Cleo, the digital assistant that helps people manage their finances today secured more than €2.2 million in a funding round led by Robin Klein of LocalGlobe. Previous Super Angels also participated in the round including Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype.
A year ago, we mentioned Cleo as one of Europe’s hottest fintech startups in 2016. In January this year, Cleo already raised $700K in venture capital. The fresh capital of the funding round announced today will be used for product development, team growth and international expansion.
Founded in 2015, Cleo is an artificial intelligent assistant that interacts with your bank accounts to manage your money. The app is now managing more than €449 million of assets, spread across tens of thousands of customers. Since launching in January 2017, it has answered more than a million queries from users. Typical questions range from “what is my balance?” to “what was my biggest spend this month?”. This way, London-based Cleo aims to provide the best tool for digital natives to manage their money.
According to Cleo, the app has shown unusually high engagement and retention for a new fintech service with over 70% of users engaging with the Cleo app regularly three months after signing up. The app allows people to securely connect all of their bank and credit card accounts and share financial insights via Facebook Messenger using natural language to:
- View their spending according to transactions, categories and merchants
- Automatically save money
- Send money to friends via Facebook Messenger without sort codes or logging into a bank
- Find better deals on bills, subscriptions and financial products
- Compare spending habits with those of peers
Barney Hussey-Yeo, the founder and CEO of Cleo stated: “Legacy banking software is unable to cater to the needs of a generation that is used to instant responses and real time interaction. We designed Cleo to make it easy for anyone to understand where their money is going, to easily save, or to send money to friends instantly through a familiar interface.”
Robin Klein, General Partner at LocalGlobe and lead investor in Cleo, commented: “We were very impressed with the application of AI to engage a community of digital natives frustrated with the difficulties of communicating with traditional banks. In a short time, the Cleo team has already demonstrated product execution for growth and retention of its target demographic. People using the service really understand where their money is going and can find ways to save and replace with better financial products.”
The London-based fintech startup provides insights across all UK bank and credit card accounts through Facebook Messenger. The data is secure because the app uses the same security software as world-leading banks.
