Remitly Closes $5.5 Million Series A Fundraising
by Unni Narayanan
Mobile money transfer service, Remitly, has announced today that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A fundraising led by QED. While many industries, mostly the tech and financial industries, have been overflowing with excitement over the potential applications and uses of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, there have been other companies focusing on the very real issues associated with the payments system, and discovering easier and more cost-effective ways of sending and receiving money digitally. Remitly is one such company. Remitly is a mobile money transfer service, which allows U.S. users send money to friends and family back home in the Philippines.
Included in the fundraising are many of Remitly’s existing investors; among them being Trilogy Partnership, Founders Co-Op, TomorrowVentures, Bezos Expeditions, and various other angels. Having a company like QED in its corner can vastly help the digital payment service grow due to its vast experience in financial technology, marketing, and operational experience, as illustrated by QED’s investments in companies like CreditKarma, TransUnion, SoMoLend, PeerTransfer, and more.
Remitly’s CEO and Co-Founder, Matt Oppenheimer, originally started the company (then known as Beamit) back in 2011, following his time working at Barclays Bank, running its mobile and internet banking programs in Kenya. The work helped him gain insight and knowledge on how banking works in developing markets, especially markets that depend greatly on the sending and receiving of payments digitally. His team includes former members of well-known companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Western Union and Oracle.
Taking advantage of its mobile platform, Remitly is able to vastly decrease its cost of operating its business (no forms, no agents, etc.) and allows 3-day money transfers to be available for free to its users. For immediate transfers, its fees range from $4.19 — $4.99. Additionally, Remitly is able to exploit an additional revenue stream inherent in fluctuating foreign exchange rates by holding foreign currency for a period of time. Remitly competes with, and undercuts, many other money transfer services, such as Western Union, Moneygram and Xoom, which went public in early 2013. Oppenheimer additionally alluded to the fact that Remitly has been growing quickly, and now processes somewhere in the millions of dollars of transactions per month.
With the new investment, the plans are to accelerate Remitly’s global market growth, as well as hire additional staff. The application recently added a messaging component allowing users to discuss remittances that are being sent. The application is available on both iOS and Android.
