Plum, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for personal finance, has successfully secured its initial 850,000 funding target through its second equity crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs. This round of funding comes less than a year after Plum raised nearly £925,000 on the funding portal.
As previously reported, Plum was launched in January 2017 by the former head of international at TransferWise, Victor Trokoudes and is claimed to be the first AI-powered Facebook chatbot that helps consumers manage their personal finances. Plum has reportedly undertaken the task of helping customers save money in a way that they barely notice by connecting securely to users bank accounts through Facebook messenger. The compay also stated it links to customers’ banking accountings, analyzes their activity, and helps them manage their money across three pillars:
- Save: Plum uses your history of transactions to save money for you automatically without any additional input from you.
- Invest (launching now): Customers choose from theme-based funds to express their view on world trends like Tech, Ethical companies, and Emerging Markets, risk-based funds for long-term diversified investing or P2P lending for more stable return. We believe that this is the first product of this kind in UK.
- Don’t get ripped off: Bills are analyzed and better and cheaper alternatives are provided. (Utilities, Loans, Credit Cards, Mortgages)
At the time of the second campaign’s debut, Victor Trokoudes, CEO and Co-Founder of Plum, reportedly stated:
“Since the beginning, Plum has been driven by a very clear mission; Make people Better off, and that to us means making people have more money than they used to. The development of Plum Investments is a step closer to completing our mission. By making investments available and engaging for everyone, people can take the first step to start investing and not feel this is something reserved for the rich, whilst also start growing their savings responsibly. We are delighted to be returning to Seedrs. We had a brilliant reception from investors last year, which helped fuel our exciting growth over the last 12 months, so we look forward to welcoming them all back again and will hopefully bring on some new investors to take us to the next stage of our mission.”
Funds from the latest funding round will be used in five key areas:
- Team: Add 5 Engineers to the team along with add head of Marketing and a Compliance Officer
- Revenue: Plum will focus on scaling its investment product take up while testing switching revenue.
- Expand: Within the year, Plum is aiming to launch across EU and one more international market.
- Product: Launch an app
- Marketing: Keep scaling acquisition
The campaign is currently set to close later this summer.
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