While some European fintech companies are worried Brexit will stifle the tech industry, London-based Revolut’s latest news indicates there’s still room for growth. The company, which offers a multicurrency-payments platform, closed on $8.7 million (£6.8 million) from big-name investors and has a goal to pull in more through a public crowdfunding campaign.
Investors include Ribbit Capital along with existing contributors Balderton Capital, Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital, Venrex and Seedcamp. Today’s Series A round brings the company’s total funding to $13.2 million since it was founded in 2013. According to Business Insider, the company is now valued at $54 million (£42 million).
Revolut is offering the public an opportunity to invest by launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise another $1.3 million (£1 million) hosted on Crowdcube, where investors can participate with as little as £10. Starting today, Revolut is inviting the most active of its 200,000 users to preregister. Others will be able to register when the campaign opens in a week. According to the company’s pitch site on Crowdcube:
Revolut will be inviting people to invest based on the number of contacts in their Revolut contact book. People with the most contacts will be granted priority access by Revolut from Wednesday 20th, 24 hours before the pitch is available to the public.
At press time the company has already far exceeded its $1.3 million goal; 4,832 people have committed to invest more than $11.7 million (£8.5 million).
The Revolut app, combined with a prepaid MasterCard, lets users load money from the bank account in their domestic currency and spend it in 90 different currencies across the globe, including bitcoin, at the interbank rate. The company is seeing more than 1,500 new customers register each day. Since the platform went live about a year ago, users have transferred more than $500 million on its cards. Here’s a look at the growth:
Revolut debuted at FinovateEurope 2015 in London. Revolut’s CEO and founder Nikolay Storonsky began working on the idea after his bank charged him $2,000 in fees after spending $12,000 while traveling abroad. “That is why we built Revolut,” Storonsky said during the demo. “It allows you to exchange, send, and spend your money, completely avoiding all your banking fees without actually using a bank.”
CEO Nikolay Storonsky, founder, and CTO Vlad Yatsenko debuted Revolut at FinovateEurope 2015 in London.
In May of this year, Revolut received an e-money license from the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority to bolster currency exchange functionality in the app. Post-Brexit, the company anticipates it will receive passporting rights from the E.U. to use the license in other countries. If the license falls through, CEO Storonsky tells Business Insider, “We’ll just set up … an office in Berlin and get licensed there.”
