Albert, a UK-based bookkeeping mobile app, announced on Tuesday it has been acquired by banking group, Santander. Founded in 2014, Albert describes itself as the “brainchild” of the created of award-winning mobile apps such as NatWest, RBS, and the BBC. The app provides customers with a solution to automate bookkeeping.
“Albert is an innovative, fast growing technology company, disrupting business finance management for people who work for themselves, a severely underserved sector that is rapidly growing. Backed by the investors behind Skype, Wix and Azimo, the company launched their platform publicly in early 2016, and has been recognised as UK startup of the year.”
Since launching, Albert has achieved the following:
- Featured by Apple App Store six times
- Over 2,500 five-star reviews on App Store
- Winner of Accenture’s Financial Tech Innovation programme
- Graduate from Telefonica’s startup accelerator Wayra
While sharing details about the company’s growth over the past four years, Co-founders of Albert, Dan Bruce and Ivo Weevers, stated:
“Freelancers ourselves, we started Albert at the end of 2014 when we built the first prototype on a flight from L.A to London. The first proper product went live early 2016. With an extremely small but extremely talented team, Albert quickly became the top-rated, fastest-growing bookkeeping platform in the UK in just under three years. In this time we have achieved exponential month-over-month usage growth, over half a million invoices have been sent by you, we’ve gained over 3,500 five-star ratings, we have over 55,000 UK users on iOS alone, have been featured many times by Apple, and we were the first B2B app with ‘Open Banking’ integration at the end of 2017. We just closed a second seed round in May of this year. Seeing Albert grow to where we are today blows our mind.”
The duo reported that for Albert users, nothing will change (for now). The company’s team will continue to support the app day in and day out. They added:
“On a personal note, we couldn’t be more proud of the whole Albert team. Together with them, our investors including our fantastic lead investors Mangrove Capital, our advisers and – of course – you, our users, we turned an idea into a fantastic reality.”