The Manchester based financial wellness platform has raised pre-seed capital from Haatch Ventures and various angel investors to develop its product and test growth strategies.
"There are many personal finance apps helping people to manage money, but no-one is combining that with specifically addressing the underserved needs of women and the amazing power of community."
Parent company LHV Group raised the capital via an oversubscribed rights issue.
"The funds raised are a key step in the UK banking licence application process. In tandem with this ongoing process, we continue to scale up LHV UK's operations. We're currently hiring vigorously for our open positions across London, Leeds, and Tallinn and continue to develop new client-facing products."
Octopus Ventures led the financing, which included backing from Hashed, Coinbase Ventures, and several prominent industry angels.
"Merge's vision is to build the infrastructure necessary to allow crypto businesses to operate without fear of shutdown by regulators or third-party risk teams. We're excited to back them as they build that and, ultimately, unleash even more innovation in crypto and defi."
Target Global led the seed financing round to support the payment platform's European expansion and product development.
"We are excited to offer our customers an unrivalled experience when it comes to accessing a reliable and transparent tool for cross-border payments. Our value lies in our ability to remove hurdles when it comes to opening business bank accounts and offering payment services at a fraction of the cost versus high street banks and legacy providers. We aim to board and activate customers in under 48 hours, start to finish. All of this is now available through one application and one dashboard to stay in control of your payments."
The financing round was led by Credo Capital Partners and Fortress Investment Group to support the expansion of the digital lender across Europe.
"Demand for eCommerce lending has expanded in Europe. We wanted to make an investment in a platform that was moving the product forward and combined all of the great technology and analytics you expect with a really differentiated product and approach,"