The Currency Cloud, an FX payments automation platform, has secured USD4m in Series-A funding, led by Atlas Venture with follow-on participation from Anthemis Group. The company had previously raised USD2M from Anthemis and others.
The funding will be used to ramp commercial activity and continue product development. More than 100 corporate customers already use the company’s SaaS offering and more than 20 platform partners have signed on to use the company’s API.
The Currency Cloud’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering is designed to reduce costs and transform the payments infrastructure into a frictionless process for making and receiving international, multi-currency payments.
Fred Destin (pictured), Partner, Atlas Ventures, says: “"It’s amazing to me how error-prone, low tech and expensive foreign exchange still is for the majority of the business community. So we backed a team of foreign exchange insiders to bring the transparency and efficiency of a next-gen, cloud-based platform to the world of cross-border payments. We want to take costs out and bring transparency and automation in."
Sean Park, co-founder, Anthemis Group, says: “Selling one currency to buy another should not be that hard. Yet for the millions of companies and individuals doing so today, it is too often a painful and expensive experience. The Currency Cloud’s universal deliverable foreign exchange payments platform brings automation and efficiency to an enormous market that has traditionally been opaque, expensive and fragmented.”
Mike Laven, CEO, The Currency Cloud, says: “Businesses everywhere need to deal in multi-currencies in every working day. The need is ubiquitous. Yet the methods being used are antiquated and expensive to all but the largest corporates and the banks. The Currency Cloud technology will transformthe way businesses and their customers manage their foreign currency needs. Our re-design of the industry business model delivers price transparency, risk management and ease of use.”
