Raisin, the European fintech marketplace for savings and investment products, has raised €100 million ($114 million) in a series D round of funding from existing investors including PayPal, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Thrive Capital.
This takes the company’s total amount raised to €170 million ($195 million), and follows its €30 million ($34 million) series C round back in early 2017 and an undisclosed strategic investment from PayPal that December. Using these latest numbers, however, we can estimate that PayPal likely invested around €13 million ($15 million) in Raisin prior to this series D, though the startup would not confirm that figure.
Raisin d’être
Founded out of Berlin in 2012, Raisin leverages Europe’s banking regulations to allow anyone in the European Union to invest their money with any other bank in the bloc. Indeed, interest rates not only vary from bank to bank and product to product, but country to country — and that is Raisin’s raison d’être.
Initially, Raisin was only available to customers in its native Germany, but back in 2016 it expanded to create a Europe-wide savings marketplace that now spans 31 countries, allowing anyone to compare and contrast rates from different banks across the continent.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
Since its inception, Raisin said that it has brokered more than $11 billion in deposits across 62 partner banks, with around $90 million in interest doled out in the process.
“We want to break through unnecessary barriers to profitable saving and share the benefits of open markets — with both consumers and banks,” noted Raisin CEO and cofounder Tamaz Georgadze. “Our central aim is to give savers and financial institutions the ‘Schengen experience‘ for banking.”
Raisin’s raise comes hot on the heels of fellow German fintech startup N26, which raised $300 million last month to spearheads its push into the U.S. later this quarter. Indeed, Raisin and N26 are actually partners, with N26 offering its mobile banking customers access to Raisin’s savings directly through the N26 app.
With another $114 million in the bank, Raisin said that it plans to add more markets to its platform in 2019, while it will look to make more hires internationally and add more investment products to its arsenal.
So does this mean that Raisin will be following in N26’s footsteps and pursuing the U.S. market? If it does, it won’t be anytime soon. “Raisin is growing fast and is screening the market for growth options,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat. “So for this year we plan to grow within our core market: Europe.”
