There is welcome news to report in Leicester, London and beyond with Backbase, StaffCircle and Kita picking up tech funding.
Banking platform Backbase has benevolent backers with a €120 million (£102 million) raise in growth equity funding from Motive Partners. This investment values the fintech company at €2.5 billion (£2.1 billion).
Leicester-based HR software platform StaffCircle has raised £3 million from its existing investors, bringing the total amount raised up to £5 million.
Carbon insurer Kita has announced its £350,000 pre-seed raise, led by Insurtech Gateway.
Backbase Boosted
Backbase is based in the fine city of Amsterdam. It was founded in 2003 and has regional offices in Atlanta (Americas HQ), Boise, Mexico City, Toronto, London, Cardiff, Dubai, Kraków, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.
The fintech firm says it has grown organically to over €200 million (£170 million) in revenue, and is now partnering with a fintech specialist private equity firm to boost its “Engagement Banking” strategy.
Jouk Pleiter, Founder and CEO of Backbase, comments. “Today is a major milestone for more than 2,000 Backbasers and 150 customers around the world, to celebrate the incredible progress we made.”
Its white label cloud-based Engagement Banking platform is used by banks and credit unions to digitise their customer-facing operations.
Backbase’s clients include BNP Paribas, Citizens Bank, HDFC, Judo Bank, KeyBank, National Bank of Bahrain, Navy Federal Credit Union, NatWest, Raiffeisen, Standard Bank and Societe Generale.
StaffCircle in Good Shape
StaffCircle will use the funding to create ten new jobs. It currently has 50 employees listed on LinkedIn.
The funding round was courtesy of Blackfinch Ventures and the MEIF Proof of Concept & Early Stage Fund.
The company says it almost tripled its annual revenue to more than £800,000 in the previous financial year and is now on course to break through the £1 million barrier.
Its clients include the Food Standards Agency, finnCap, housing associations and NHS bodies.
David Baker, investment manager at Mercia, which manages MEIF, notes: “StaffCircle’s focus on managing remote workers has helped to differentiate it from competitors and achieve significant growth.”
Kita Flying
Kita (which means ‘north’ in Japanese) is based in London. In a scoop in February, eWeek UK reported on its pre-launch plans.
At that time, it stated its ambitions to be the world’s first “carbon insurer”, using parametric insurance products that address this challenge by guaranteeing the quality and delivery of carbon offsets and negative emission technologies.
In the pre-seed announcement, Kita says the round was heavily oversubscribed and included investors Carbon13, Climate VC and Echelon Capital.
Kita explains: “To fight climate change, the world urgently needs to (1) stop emitting carbon, and (2) remove existing excess carbon from the atmosphere. Kita’s focus is carbon removal, insuring ‘carbon delivery risk’ to enable carbon removal solutions to scale.”
The tech startup’s insurance products cover carbon delivery risk.
The pre-seed round will be used for Kita’s product build and for hiring. (Last month it revealed three new hires.)
