| BUSINESS & WEALTH |
transform a smartphone into a card payments terminal. This year, the Swedish payments company raised £36.3m in a C round, taking its total investment to £63.6m. iZettle estimates that there are still ‘millions’ of businesses yet to accept card payments.
4. WorldRemit - £23.4m: Accel Partners
The World Bank estimates that the global remittance market is worth £303bn and WorldRemit CEO and founder Ishmail Ahmed expects the online money transfer sector to account for approximately 30 per cent of it in the next few years. The London-based business, which currently enables more than 1.3 million annualised remittance transactions, secured £23.4m, one of the largest ever Series A rounds achieved in Europe in March, and plans to quadruple its staff from 50 to 200 by the end of the year.
5. Kreditech - £32.1m:
Värde Partners, Blumberg Capital, Point Nine Capital, Kreos Capital The German credit-rating service for enterprise secured a £23.4m series-B funding round, the largest ever for a German FinTech company and one of the largest rounds in Germany in 2014. In January, it also secured £8.8m in debt financing from Kreos Capital. Kreditech offers micro-loans to consumers based on social and commerce data and claims to have approved more than 1.5 million individual loans within the 20 months to June this year.
6. Funding Circle - £65m: Index Ventures, Accel, Union Square and Ribbit Capital By June, the online lender had lent £100m to UK businesses in the first six months of 2014 alone, and in July the online lender raised an impressive £38m to take its total
Image by Dan Biddulph
Nutmeg offers portfolio management services to anyone with as little as £1,000 to invest and now has over 35,000 registered users
funding to £71.9m. The company also announced a pioneering partnership with Santander which would see the bank refer smaller business customers to Funding Circle, which in turn would direct SMEs to Santander when they require day-today relationship banking or other services such as international banking and cash management.
7. Nutmeg - £18.7m:
Armada Investment Group, Balderton, Charles Dunstone, Tim Draper, Schroders The UK-based online investment management business raised £18.7m, taking its total shareholder investment to £29.2m. Nutmeg offers portfolio management services to anyone with as little as £1,000 to invest and now has more than 35,000 registered users. Customer
THE CITY MAGAZINE | August 2014
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