Banking startup Soldo gets $11million from Accel as it pivots to business accounts

LONDON — Banking startup Soldo has secured $US11 million (£8.6 million) in funding for its new business service, which allows companies to manage and track employee spending via their app.

Soldo announced on Wednesday that it had closed a Series A funding round, led by tech investors Accel. Accel’s previous investments include the likes of Facebook, Dropbox, and Deliveroo.

Soldo’s app lets an unlimited number of people use a single bank account. This lets businesses minimise time-consuming and costly admin, streamline a company’s spending, and ensure all transactions are transparent and trackable.

“We were delighted our business account was first to market in the UK offering companies an entirely new way to automate company-wide expense accounting, effectively eliminating the workload required to manage cash advances for employees and track company cash flow,” says founder & CEO says in a statement Carlo Gualandri.

Soldo was originally pitched at parents who wanted to give their children a set amount of money and track how they spent it. Is the new business service a pivot?

Gualandri told Business Insider the family account was “a big research and development experiment in go-to-market and customer experience.” Soldo began, he says, with the problem of how to make group banking easier, and decided to start with the simplest type of group: the family. Working on the Family app allowed them to tackle problems, find solutions and improve features, before bringing the product to a much larger market. Read more

Camilla Hodgson - Business Insider Australia - 21 June 2017