Why We Invested: Weavr.io

Anthemis has made a conscious choice to invest in a new generation of entrepreneurs building startups that are pioneering change at the infrastructural layer of finance; whether that’s within the Open Banking space (Truelayer, Flux), insurance (Qover, Matic, Hokodo), asset management (Goji) or payments (Currencycloud, Hover).

More broadly, over the last decade at Anthemis, we have invested in over 100 financials services startups globally. Along the way, we have met entrepreneurs that we admire greatly but never managed to work together with. This was the case of Alex Mifsud and his previous company Ixaris. So when Alex mentioned he was working on something new, we knew we had to pay attention.

While digital companies have grown to tackle an increasing number of complex use cases, whether in transportation, lodging, work, e-commmerce, services, the digital financial services layer built for them has made progress on only a few aspects. Card acceptance is probably the one most advanced with the likes of Stripe, Adyen etc. However the rest of the financial stack remains relatively unchanged.

For example, some key challenges remain in the the card issuance space:

• As an issuer, it is difficult to get onboarded on to the existing players. Often, it can take six to nine months to go live.
• It is difficult to avoid ‘financial services debt’, where adding or changing providers becomes a long-term drag.

Enter Weavr.io, a provider-agnostic technical platform that allows anyone that needs to issue payment to easily build it on their app and future proof it. Not only does Weavr.io simplify the interaction with the various underlying providers: issuers, programs, KYC etc.. but it also provide the technical building blocks to integrate specific functions in an application. Weavr.io has introduced the concept of Payment models: standardised and re-usable payment flows with their unique API.

With Weavr.io, service providers can now more easily embed payments within rich digital applications. For example: a B2B marketplace can create payouts to providers directly on a unique account, a family financial app can create birthday gifts in the form of a card with specific restrictions, a tour guide travel service can manage onsite budget by creating per trip expense accounts and cards, and much more to be invented!

If you are thinking about building applications with embedded payments, reach out to the team at Weavr.io: https://weavr.io and reach out to me at Anthemis as well : @tek_fin. We can’t wait to see the applications leading the next generation of financial services.