Participated · Equity · Jun 2021

Mollie is an Amsterdam-based payments startup that provides an API enabling businesses to integrate payments into sites, documents and services. The company has largely been profitable since its founding in 2004 and has experienced rapid growth during the pandemic. In 2021 Mollie is on track to process about €20 billion in payments, up from roughly €10 billion the year before, and serves about 120,000 monthly active merchants (versus 100,000 in 2020), adding 400–500 new customers daily. The company plans to accelerate growth by building adjacent services around payments, including working capital for small businesses, card issuing and corporate card programs, expense management and business banking, and by expanding beyond its core European markets. Mollie intends to focus on organic growth and significant hiring (planning to grow headcount from ~480 to just under 800) with investment in its commercial, product and engineering teams rather than relying on acquisitions. Management and investors see opportunity in a fragmented payments market and sustained shifts to online commerce. Mollie provides a simple, API-driven payments integration aimed primarily at small and medium businesses. It counts about 100,000 merchants, predominantly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and is on track to process more than €10 billion in transactions this year. The company reports overall transaction growth of 100% year-over-year, with Germany up 1,000%, and says it has been profitable for a number of years. Mollie differentiates via highly localized payment method support and quick, simple integrations that can boost conversion rates by roughly 7%. Management plans to build adjacent financial products for SMBs — including potential working capital, point-of-sale, card issuing and other banking services — to expand offerings and revenue. Founded in 2004 and long self-funded, Mollie has only recently begun raising outside capital to accelerate product development and international expansion.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2020

Tink is an open-banking platform that aggregates banks and financial services via APIs to enable integrations and payment initiation. The platform links 3,400 banks and covers some 250 million people, and has about 8,000 developers using its APIs. Tink processes around 1 million payment transactions per month across five markets and makes commission on transactions it routes. Customers mentioned include Kivra (4 million adults in Sweden) and payment fintech Lydia (over 5 million customers). The company has made three acquisitions (Instantor, Eurobits and OpenWrks) as part of its growth strategy and is live in numerous European markets with plans to expand to 10 markets in 2021. Tink has a post-money valuation of €680 million and has raised €175 million in total. Tink is a Swedish open-banking platform founded in 2012 that provides cloud-based infrastructure and data products to banks and fintechs. Its product suite includes Account Aggregation, Payment Initiation, Data Enrichment and Personal Finance Management for standalone services or integration into banking applications. The company says its technology has been integrated by leading European players including NatWest, ABN Amro, BNP Paribas Fortis and Klarna; partners also include Nordea and SEB. PayPal has made a strategic $11.2 million (10 million euro) investment and will also be a customer using Tink’s account aggregation technology. Tink stated the investment will support its expansion across Europe and help extend the reach of its open-banking technology. The company positions itself as providing the infrastructure and data services for the next generation of financial services. Tink began in 2013 in Sweden as a consumer finance app focused on bank account aggregation and has since repositioned to sell its technology to banks and financial service providers. Its platform exposes APIs across four pillars: Account Aggregation, Payment Initiation, Personal Finance Management and Data Enrichment. Tink's developer platform is launching in five new markets (U.K., Austria, Germany, Belgium and Spain), bringing total coverage to nine countries, and the company plans to reach 20 markets by the end of 2019. The firm recently opened a London office and intends to establish four more offices while roughly doubling headcount from 150 to about 300. Customers named in the article include SEB, ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas Fortis, Nordea and Klarna. Tink is a mobile app launched in Sweden in 2013 that aggregates bank accounts and credit cards to give users personal finance management (PFM) insights via a news‑feed style stream on iOS and Android. The product today is largely ‘read only,’ presenting spending habits and comparisons to services like Mint; the company says it plans to evolve into a full virtual bank by using new EU rules. The January EU Payment Service Directive (PSD2) will let Tink initiate payments and therefore support withdrawals and deposits across customers’ accounts. Tink reports 300,000 users in Sweden on Tink 1.0 and is running beta tests in 10 additional European markets ahead of international expansion later this year. The company also partners with banks to let users compare mortgage rates, savings accounts and credit cards across providers. SEB Venture Capital’s participation is strategic: SEB will integrate Tink’s PFM features into its own banking app and has become Tink’s fifth largest shareholder. Tink offers a mobile app (iOS and Android) that connects to users' bank accounts and credit cards to continuously collect, sort and analyze personal finance data. The app surfaces spending insights, budgets and “fun facts” in a news-feed style stream designed for quick, frequent use. It targets young, mobile users and reportedly resonates particularly with females in their early 20s. Tink launched in Sweden in September last year and claims over 200,000 users — more than 2% of Sweden’s population. The company plans to use new capital to expand internationally, further develop the product and increase head count. Management emphasizes a fully automated, feed-based UI as its competitive advantage versus other personal-finance apps.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2020

Klarna operates a payments and commerce network that serves more than 118 million consumers and works with over one million merchants, processing millions of transactions daily. The company leverages its regulated banking license as a strategic advantage to access funding structures used by established financial institutions. Klarna has pursued multiple Significant Risk Transfer transactions — the recent $1.7 billion deal is its sixth and largest — to optimize capital deployment and reduce risk-weighted assets. It also announced a $2 billion facility intended to support up to $17 billion of U.S. financing expansion. Combined, these funding initiatives are intended to enable Klarna to support over $40 billion in lending capacity. Klarna is using these capital-efficiency structures to scale its consumer credit offerings and expand lending, particularly in the United States.