Participated · Series A · Feb 2022

Banked, founded in 2018 and based in London, provides a "Pay by Bank" service that lets shoppers select their bank at checkout and approve payments via their mobile banking app. The company uses open-banking APIs to process payments directly from users' accounts, positioning the service as faster and cheaper than card settlement. Banked has strategic partnerships and previously raised funding from Bank of America. The startup has about 100 staff and says it will grow the team as it expands its US presence in the coming months. Banked recently published a 21-slide pitch deck used to close its latest round. To date the company has raised just over $50 million. Banked is a London-based fintech that offers an alternative to traditional card schemes by enabling consumers to pay without entering financial data or creating an account. Authorizations are biometric, no financial details are shared, and merchants receive funds in real time. The platform embeds incentives and rewards inside the payment process to drive customer engagement and loyalty. Banked says its fees can be up to 90% lower than traditional payment methods and it aims to deliver cheaper payments, lower fraud and instant refunds. It competes with TrueLayer, Trustly and Volt but presents a more end-to-end experience rather than just rails and infrastructure. Financially, the company raised a £2.35M seed in 2020 and has now raised more than $30 million in total to date. Banked builds account-to-account payment software that uses open banking/PSD2 to initiate payments directly from a payee’s bank account, enabling near real-time settlement. The platform charges a single low processing fee of 0.1%, which it says is a fraction of the typical 1–4% market rate, and claims it can reduce fraud by about 96% because authentication is handled by customers' banks. Banked exited beta last month and targets use cases where cash flow and high processing fees are critical, including wallet top-ups, trading apps, car financing, charities, and high-value e-commerce. The company emphasizes empowering merchants to offer the payment option while leveraging consumers' trusted relationships with their banks. Longer term, Banked plans to move beyond payment initiation into checkout features, commercial relationships with banks, and partnerships around loyalty, insurance and other checkout services. Banked is a London-based fintech that raised £1.5m in seed funding led by Backed VC. The company will use the funds to continue developing its product and plans to release its first product in early 2019. Banked's platform connects people’s bank account data to third-party applications, allowing users to make informed decisions and enabling direct payments. Information is delivered via APIs and supported by consent flows. Launch features include bank account connections, spending analysis, balance and income verification, and low-cost payments. Banked is led by founder and CEO Brad Goodall and will continuously add a library of ready-to-use functions and actions.

Participated · Seed · May 2021

StudentFinance is a European fintech that funds educational programs via income share agreements, partnering with providers such as Ironhack and Le Wagon to finance upskilling into software development, cybersecurity and AI. The company uses AI models to discover in-demand skills by monitoring job listings, salary data and market changes, and maps those needs to suitable education providers. It is developing machine learning models to forecast future job-market demand and predict income levels, and plans to invest in internal data and AI capabilities through strategic hires. Revenue comes from ISA repayments (interest tied to alumni earnings) and fees charged to course providers for each student start. The platform and financing are available in Spain, Portugal and the U.K., and it provides a SaaS offering to partners in Germany and Finland; StudentFinance plans to expand its full service into Germany after receiving BaFin clearance. With the new funding the company aims to support its lending capital, operational costs and hiring to scale its product and data capabilities. StudentFinance.com builds the technology and data infrastructure to enable education providers to offer Income Share Agreements (ISAs) as an income-based deferred payment option. Its platform targets a range of providers from boot camps and certificate programs to Masters degrees. Founded in 2019 and launched in early 2020 by Mariano Kostelec, Marta Palmeiro, Sergio Pereira and Miguel Santo Amaro, the company operates across several European countries including Spain, Germany and Finland. It works with established schools and upskilling platforms such as Ironhack and Le Wagon and employs a team of 16 people. The company secured $5.3M (€4.5M) in seed funding to support growth. StudentFinance plans to use the funds to expand into the UK later this year and to triple its headcount, hiring specialists in product, data, engineering, design, operations, HR, finance and legal. StudentFinance is a Spanish fintech founded in 2019 that offers Income Share Agreement (ISA) financing, covering students’ tuition and recouping repayment as a fixed percentage of income once graduates earn above minimum wage. The company partners with schools, bootcamps and universities and is building a technological data infrastructure and platform to enable partners to offer ISAs. StudentFinance says the capital will help them support more than 500 students by 2020 and to scale ISAs across Europe. The startup positions itself at the intersection of fintech and edtech to address a reported digital talent gap, citing over 700,000 uncovered technology job vacancies in Europe. The founding team includes Mariano Kostelec, Marta Palmeiro, Sergio Pereia and Miguel Santo Amaro, who previously helped build Uniplaces. Financially, StudentFinance has raised an investment round of €1,150,000 to execute these plans.

