Weavr.io, the open collaboration platform that makes designing, building and taking a brand new payment service live in weeks, today announced that it has closed its seed funding round totalling £500,000. Investors include Anthemis, Force Over Mass and UFP Fintech. Financial services industry veterans Alan Morgan, former Head of McKinsey’s Financial Services Practice in EMEA and Craig Dewar, Co-Founder of Global Processing Services, one of the longest established card processors serving the fintech sector worldwide also supported the fundraise as angel investors.
The founders of Weavr.io, Alex Mifsud, CEO, and Adrian Mizzi, CTO, are serial entrepreneurs with a background in payments and engineering. They have experienced first-hand over many years how cumbersome, slow and expensive launching new payments solutions invariably turns out.
Today’s users of digital applications expect payments to be seamlessly woven into the user experience, and to remain competitive digital businesses increasingly have to automate back-office payments processes. Most businesses, including many startups, don’t have the skills and the capital to build the necessary sophisticated payment solutions and that’s where Weavr.io can help – it provides free tools for non-specialists to build, test and integrate such payment flows, and then connects them to suitable payment providers to power them up.
The funding will be used to drive customer acquisition, to serve early adopters and to enhance its self-service UX for payment solution delivery. In addition, following on its recent release of a virtual cards toolkit, Weavr.io plans to add support for plastic contactless cards, IBANs and bank-based payments, as well as card acquiring to offer a rich set of payments solutions for digital businesses.
“We are thrilled to have the backing of fintech-focused funds as well as highly experienced individuals from the financial services sectors as our investors, not only for the recognition but also for the experience and reach they will give us into the digital innovation ecosystem” said Alex Mifsud. “While payments technologies and networks have become more powerful and also more open, the huge recent increase in complexity and in the compliance burden has made it more difficult for digital businesses – especially startups – to fully exploit the latest payments capabilities to deliver value and a seamless user experience to their customers. Our investors are very much part of this collective mission.”
Anthemis Partner Yann Ranchere said: “We believe that the future of financial services is embedded, augmented and ubiquitous, with payments innovation becoming a critical part of that fabric. Weavr’s ability to identify this trend, understand that innovators need effective tools to facilitate payments disruption and execute is very exciting to us. We look forward to supporting the team on this journey to make it easy for developers to embed a whole financial services infrastructure seamlessly.”
“Customers of fintechs and other digital businesses nowadays expect seamless payments within their favourite web and mobile applications and businesses need to keep up with ever more sophisticated solutions. Weavr.io delivers both” says Alan Morgan.”
Following this investment, Weavr.io is now accelerating its outreach activities to collaborate with digital innovators as well as innovative payment providers across the European Economic Area.
— Ends —
About Weavr.io:
Weavr.io is the open collaboration platform for digital innovators and fintechs. We help innovators build and run complex payment flows and user experiences with minimum pain. Our technology is a direct output of the Open Payments Ecosystem (OPE) project that was possible thanks to funding from the EU Horizon2020 programme and the support of the project partners, including Visa, Locke Lord, IDT Finance, the University of Malta, and Startup bootcamp Fintech.
About Anthemis
Anthemis cultivates change in financial services by investing in, growing and sustaining businesses committed to improving the world. We are founded on three guiding principles — authentic collaboration, virtuous cycle outcomes, and diversity and inclusivity — and our deep understanding of markets and models, passion for emerging technology and values inspire everything we do. By creating fertile ground for a diverse group of startups, investors, entrepreneurs, institutions, academics and visionaries to converge, we believe we can solve the financial services world’s most pressing challenges faster, better and for the benefit of all.
If you have a media enquiry, please contact the Weavr.io team at [email protected] or the Anthemis team at [email protected].
