News from the Wire

Weavr closes $40M Series A funding for plug-and-play finance

Tuesday, February 22, 2022 — 14:55:27 (EST)

LONDON (22 Feb, 2022) - Weavr, a London-headquartered technology provider that enables businesses with Plug-and-Play financial solutions, today announced the close of a $40 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. The company is disrupting the current banking-as-a-service (BaaS) model -- which can serve only a limited audience because of its heavy costs, compliance and technical burdens as well as long implementation times--by making embedded financial services available to any business with a digital presence. The financing will support Weavr’s international expansion plans, beginning with an official U.S. market launch and including continued growth in the UK and Europe.

Since introducing its embedded finance platform in late 2020, Weavr has experienced fast adoption of its payment and banking solutions among a range of businesses and industries. This series, which includes participation from Mubadala Capital, LocalGlobe’s growth stage Latitude fund and previous Weavr backers QED Investors, Anthemis and Seedcamp, marks the company’s third funding round in 18 months for a total of $55 million. Building on the strong momentum of client integration and overall company growth, Weavr is launching its strategic international expansion plans with business development and recruitment efforts in the U.S. market.

"We believe an increasingly digital world works better when financial services are provided seamlessly within digital applications. Plug-and-Play Finance is the fastest, easiest and most efficient way for businesses to accomplish this,” said Alex Mifsud, co-founder and CEO of Weavr. "In the past, industry disruptors, like Uber and Amazon, had no choice but to build their finance integrations from the ground up in what was a costly, complex and time-consuming process. Weavr shortens the time to launch embedded financial solutions from many months, or years, down to weeks or even days, while eliminating the hassle of managing compliance and data security.” Mifsud continued, “this level of simplicity makes it possible for rapidly digitizing sectors such as health, education, logistics, HR-management and real estate to effortlessly incorporate sophisticated finance offerings in their existing properties."

Unlike traditional BaaS solutions, which offer a selection of APIs that require clients to invest in time-consuming and technically intensive integrations, Plug-and-Play Finance preconfigures APIs into sophisticated, tailored embedded finance solutions clients deploy out of the box without needing to master—or even concern themselves with—the back-end technology powering them. The Weavr platform provides everything a business needs to integrate financial services seamlessly into its mobile apps, SaaS applications and other digital properties. Weavr’s Plug-and-Play model eliminates the cost and burden of multiple vendor relationships, simplifies compliance, shortens the runway for integration and empowers businesses of all kinds to go to market swiftly and safely.

Weavr’s solutions are also extensible, meaning that customers can add more financial services as their businesses grow, and even add financial providers to power them in new geographies. Unlike other platforms, the Plug-and-Play technology is open to connect to financial-services providers and vendors in multiple geographies across continents.

“Weavr has a clear vision for delivering frictionless embedded financial solutions that allow clients to focus on their core business,” said Alex Cook, Partner, Tiger Global. “We are excited to partner with Weavr as they embark on international expansion and continue to build the platform for developer-first financial services."

What Weavr’s Customers are Saying

“When we were looking for an embedded finance provider, we weren’t just buying a service. Instead, we were looking for a partner with whom we could work long term. Besides issuing both physical and virtual cards, we loved Weavr’s outlook of what we can do regarding the product in the future. We were already thinking about other products, so it was important that Weavr was thinking the same and not limited to the current offering. This partnership was very important for our sustained growth.” - Csaba Kruemmer, co-founder and managing director, finway

“Our goal was to create a super app that was agile, innovative and secure. But we needed to find the right mix of trusted partners who gave us the freedom to design and bring winning payment propositions to our members and customers with unmatched speed. Weavr were the first to really grasp what we wanted to achieve and were quick to partner with us. Their model was the most suitable to be selected as a cornerstone of our project and they have worked tirelessly to deliver a world class solution.” - James Séne, chairman, 11Onze

“Thanks to Weavr’s pre-approved payment models, their time-to-market cannot be beaten. Coupled with the quality of support we have received and the flexibility of the solution, for a young company who needs to get a product out quickly, there is no better solution in the UK.” – Sebastian Fallert, CEO and co-founder, Thanks Ben


About Weavr:

Weavr is the leading open platform for embedded finance for the digital economy. Founded in 2019, Weavr’s mission is to enable any business to integrate any financial service anywhere its customers need it. The company is backed by Tiger Global, QED Investors, Anthemis, Mubadala, Latitude, Headline, Seedcamp, Force Over Mass Capital and UFP Fintech. Weavr has been recognized with various fintech industry awards and rankings, including BusinessCloud ‘50 Most Innovative UK Financial Technology Firms’ in October 2021. Weavr is headquartered in London. For more information, please visit www.weavr.io.

About Tiger Global:

Tiger Global is an investment firm focused on private and public companies in the internet, software, and financial technology sectors. Since 2001, Tiger Global has invested in hundreds of companies across more than 30 countries, including investments ranging from Series A to pre-IPO. The firm aims to partner with dynamic entrepreneurs operating market-leading companies in its core focus areas. Tiger Global's investments have included JD.com, UiPath, Stripe, Databricks, Bytedance, Snowflake, Facebook, Alibaba, Procore, Chime, Blend, Peloton, Attentive, LinkedIn, Flipkart, and Toast.

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Source: Company press release.