Open banking platform TrueLayer recently landed $70 million in Series D funding.

The investment, which brings the London-based company’s total funding to $142 million, was led by Addition, with contributions from all major existing investors, as well as new investors including Visionaries Club, Surojit Chatterjee, Zack Kanter, Daniel Graf, and David Avgi.

TrueLayer’s mission is to open up finance with its open banking network that connects payments, data, and identity to help people spend, save, and transact more freely online.

The funding comes at a time of major growth in the open banking scene in the U.K. The nation has seen more than three million open banking users and if the growth curve continues, 60% of the U.K.’s population will be using open banking by the end of 2023.

Founded in 2016, TrueLayer now processes more than half of the open banking volume in the U.K., Ireland, and Spain. Much of this growth has come over the course of the past year during which time the company has grown by 600x and expanded across 12 markets.

As for what’s next, TrueLayer will launch new open banking capabilities this year. The company will also expand its network, which will in turn add more account connectivity for consumers.

“We believe that open banking is reaching maturity in several markets and the next phase is about solving bigger, more complex problems for our customers – layering value on top of the raw infrastructure,” said TrueLayer CEO and Co-Founder Francesco Simoneschi. “You’ll see us building more and more in this direction.”

TrueLayer’s clients number in the hundreds and include fintechs such as Revolut, Nutmeg, Trading 212, Stake, and Payoneer.

Here’s an idea: a corporate card that incentivizes spending less rather than rewarding you for spending more.

Ramp, a New York-based fintech launched by Eric Glyman, Gene Lee, and Karim Atiyeh, has raised $115 million in Series B funding to power this approach to business expense management. Taking Ramp’s total capital to $320 million, the investment gives the company a valuation of $1.6 billion.

“Co-founding a fintech unicorn was never my plan,” Ramp CEO Glyman wrote on the company’s blog in a funding announcement, “and almost feels crazy given my job 12 years ago was selling t-shirts and jeans.”

The round was led by D1 Capital Partners and Stripe. Joining them were Founders Fund, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Redpoint, and Box Group. Ramp also announced that it had received a $150 million line of debt financing from Goldman Sachs. “During our next phase of growth,” Glyman added, “we plan to expand our efforts to bring the value of Ramp to more businesses in more places and to transform the way more companies do business.”

Ramp offers a corporate card with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every transaction, 10x to 20x higher limits and no fees, and both smart virtual and physical cards with built-in spend management controls. An integration with Slack makes it easy for managers to get alerts, approve expenses in real-time, and respond to issues from within the business communication platform.

Ramp says that it has identified more than $10,000,000 in annualized savings for 1,000+ customers, with the average Ramp customer saving in excess of $100,000. Companies using Ramp’s spend management platform range from startups to corporations, and include technology innovators in their own right such as Clubhouse and Finovate alum Marqeta. The technology is integrated with popular accounting platforms such as Netsuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, QuickBooks, and more than 100 others.

Onboarding its first company in 2019 and launching publicly one year later, Ramp has experienced 4x growth over the past six months. Glyman said the company is approaching annualized transaction volume of more than $1 billion.

Photo by Joshua Welch from Pexels