Fintech outfit Curve closes £9.9m in record crowdfund

28 May 2021

Image: © bnenin/Stock.adobe.com

The campaign launched earlier this week and clocked in nearly £10m in less than three days from 12,000 investors.

Curve, the fintech company behind the ‘all-in-one’ payments card, has raised £9.9m in the largest equity crowdfunding raise on Crowdcube.

It is the London-based company’s latest foray into crowdfunding. It attracted nearly 12,000 investors in less than three days, with £6m raised in the first three hours of the campaign going live.

Curve, which allows customers to consolidate their various payment cards into one, raised $95m in January in a Series C round from IDC Ventures, Fuel Venture Capital and Vulcan Capital. This followed a $55m Series B round in 2019.

The company said the Crowdcube effort was to allow people to “follow in the footsteps of some of tech’s leading institutional investors”.

“Ever since our last crowdfund in 2019, our customers have been requesting another opportunity to take a share in Curve,” chief executive Shachar Bialick said.

“So we launched this campaign to give the public a chance to join us as we embark on the next stage of our exciting journey, when we reveal Curve Credit to the world and launch in the US.”

The funds from VCs and the crowd will be used to bolster operations on both sides of the Atlantic. The company is in the midst of a US expansion that will continue to be capital intensive, while it also seeks to reinforce its presence in the European market. It is preparing to launch Curve Credit, for breaking up payments into instalments, in the UK soon.

The company added that it plans to add 200 more employees this year.

Curve’s latest set of accounts, which cover the period of November 2018 to December 2019, showed that company’s losses quadrupled to £28.5m on revenue of £5.9m.

According to the company, it processed £2.6bn in transactions over the last year.

“As one of the lead investors in Curve, we’re ecstatic to see such a phenomenal response from its customers and community,” Bobby Aitkenhead, managing partner of IDC Ventures, said of the crowdfunding round.

“Digitalisation is stepping up pace globally, as is financial services fragmentation. Pioneering companies like Curve have huge potential to shape the future of finance.”

Jonathan Keane is a freelance business and technology journalist based in Dublin

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