Kroo, a UK startup building a "social" bank, has raised £17.7 million in Series A funding round led by tech entrepreneur Rudy Karson.
Targeting an early 2022 launch, Kroo says it wants to remove friction from financial interactions between friends and family, reducing the "anxiety that can surround social finances".
It offers a prepaid debit card and tools to track personal and social finances - enabling users to easily create groups with friends, track spending, and split and pay bills quickly and securely.
The startup is also promising a socially conscious ethos, pledging to donate a percentage of profits to social causes. A tree-planting referral scheme has already been launched, so that every time a customer successfully refers a friend, Kroo plants 20 trees with the aim of creating a forest of a million trees.
The company is applying for a full banking license and has built its own technology platform that is microservices-based and cloud-native.
The funding will be used to drive its mobilisation phase - scaling up operations, growing its team across engineering, marketing, product, compliance and customer service, and further developing its product offering and app.
Andrea de Gottardo, CEO, Kroo, says: "We want to build the world’s greatest social bank: a bank dedicated to its customers and to the world we live in."