Money Transfer Startup Azimo Raises $20M At A $100M Valuation
TECHCRUNCH: Azimo, a mobile money transfer startup out of London that was once feted by Facebook, is jumping into the funding ring with a $20 million raise. CEO and co-founder Michael Kent says the company will use the investment to continue to build out its operations across Europe and deeper into the community of migrants who already form the bedrock of its services.While Azimo — which was founded in 2012 and covers 200 countries and 80 different currencies –is not disclosing its valuation, we have confirmed with reliable sources that it is just under $100 million.
The Series B round was led by Frog Capital, with participation from MCI Management and existing investors e.ventures and Greycroft Partners. It brings the total raised by Azimo to $31 million.
On the surface, Azimo is similar to other remittance services like WorldRemit and TransferWise — also UK startups, albeit bigger in size and more heavily funded. WorldRemit most recently raised $100 million in February, while TransferWise, which counts Andreessen Horowitz among its backers, bagged a $58 million round in January.
Kent says that part of what sets Azimo apart from these others is less its size but the fact that for now it’s focused mainly on growing its business in Europe and specifically among a demographic that is often neglected by tech services: individuals who are often migrants who may earn less than the average income, and who regularly send a portion of that income far back home to family, with Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and parts of Asia “all popular corridors for us.” (Indeed, to raise more awareness about this demographic and the role they play in the $600 billion remittance market, the UN has declared Tuesday “World Family Remittance Day.)
“We run up against a lot of patronizing people when it comes to migrant workiers,” he says. “People assume they wouldn’t use Skype or social networks or smartphones. But in fact we found that Eastern Europeans, Filipinos, and others massively over-indexed on services like VoIP and social networking, so in fact it completely makes sense to sell them digital remittance apps. Rather than requiring them to walk into a Western Union and pay more, you could take the stuff they were using already for other reasons to deliver a cheaper and more cost effective service.”
Facebook-based transfers constitutes around 25 percent of all transactions these days, he adds.
As a measure of the typical monetary values that Azimo deals in, Kent tells me that $700 is the average transaction size, and this represents usually between 25 percent and 50 percent of a customer’s take-home pay. “That’s the difference between us and TransferWise or Travelex in a nutshell,” he said. “[Our transactions] are just much smaller.”
Nevertheless, the company plays on economies of scale and lower costs, helped in part by the all-digital money transfer network, to make better returns. That, and a five-fold growth rate (but at values that Kent would not specify), are what attracted investors.
Read also: WIRED: Tech City UK CEO: why London needs startups, and why it needs us
