News

Nordic FinTech Week: Indó & ReceiptHero

Congratulations to Indó and ReceiptHero!

During Nordic FinTech Week 2022 in Copenhagen we saw two portfolio companies making a big impression. Indó really impressed and manage to come out as the FinTech Hero Winner! ReceiptHero also had good success at the event and competed for the FinTech Award within the Growth category, they made it to the final and ended up as the runner up. Both company really showed that they are on the forefront of FinTech in the Nordics and we are very proud to support them on their journeys!

 

New investment: Indó

We can finally announce our investment in the neo-bank Indó, the first new bank on Iceland in decades.

This is a company that truly represents what Vidici wants to see in a FinTech company:

  • A great founding and tech team with the right experience
  • A customer-first approach with true customer value and a superior UX
  • Offering a customer-core product and a transparent model
  • Leveraging the latest technology to offer financial products of the future
  • Disrupting a real legacy market with the potential to becoming a market leader

 

indó is the first new Icelandic bank to arise in decades. indó provides better rates than any legacy bank, combined with lower fees, total transparency and an easy-to-use app for instant access to your funds. indó is different, taking a leadership role as a responsible institution safeguarding Iceland’s financial future. indó is here to ensure your money grows responsibly and is there when you need it most.

Read more about Indó here or on their website

 

 

Will Ferrell joins Lunar

“Danish neobank Lunar has received investment from a somewhat unexpected source – US actor, comedian, producer and writer Will Ferrell.

Article from FinTech Futures

Announcing the investment on LinkedIn, the digital bank also posted a 30-second video where the comedic actor apes an early 90s Swedish commercial for Postbanken, repeating the word ‘Lunar’ dozens of times as he faces the camera.

Ferrell says: “I am excited to take part in Lunar’s mission to give consumers and businesses more power from their money. By joining Lunar I am expanding my engagement in the Nordic countries, which is close to my heart.”

The Anchorman star continues: “Nordic people are smart, sexy and are tired of having their money messed with. That’s where Lunar comes into play as a digital disrupter in the financial industry.”

Along with its new investor, Lunar also claims it has “great things in the pipeline”.

In January, the neobank said it is building the “go-to app” for banking, payments and investments for consumers and SMEs in the Nordic region.”

Luko acquires Coya and gains insurance license

“French startup Luko is acquiring German startup Coya in order to grow its European presence and get an insurance license from German regulators. While Luko isn’t disclosing terms of the deal, the company says it’s a 100% share deal, which means that Coya investors are now Luko investors. Those investors include Valar Ventures, Headline and Roland Berger’s family office.

Article from: TechCrunch, 

Luko started as a home insurance company for both homeowners and renters. It’s a big market, as you have to prove that your home is insured when you rent or buy a home in France. Since then, the company has expanded with new insurance products and services.

Compared to traditional insurance companies, Luko has chosen a direct-to-customer model. People sign up on Luko’s website or in the company’s app directly.

After that, Luko tries to be as efficient as possible. You can chat with the company in the app directly. When the insurance pays you back, it tries to send you the money as quickly as possible. For instance, you can receive money instantly on a Lydia account.

When it comes to transparency, Luko takes a 30% cut on monthly payments. Everything else is pooled together to pay compensation. If there’s money left at the end of the year, you can choose to donate your portion of what’s left of the 70% share.

The startup has been quite successful. It has attracted 220,000 customers — in particular, the customer base has doubled between November 2020 and November 2021. Luko started accepting clients in Spain a few months ago, as well.

Coya, on the other hand, offers various insurance products for the German market. Insurance products include home content, private liability, dog liability and bike insurance.

Following today’s acquisition, Coya is going to be called Luko Insurance AG. Coya’s 80,000 clients are joining Luko’s customer base, which means that Luko now has 300,000 clients in total.

More importantly, Coya has obtained an insurance license in Germany. Luko is going to leverage that license across all its markets thanks to European passporting rules. This way, Luko controls a bigger chunk of the insurance stack.

