With the UK set to crown its new King, FinTech Global has looked back at the FinTechs that had a royally good start to the year.
The UK is currently in the middle of celebrating the coronation of King Charles III. With the limelight on the UK, it is worth celebrating the strong FinTech sector. With one of the biggest FinTech markets in the world, FinTech Global has looked at the biggest deals of the year. The top five deals raised a total of £771m ($976m).
The UK’s FinTech sector has had a great start to 2023. In the first four months of the year, a total of £1.4bn ($1.8bn) has been raised across 112 funding rounds. However, when accounting for FinTech companies that have not declared the size of their funding round, there have been 152 deals in total.
Similar to a global trend, FinTech funding in the UK dropped significantly during 2022. According to a report from KPMG, total Fintech investment fell by 56% in 2022, dropping from $39.1bn in 2021 to $17.4bn in 2022, which includes M&A, private equity and venture capital deals. In terms of deals, there were 724 in 2021 and 593 in 2021.
While it is still unclear whether the UK will rebound from 2022’s lows, here are the 5 biggest UK FinTech deals of the year so far.
Abound
The largest funding round of a UK FinTech to close this year, so far, was raised by Abound, a marketplace lending company. The FinTech raised £500m, in a mixture of debt and equity finance, but it is not clear how this funding was split.
The equity was supplied by K3 Ventures, GSR Ventures, and Hambro Perks, while the debt came from Citi and clients of Waterfall Asset Management. With the close of the round, Abound has raised a total of £570m in funding.
Abound was founded in 2020 and provides borrowers with better interest rates on loans by capturing a holistic view of their financial situation, rather than solely relying on a credit score. It achieves this through a combination of open banking and AI technology.
Currently, the company offers loans ranging between £1,000 and £10,000 and are repayable over terms of up to five years with 24.8% APR. Its goal is to have £1bn on its balance sheet by 2025.
The £500m will help Abound increase its headcount and further the development of its business-to-business offer, allowing other banks and lenders to take advantage of its technology.
Abound claims it has been growing 30% month-on-month and served over 150,000 customers through its service.
Quantexa
The next biggest funding round in the UK was secured by Quantexa, a data analytics firm. The RegTech company secured $103.9m for its Series E funding round, which brought its valuation to $1.8bn, earning it the status of a unicorn.
The round was headed by GIC with participation from Warburg Pincus, Dawn Capital, BNY Mellon, HSBC, ABN AMRO, British Patient Capital, AlbionVC and Evolution Equity Partners.
Quantexa was founded in 2016 by Imam Hoque, former managing director of fraud and financial crime EMEA/AP at SAS, and Vishal Marria, former executive director at EY. The platform uncovers hidden risk and new opportunities by providing a contextual, connected view of internal and external data in a single place. It solves major challenges across data management, financial crime, customer intelligence, credit risk, fraud and throughout the customer lifecycle. It currently has over 600 employees in offices around the world, including Singapore, Brussels and the UAE.
With the fresh capital, the RegTech company plans to build new tools for its decision intelligence platform.
The funding comes shortly after Quantexa acquisition of Aylien, a Dublin-based AI-focused company.
Prior to the Series E funding round, Quantexa secured $153m for its Series D funding round, which had brought its valuation to somewhere between $800m and $900m.
TerraPay
Up next is TerraPay, a global payments infrastructure business. The PayTech company secured over $100m (£79m) for its Series B, the exact figure is not clear.
The investment was led by IFC and supported by Prime Ventures, Partech Africa, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and a consortium of other investors.
This capital injection will help TerraPay to further its global expansion plans, especially across the LATAM and MENA regions, strengthen its existing pay-out network to 150 countries by 2024, support and accelerate its growth and invest in the marketing and adoption of alternative payment methods for mobile wallets.
In addition to this, the PayTech company plans to expand its regulatory and compliance infrastructure, including key licence applications across the globe.
TerraPay is on a mission to bolster financial inclusion and specialises in enabling the delivery of cross-border remittances and instant money transfers, securely, and at a low cost. With the new funding, the company is well-positioned to capitalise on the growing demand for its remittance and payments solutions and continue its mission of making cross-border payments more accessible, secure, and affordable for all.
Zopa
The fourth biggest UK FinTech deal of 2023, so far, was raised by digital bank Zopa. The challenger bank raised £75m in funding from its existing investors to support its next growth stages.
This funding will help Zopa grow its balance sheet, as well as bolster its M&A deal making efforts. The firm recently completed its first acquisition. It purchased DivideBuy’s point-of-sale finance technology and lending platform, which it hopes will increase its revenue by at least 20% in the next few years.
By working together with DivideBuy, Zopa hopes to offer a simple and fair solution for larger purchases, those between £250 and £30,000, which might take a customer months or years to save for.
Despite the economic uncertainty, Zopa managed to grow its revenue by over 100% year-over-year. It attributes this growth to the continued expansion of its suite of digital-first financial products.
Since its launch in 2020, Zopa has attracted over £3bn in deposits, over £2bn in loans on balance sheet and issued over 400,000 credit cards.
Zopa is a digital bank that provides consumers with various financial services, including loans, credit cards, fixed term savings and more.
It also offers a buy now pay later solution. Its BNPL 2.0 lending solution aims offer affordable credit by running credit checks and affordability assessments for all customers, share data with credit rating agencies to give other lenders a full picture of people’s debt positions, help customers to better consolidate, structure and pay down their debt using its proprietary tools and enable users to build their credit profiles and improve their financial positions.
Last year, it was reported Zopa was looking to raise another $100m before it went public.
Hack The Box
Finally, Hack The Box was responsible for the fifth biggest FinTech deal of the year, so far. The company, which offers a gamified continuous cybersecurity upskilling, certification and talent assessment platform, secured $55m for its Series B funding round.
The funding round was led by global investment giant Carlyle. Other contributions came from Paladin Capital Group, Osage University Partners, Marathon Venture Capital, Brighteye Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst Fund.
This capital injection has been earmarked to help Hack The Box bolster its international expansion efforts, with its eyes set on the US, Europe and APAC. It hopes the funding will bolster its growth trajectory and help it deepen its suite of “gamer-first” solutions.
Chief information security officers and other senior cybersecurity decision-makers are using Hack The Box to assess how secure their organisations look from an attacker’s perspective. They also use the platform to improve their human defence element through a performance-driven training.
The company claims to have tripled in size over the past two years and has a global hacking community of over 1.7 million members. Its platform launched in 2017 as an online cybersecurity training platform that offers virtual hacking labs to cover all skills. It boasts hands-on penetration testing and scenarios that mimic real-world threats.
Its gamified elements include scoreboards, multiplayer battles, ranks and more. One example of a game-based cybersecurity session is capture the flag. In the game, two teams go against each other to solve the most number of challenges, for each one completed they will earn a flag.
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