·       UK fintech Kroo has raised £17.7m from lead investor Rudy Karsan and others in a Series A funding round

·       Kroo is building a truly social bank that helps users reduce anxiety around finances and champion social causes and was named Best Newcomer in the 2021 British Bank Awards

·       Kroo will use the funding to support its mobilisation phase, grow its team and secure a full banking license.

Kroo Ltd has raised £17.7 million in a Series A funding round led by tech entrepreneur and founder of Karlani Capital, Rudy Karsan. The capital raised will be used to mobilise the bank ahead of its launch in early 2022.

Kroo’s goal as a social bank is to remove friction from financial interactions with friends and family. Currently it does so by offering customers a prepaid debit card and innovative ways to track their personal and social finances – enabling them to easily create groups with friends, track spending, and split and pay bills quickly and securely. It aims to reduce the anxiety that can surround social finances, and make it easier to share experiences without money getting in the way; gone are the days of feeling awkward and anxious, or wasting time managing finances.

Kroo goes beyond offering slick banking functionality. Fostering social good is at the heart of its vision. Kroo's board-level social conscience committee will ensure that it actively advances social good and the company has pledged 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 1 million trees.

Kroo is currently in the process of securing a full banking license, so that it can provide a comprehensive platform from which customers can navigate their financial lives. As a regulated bank, Kroo will be able to offer customers a safe, secure and intuitively designed current account, FSCS deposit protection and loans at fair and competitive rates. It aims to launch in early 2022.

Kroo has been built on a state-of-the-art agile technology platform that is microservices-based and cloud-native. This enables Kroo to deliver a trusted banking environment, with a fabulous end-to-end experience that is continuously improving. Rather than embedding its front end on an aging tech stack, Kroo’s scalable, resilient and performant core banking platform means market-leading features and products can be launched rapidly.

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.”

Kroo will use its Series A 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 ahead of launch in 2022.

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.”