The London and Warsaw-based FinTech Billon has topped up its accounts with a £2m cash injection supported by the Future Fund scheme, which matched the £1m invested by angel investors and VCs.
As part of the deal, Billon has the opportunity to attract additional private investments for up to £500,000 by the end of October 2020, with all investments in the form of convertible loan notes.
“The Future Fund agreement allows Billon to stay focused on helping clients pursue digital transformation and new business models for a world changed by the pandemic,” said Wojtek Kostrzewa, CEO of Billon. “I am very grateful to our investors and the Future Fund for an immediate and positive response at the height of this crisis.”
The Future Fund was established by the UK government in April 2020 to support startups and innovative companies who feel the squeeze from the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent economic downturn. The programme requires private sector lead investment, with the government contributing by matching the investments. So far, the fund has invested in 320 companies for a total amount of over £320m.
“This new funding in 2020 will support the next phase of Billon’s development and represents an endorsement that investors seek pure distributed ledger technology companies that are better suited for solving national currency and personal data challenges than certain early blockchain architectures,” said Anand Phanse, CFO of Billon. “The pandemic will open new opportunities for innovative companies like Billon.”
Billon has previously raised over $13m of equity from investors, including the recent close of its Series A.
Billon is a developer behind a DLT protocol and system specifically for tokenising and transacting national currency and processing sensitive data in compliance with regulations. The idea is that this will, as the company says, unleash “the transformational capabilities of blockchain technologies in the regulated world.”
The UK government’s Covid-19 response has been criticised by British FinTech companies for doing too little to support them. For instance, a survey of FinTech founders conducted by Digital Finance Forum found that only 25% believed the nation’s leadership had done enough to support the sector.
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