Up next, Luko has ambitious goals as it plans to build a European leader in the insurtech startup space. The company plans to hire 100 new employees this year alone. By 2023, the startup wants to reach one million customers.”

Limina raises a €2.53M Series A, led by Industrifonden

Limina has raised a €2.53M Series A fundraise, led by Swedish venture capital firm, Industrifonden. In addition, existing investors including Vidici Ventures, STOAF SciTech, Almi Invest and Justin Wheatley, the founder of StatPro, also participated in this round. The new capital will now go into scaling the offering, including further product development and strengthening the expert-led services organisation that complements its technology solution.

“With the backing of Industrifonden’s expertise, we will expand the core offering – supporting even more forward-looking asset managers to achieve their investment management goals.

As more and more clients realise that there is, in fact, a modern alternative that can evolve and flex as their businesses grow and requirements change, Limina is able to help more asset managers. The digital first, ‘always on’ nature of society calls for technology that matches these characteristics. By blending the benefits of a traditional SaaS model with the flexibility and configurability of an enterprise IMS, we will continue to offer improved investment workflows for our clients.”

/ Limina Insight July 2021

Vidici has a good experience of co-investing with Industrifonden and we are now  happy to welcome them onboard Limina. Their long track record of FinTech investments and their expertise within the sector brings great value to the operations and they share Vidici’s view on Limina and the market opportunity. We look forward to be part of the journey ahead!

 

Kinnevik and Tencent invest in Lunar’s €210M round

Lunar just raised a €210M Series D round led by family-owned investment company HEARTLAND. The round also included leading Swedish investment company Kinnevik, and the China-based technology company Tencent

Other investments came from some of the world’s notable investors in the financial technology space. Alongside the lead investors you find IDC Ventures, Fuel Ventures, MW&L Capital Partners and Peter Mühlmann (Founder and CEO of Trustpilot). They will join current investors such as SEED Capital, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Socii Capital, and Greyhound Capital.

For Vidici it is great to see that other investors share the view not only that everyday banking as we know it needs to change but that Lunar is the challenger that can make it happen. Lunar have shown great execution over the last years and gaining more and more traction as they progress, nearly doubling the customer base the past year and releasing attractive features such as joint accounts and pay later solutions taking on Klarna. Also going after the underserved SME segment increases the market opportunity and have rapidly shown good traction, having received applications from more than half of newly established Danish SMEs in 2021.

With the new capital, the company will continue their Nordic expansion but will also pursue a M&A strategy that kicked of with the acquisition of Swedish-based loan marketplace Lendify.

Vidici’s view is that Lunar is in a great position to take on the Nordic and establish them selves as the leading Nordic neobank and Vidici will continue to support the company and the great team that have built it.

 

Lunar doubles its growth with Swedish savings customers

In June, the digital bank Lunar launched savings accounts with Sweden’s highest savings rate of 1 percent and fee-free stock trading. Deposits have now grown by 100 percent in one month’s time and four times as many share purchases have been made compared to when the service was first rolled out in Denmark. Successes that are in line with Lunar’s ambition to give more people the opportunity to invest and save smartly and easily in one place.

(Translated article from News by Cision, for Swedish article read here)

In recent years, Lunar has moved further and further into the Swedish banking scene and challenged the traditional banks. During the first half of 2021, Lunar has both added savings accounts with Sweden’s best savings rate of 1 percent and the opportunity for simple and safe stock trading, and acquired the fintech company Lendify. The deal, which is now fully completed, means that after the summer, Lunar will also launch savings in consumer loans, so-called “peer-to-peer loans”, directly in the Lunar app.

– Everyone should be able to save money. We experience that forms of saving and getting your finances together are more difficult than it needs to be for ordinary people. With simple grips and through the financial overall picture that the user gets directly in the app, it becomes both easy and safe. We at Lunar know the best ways to save and we want to make it available to more people. With the peer-to-peer loans, we add another dimension where our customers get more savings alternatives with good returns, says Mats Persson Bergius, Sweden manager at Lunar.

