Plum, the AI assistant that aims to boost your bank balance, today announced it raised €2.7 million in additional funding to fuel its growth and expansion across Europe. The London-and-Athens-based startup is also launching an Android app to reach more savers in the UK and beyond. Plum now already counts 31 team members, while the Athens office has tripled in size since April.
The fresh capital brings the company’s total funding to €8.4 million. Investors in the round are EBRB and VentureFriends. Christian Faes, founder and CEO of LendInvest has also joined this round, further bolstering Plum’s support in the fintech community.
This week has also seen the launch of Plum’s Android app, following its successful release on iOS in April 2019. Plum is now one of the few financial AI assistants that is available across Facebook Messenger, iOS and Android. The launch of Android is also a key step in plans to bring Plum to users beyond the UK, due to Android’s wide market share in Europe and beyond. In Spain, for example, over 80% of smartphone users have Android.
Plum’s CEO and Co-founder, Victor Trokoudes, commented: “We’re ending 2019 with the great news that our close collaborators VentureFriends and EBRD have chosen to invest further in Plum. We’re also welcoming backing from Christian Faes, the co-founder of LendInvest. Our plans to bring Plum’s magic to even more people across Europe are well underway, with our iOS and Android apps. Until now we have been focused on the UK but the Brits are not the only people who are struggling to save and grow their money. Our sights are firmly set on Europe; in Spain, for example, a quarter of the population don’t have any savings at all.”
He continued: “We plan to help these people by investing heavily in our product to make it as useful as possible. We have hired a behavioural scientist to ensure that the new features we’re building are trail-blazing and informed by actual human behaviour rather than industry assumptions. We recently launched two new intelligent saving rules: the 52 Week Challenge (which can help you save £1367 over a year) and the Rainy Day Rule (which puts aside money when it rains). Saving rules use automation to help people save more effectively without overloading them with information. We have good evidence that this approach works: our automated round-ups feature, that we launched earlier this year has become a firm favourite among Plum users, boosting their savings by 50% on average.”
