In a round led by Group 11, banking app Lili has secured $55 million in Series B funding. The capital will help the New York-based fintech grow its product range over the next few months. This will include the addition of new features for invoice and payment management and a new loans product.

“We’ve created the tools you need to spend more time building your venture and less time on things that historically your employer would handle: sorting expenses, managing financials, and filing taxes,” Lili CEO and co-founder Lilac Bar David explained.

The Series B took the two-year old company’s total capital to $80 million. Also participating in the investment were Target Global and AltaIR.

Having doubled its account base over the past six months and currently boasting 200,000 users, Lili offers real-time expense management, tax preparation, and no-fee accounts designed for freelancers and gig economy workers. Lili also provides direct deposit and a Visa business debit card with free ATM withdrawals at more than 32,000 locations.

Named to the Forbes Next 1000 list for 2021, Bar David co-founded Lili having spent three years as CEO of Israeli challenger bank, Pepper. Along with current Lili CTO and co-founder Liran Zelkha, Bar David’s goal was to build a solution for workers in the freelance economy that combined banking and business management services into a single platform. She estimated that Lili has saved its users 60 hours on administrative tasks and $1,700 a year in fees, costs, and tax savings.

The 60 million freelancers in the U.S. – more than a third of the workforce – often struggle to secure timely payment for services rendered, accurately meet tax obligations, and manage their overall financial work/life balance. With the expectation that this relatively young cohort will only grow in size over time, investors like Group 11 see Lili as well-positioned to take advantage of this evolution in the “future of work.”

“Lilac and Liran’s forward-looking vision is changing how modern workers manage their finances, while saving them valuable time and money,” Group 11 founding partner Dovi Frances said during the company’s seed funding round announcement just under a year ago. “Lili is redefining banking for freelancers and we’re thrilled to be partnering with the team.”

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Self-proclaimed “financial super-app” Curve announced it will soon go live with a crowdfunding campaign.

The campaign, which will launch “sometime in May,” will be held on Crowdcube and will enable Curve’s more than two million customers to invest and be part of its journey. Curve will use the funds to fuel its launch into the U.S. market and help it to expand further into Europe.

“We know many new customers missed out on our 2019 crowdfunding, and we’ve fielded constant requests to open a new round,” said Curve Founder and CEO Shachar Bialick. “Since we place our customers at the heart of everything we do, we wanted to offer another chance for them to be involved in our success, enabling them to be part of our journey.”

Funds raised from the campaign will add to the $169 million Curve has raised since it was founded in 2015. This includes the company’s recent $103 million (£72.5 million) Series C round it closed in January which received contributions from Fuel Venture Capital.

“With increasing fragmentation in financial services, and growing demand from consumers for a simpler way to control and manage their finances, the scene is set for Curve to seize a global opportunity,” said Bialick. “We are investing in our people and the business to make that happen.”

This news follows Curve’s 2019 crowdfunding round, which raised $5.7 million (£4 million) in 42 minutes. The move tripled the company’s valuation. The announcement also comes after a year of growth during which Curve hired over 100 new employees, doubled its customer base to over two million, and saw its transaction volume increase to $3.7 billion (£2.6 billion).

Curve has big plans for 2021, including the launch of its crowdfunding campaign. This year, the company is also working on the rollout of its Curve Credit product and will increase its workforce by 60%, hiring 200 additional employees.

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Railz, an API developer that helps connect financial institutions and fintechs with their customers’ accounting information in real-time, has secured an investment of $12 million. The Series A round, led by Nyca Partners, takes the Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based company’s total funding to more than $15 million.

“While there are many players who focus on collecting data across various accounting packages, the challenge of understanding what the data actually means, and how to categorize it, continues to be a major hurdle for the users of this information,” Railz CEO Sohaib Zahid said. “Railz’s data normalization solution, coupled with our insights and analytics engine, is the secret sauce that can address this challenge – and tackle it more accurately and quickly than any other service offering in market.”

Also participating in the Series A were Vestigo Ventures, Susa Ventures, Plug and Play, N49P, Hack VC, Global Founders Capital, and Entrée Capital. The company plans to use the new capital to add more talent to its sales and engineering teams.

Railz offers a single API that integrates with all major, SME-oriented accounting platforms to enable on-demand access to financial transactions, analytics, and insights. The fast, low-cost, accounting-data-as-a-service solution gives small businesses the ability to be better served by financial institutions by giving them an easier, less cumbersome way to share their critical financial information.

“Businesses use accounting software as a single source of truth to record the financial health of their company,” Nyca Partner Jeremy Solomon said. “Sharing this data with another party is currently a manual process that is slow, expensive, and error-prone.”

With just a few lines of code, Railz claims that it can get customers up and running with its technology in less than a day. The company’s real-time financial analytics and insights offer risk scoring and fraud identification, in addition to standardized accounting entries that use a universal format for easier modeling and reporting. Founded in the summer of 2020, Railz says its customers have benefitted from up to a 53% reduction in costs and a 75% reduction in fraud.

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