Volume, which stylises itself as the transparent checkout startup, has scored $2.4m in its oversubscribed pre-seed funding round.
firstminute Capital served as the lead investor to the round, with commitments also coming from SeedX and Haatch Ventures. Several angel investors also contributed to the round, including LendInvest co-founder Christian Faes, tabby CCO Russ Carroll, as well as unnamed backers from MADE.COM, Mastercard, Visa and American Express.
With the capital, the company plans to expand its UK operations, as well as grow across Europe and North America.
Volume claims to improve current open banking capabilities to reduce the long checkout process, whilst killing hidden fees.
It claims to be the first platform to leverage the variable recurring payment mandate to significantly speed up open banking-enabled direct account-to-account online payments. It also detects the preferred bank that shoppers pay with and relay them to to a biometric security check.
Consumers can pay online from any devicestraight from their bank, once completing a biometric check.
Volume founder and CEO Simone Martinelli said, “Instead of yet another one-click checkout, Volume is building the world’s first-ever transparent checkout. Ecommerce has a ‘hidden tax’ in the form of payment commissions to cards and ewallets, and consumers don’t know this ultimately impacts on the prices they pay.
“We want to finally bring transparency to this enormous market and kill all hidden fees. What Transferwise did for cross-border payments, we’ll do for online payments. We estimate that if every merchant were to implement our solution, the ecommerce industry could save $800 billion in fees.”
The company was founded by Simone Martinelli and Krzysztof Tarnawski who have spent the past decade working at Level39, Mastercard, HSBC and WorldRemit.
Speaking on the deal, firstminute Capital partner Arek Wylegalski said, “Having backed Revolut at a similar stage in the past, I believe in Krzysztof’s and Simone’s unique mix of fintech know-how, technical talent, relentless customer focus and ambition to get the job done.”
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