Participated · Series A · Apr 2021

Gr4vy is a cloud-based IaaS payments platform led by founder and CEO John Lunn. Its no-code rules engine gives businesses access to 100+ payment methods and anti-fraud providers worldwide through a single integration. Merchants can personalize checkout experiences, create dynamic routing and retry rules, tokenize transactions, and migrate data between providers. The company is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, PSP-agnostic and offers dedicated cloud instances for resilience, redundancy and performance. Gr4vy will use the recent multi-million dollar investment from W23 to further growth within Australia and the APAC region. It has a multi-year partnership with Woolworths Group that powers the Wpay payment platform and has previously raised $27.2M in total funding. Gr4vy operates a cloud-native payment orchestration platform (POP) and offers Instances, a product that provides merchants infrastructure in the cloud. The startup launched in the U.S. last year and positions itself as a faster alternative to merchants building their own orchestration systems. Gr4vy has formed partnerships with GoCardless, Banked and Akoova to expand payment integrations. The company says the pandemic accelerated demand for online payment infrastructure and that its platform helps merchants manage increasingly complex digital payments. Financially, the business has raised multiple rounds culminating in a Series A and extension and reports a valuation that doubled to $115 million after the latest raise. Leadership emphasizes simplifying payment infrastructure for e-commerce merchants as a core go-to-market focus. Gr4vy is a cloud-native payments company offering a payment orchestration platform (POP) that merges a cloud platform with payments infrastructure. The product lets retailers run an instance of Gr4vy on the cloud provider of their choice—or in their own data center—to manage and route payments across providers and geographies. Gr4vy positions itself as payment-service-provider agnostic, enabling merchants to mix and match providers, payment methods and routing without vendor lock-in. The platform emphasizes reduced single-point-of-failure risk, edge deployments to reduce abandoned carts and stronger local compliance, plus centralized reporting, monitoring and management. Feature highlights called out in the article include a PCI1 Certified Gr4vy vault, a universal API, an easy modern checkout and a no-code admin. The company launched amid accelerating online commerce driven by the pandemic.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2018

Stream, founded in 2018 and formerly known as Wagestream, delivers a workplace finance platform that lets employees access earned wages early and use integrated tools for saving, budgeting, and financial planning. By partnering directly with employers, the company positions its services as low-cost alternatives to high-interest short-term credit products. Stream now works with more than 2,000 employer brands and serves about four million workers across the UK, Europe, and the United States. According to the company, members have collectively saved over $200 million by avoiding high-cost financial products. The platform has evolved to include savings pots, budgeting guidance, and affordable credit options, and Stream plans to add pensions next. Management intends to use new capital to deepen its product suite and accelerate U.S. and broader international expansion. To date, Stream has raised $228 million in total funding from a roster of more than 75 investors.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2018

SkinNinja is a skincare app led by Jo Osborne that aims to help consumers shop smarter by providing personalized, independent and evidence-based product information. The app matches expert evidence (including IARC and the World Allergy Organisation) to a database of over 200k ingredients across 800k products. Its core product is a searchable ingredient/product database that highlights contact allergens, carcinogens and other ingredient risks. The company plans to continue developing its proprietary technology stack and to invest in key hires. Sciapps is also focused on leading the expansion of its B2B business. The recent funding provides capital to support these product and commercial initiatives.