The Journey so far: We just closed our $18.3M Series A Fund Raise

Between us, we have been working in payments for over 30 years. Across all aspects of the ecosystem – from Card Issuing to Card Acquiring; Open Banking to Foreign Exchange and Cross Border Payments. Within each of these industry segments, we’ve encountered challenges, run into technology limitations, and hit out-and-out brick walls. Payments can be painful. Even more so when you need to send funds across borders – it’s complex, expensive, and slow.

But building these payment processes internally to function as you want them to takes time, resource and expertise that most businesses simply don’t have. And using typical payments providers often means integrating with 10+ partners, and giving up control due to being removed from the flow of funds. Not to mention the poor unit economics that come with this.

We knew we weren’t the only ones experiencing this endless friction. And we knew there must be a better way…

Enter Navro.

In 2022, we founded Navro. In the beginning, it was just an idea – a dream. Amassed from our combined experiences and vision of what perfect would look like. We wanted to develop a solution that would enable businesses to unlock access to the best payments products around the world through one contract and one API. Meaning they could scale quickly and easily.

We spoke to industry leaders, those battling at the front line against the problem we are trying to solve. They validated our thinking and gave invaluable insight into their experiences which would help shape Navro.

Almost immediately, we recognised that the only way to build this solution was to take a serious approach to compliance and regulation. Most early-stage businesses don’t – and for very good reason. Getting regulated is hard, let alone by those in gold-standard jurisdictions – it takes time, expertise and funding. But for us, this was a non-negotiable. It would allow us to unlock access to the most robust, secure and global payment capabilities.

We knew we couldn’t build Navro alone. So we took our dream out into the world.

And as it turns out – other people believed in our dream too.

In May 2022 we raised £5M – one of the largest pre-seed funding rounds in European FinTech History from an incredible group of Venture capital and Angel Investors including Bain Capital Ventures, Fin Capital, Hambro Perks, Clock Tower Ventures, Better Tomorrow Ventures and D4 Ventures.

We recognised that you can only build a world-class solution with a world-class team. So we used these funds to do just that. We’re thrilled to have welcomed Ed Adarrio, CTO (ex-Currency Cloud), Mike Southgate, Chief Compliance Officer (ex-Google), Peter Rowan, GM Ireland (ex-Paypal and Twitter) and David Sola, CFO (ex-Houlihan Lokey, UBS and Softbank) to the team, to support us in this mission.

We’re now a team of almost 60 people, with hubs in 4 countries – and our ambition to hire only the very best hasn’t wavered. We’re incredibly lucky to have the support and dedication of such a stellar team.

We have already developed phase one of the Navro solution and today, we are able to process Payouts in 130 currencies, and 200+ countries all around the world. We’ve onboarded our first customers representing hundreds of millions of flow. We’ve acquired a PI License. We’ve launched a Navro hub in Ireland. And we’ve been named as one of the 27 most exciting European fintech startups to watch in 2023, according to venture capitalists.

We’ve achieved so much in such a short space of time – and we’re not slowing down.

It is with great excitement and extreme thankfulness that we announce our $18.3M Series A funding round, led by Unusual Ventures, alongside Motive Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures.

This injection of funding will enable us to scale our platform as we build phase 2 of our solution: Payments in. Helping us get one step closer to achieving our mission of becoming the go-to end-to-end payments provider for Marketplaces and platforms globally. It will also help us scale our team even further – we’re currently hiring across the organisation, from Business Development to Operations, Compliance and HR. By joining, not only will you play a pivotal role in helping us shake up the payments space, but we also offer some pretty amazing perks for all our employees. (You can check out our open roles, and apply here).

We’re so excited for the next chapter of the Navro journey. And we want to take this opportunity to offer our deepest gratitude to our investors, partners, friends, and customers – and anyone else who has contributed to helping us get to where we are now.

It really does take a village – and we’re very lucky to have ours.

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All the best,

Aran and Eddie