TransferGo has secured a USD2.5 million investment seed round led by Mark Ransford, former investor at Apax Partners; Voria Fattahi, former investor at Kinnevik; Clive Kahn, former Travelex CEO; and Richard Tudor, former partner at Exponent.
Practica Capital (VC) are also participating in this round. It is the largest round of seed funding in the money transfer space.
TransferGo’s digital remittance service, which enables faster, cheaper and more convenient international money transfers, is based at Canary Wharf Group’s Level39, Europe’s largest technology accelerator space for fintech companies. TransferGo has grown significantly since its launch in 2013 and is now serving more than 100,000 customers, having transferred more than £100 million and grown its customer base 20 per cent each month.
TransferGo was created after co-founder Daumantas Dvilinskas’s frustration with cash bureaus and traditional banks charging too much to make payments. The business enables money transfers with no hidden fees, guaranteed destination amounts and close to real-time delivery.
TransferGo has expanded transfer destinations to include Australia, Israel, South Africa and Canada, adding to 39 countries including the UK, Ireland, Spain, Poland, Austria, Romania, Cyprus, Switzerland, Estonia, Lithuania and the USA among others.
Dvilinskas, CEO of TransferGo, said: “We’re delighted to secure a seed round of this size, not only putting us above all other money transfer players at this stage but demonstrating that remittance services aren’t about disrupting banks, they are about working with them.
“We have made a strategic decision to collaborate with more than 30 of the world’s most respected and innovative banks, using their local transfer infrastructure to offer an unrivalled service in terms of price, speed and most importantly, security. By investing early in compliance we have managed to build one of the safest digital money transfer systems, which in turn creates one of the lowest-risk environments for our banking partners.”
Eric Van der Kleij, Head of Level39, said: “The exponential growth of TransferGo is a great success story for Level39 and we’re delighted to support their growth on every step of the journey. TransferGo has always been deeply involved in our community, taking full advantage of Level39 mentoring sessions, events, workshops and our growing investor network. Receiving this investment marks a new era for financial services — one which builds itself upon the strong foundations of banks.”
Mark Ransford, former investor at Apax Partners, said: “TransferGo is providing an essential service to migrants who want to send money home. These are the people who can least afford the high fees currently being charged by existing providers.”