Raisin’s founding team. Image: Raisin
Raisin plans to use this investment to prepare for the start-up’s 2020 launch in the US.
In February, fintech start-up Raisin amassed investment of $114m in Series D funding. Now, just a couple of months later, Raisin has received a top-up investment of €25m from investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.
The news was announced this morning (16 July) by Raisin.
Raisin’s product is a pan-European platform that allows European customers and SMEs to access a marketplace to invest in savings accounts around the EU that offer the best interest rates.
Raisin said its marketplace offers “access at no charge to attractive and guaranteed deposit products from all over Europe, as well as globally diversified, cost-effective ETF [exchange-traded fund] portfolios in cooperation with Vanguard and DAB BNP Paribas”.
As well as having distribution partnerships with N26, Commerzbank, Yolt and a number of other companies, Raisin’s marketplace offers more than 480 savings products from 80 European partner banks through its ‘deposits-as-a-service’ platform.
This model allows savers to find better deals and allows banks that need liquidity to access additional funding. Raisin then collects an undisclosed margin on deposits sourced through the platform, which is how the start-up makes money outside of investment.
Raisin has six country-specific savings platforms in Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Austria. FinTech50 recognised Raisin as one of Europe’s top five fintech companies in its most recent awards and the start-up has been backed by Index Ventures, Orange Digital Ventures, PayPal, Ribbit Capital and Thrive Capital.
In May 2019, Raisin announced plans to launch in the US and the start-up aims to use this funding to lay down the foundations before officially launching in the States in 2020. The start-up also plans to enter two new European markets by the end of this year.
When explaining why accessing the $12.7trn market in the US was the company’s next goal, co-founder and CFO Frank Freund said: “The deposit base in the United States is larger than in all of Europe combined.”
Raisin declined to give a valuation after receiving the investment, but told Reuters that Goldman’s resulting percentage shareholding would be in the low single digits, which leads Reuters to believe Raisin is now worth around €500m.
