”.
The fintech says its software is easy to integrate, with “only three lines of code”.
Yimba’s management team comprises co-founder and CEO, Robert Dowd, who has previous experience as a senior manager and director at American Express, Barclaycard, Citibank and MBNA/Bank of America; co-founder and chief commercial officer, Lee Clarke, a serial entrepreneur who most recently was at Bink; and co-founder and chief product officer, Jonathan Allen, who previously worked at Morgan Stanley and MBNA.