During June, Lunar’s users increased by as much as 71 percent and were listed as one of Sweden’s most downloaded apps. After Swish, Lunar has been the second most downloaded app on iOS and has rushed past both Avanza and Nordnet. The largest increase occurs in the age range 50 years and upwards, while the largest user base is still in the age group 20–30 year olds.

– That we are expanding and reaching a broader demographic is great fun. This indicates that the need to understand and get more out of one’s money is widespread at all ages. When it comes to the gender distribution within stock-trading customers, we unfortunately see that only 10 percent are women. Here we need to do more to both reach and involve more people, Mats Persson Bergius continues.

Lunar is looking forward to a strong and expansive autumn.

– Our goal is to establish ourselves as Sweden’s most easy – to – use investment app for those who want a good range of simple services with a good risk-adjusted return at a good price. We have partly set our sights on the customers who currently have Avanza and Nordnet and who do not need such a wide and complex range of services. But who still wants a good return mix in the portfolio, Mats Persson Bergius concludes.

Lunar’s services will make it easier for both existing and new users to save in a smarter way. The investments are made easily and securely in the app, where Lunar’s customers have a clear overview of their entire finances.

 

(Translated article from News by Cision, for Swedish article read here)

Lendify acquired by Lunar

After 7 years Lendify is being acquired by Danish neobank Lunar. This is a big day for both Lendify and Vidici. We have been investors and partners from the start, we have worked on the board, with the administration, with the operation and through the regulatory challenges that comes with running a regulated FinTech company. We learned a lot from starting and scaling a FinTech company within a regulated space from the journey. Starting off as a peer-to-peer lender with the goal to create a new popular asset class for savings in Sweden, building an in-house platform and recruiting great talent they became an efficient credit facility and could evolve in to a marketplace for loans that today employs around 60 people. We are really happy that we got to be a part of that and do what we could to contribute to what Lendify is, a successful FinTech company.

 

When it comes to what is next for Lendify, as part of Lunar Group, we believe that the combination has the potential of being the next Nordic FinTech star. For Lendify the big question has been if they should go for a banking license or not, this would have come with a regulatory burden, however, it would decrease the cost of capital and therefore generate better margins. As part of Lunar, Lendify will now be able to not just operate under a banking license it will work under a neobank that have shown that you can still be agile, customer focused and tech savvy while holding a banking license. Lunar on the other hand, as for all neobanks, faces the challenge that it is hard to charge for banking services today since incumbent banks are making their money largely on their big balance sheets and not from their services. Hence, as a neobank you need to offer services where you have bigger revenues, such as unsecured consumer loans. So, we believe that Lendify and Lunar are actually bridging each other’s challenges, Lendify will now be equipped with a banking license while Lunar will add on a credit facility that have been operating for 7 years and shown that deliver great services.

 

As for Vidici, we take place as shareholders in the Lunar and do so truly excited to follow the next chapter of Lendify. We will continue to work with the company and the management team to support them any way we can and together we are now setting the goal to be the dominant neobank in the Nordic and the next Nordic FinTech star.

 

/ The team at Vidici

 

Read more:

Article in Fintech Futures

Article in FInanstid (swedish)

Lendify

Lunar

New Investment: Coya

Vidici Ventures partners with Coya, an Insurtech company incorporated in Berlin that is on a mission to re-engineer and modernise the insurance business using a pure play digital approach focused on millennials and other digital natives.

Coya is a consumer-centric, full-stack property and casualty insurance underwriter using cutting edge tech to offer its customers a superior user experience. Coya currently provides coverage across five key segments: home contents; private liability; bike; ebike; and dog insurance with customer acquisition focused purely on digital channels including direct digital, targeted marketing and partner (B2B2C) distribution. Other investors in Coya include Valar Ventures, e.ventures and La Famiglia.

Vidici Ventures looks forward to partnering with the Coya team on the next phase of its growth journey!

 

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