Kroo, formerly known as B-Social, is building a new UK bank to allow its customers to easily participate in a shared financial activity with each other and champion social causes that impact their world.
Raised £17.7 million
Recently, the London-based company has raised £17.7 million in a Series A funding round led by tech entrepreneur and founder of Karlani Capital, Rudy Karsan.
The company will use the funding 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. Notably, the company expects to launch in early 2022.
Aims to remove financial frictions
Built on an agile technology platform that is microservices-based and cloud-native, the UK company aims to remove friction from financial interactions with friends and family.
Kroo does it by offering customers a prepaid debit card and ways to track their personal and social finances – enabling them to create groups with friends, track spending, and split and pay bills quickly and securely.
The company has pledged to donate a percentage of profits to social causes. Further, a tree-planting referral scheme has already been launched, so that every time a customer successfully refers a friend, Kroo plants 20 trees to create a forest of 1 million trees.
Full banking license
It’s worth mentioning that, Kroo is currently in the process of securing a full banking license. As a regulated bank, the company will be able to offer customers a safe, secure, and intuitively designed current account, FSCS deposit protection, and loans at fair and competitive rates.
CEO Andrea de Gottardo has been key to the development of Kroo’s business model and the delivery of Kroo’s banking license. Andrea was already an experienced bank executive when he joined Kroo as Chief Risk Officer in 2018.
Andrea de Gottardo says: “We want to build the world’s greatest social bank: a bank dedicated to its customers and to the world we live in. We’re going to do more than just work with Kroo customers to improve their relationship with money and provide them with access to fair loans. We’re going to offer them ways to actively take part in making our world a better place, like carbon offsetting and a tree-planting referral programme.”
Lead investor Rudy Karsan says: “The reason I’m excited about Kroo is that it has a concrete opportunity to dramatically change the way people feel about their bank, for good. Kroo has an exceptionally talented management team and a nimble tech stack that will enable the continuous delivery of banking features customers really care about. I’m confident Kroo is building a sustainable bank and am excited to support them on the next stage of their growth journey.”
