Yapily, an open banking platform based in the UK, announced on Monday it secured $13 million through its Series A funding round, which was led by Lakestar, an early investor of Skype, Spotify, Airbnb, Facebook, and Revolut, with participation from HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and LocalGlobe. Angel investors also include Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise chairman and co-founder), Ott Kaukver (Twilio’s CTO), Roberto Nicastro (UniCredit’s former deputy CEO) and Frank Strauss (Former CEO of Deutsche Postbank).
Founded in 2017, Yapily describes itself as an “award-winning, API Only technology provider whose mission is to enable innovative products to connect banks, empowering a new generation of financial services.” The company further explained:
“Imagine if service providers had a seamless, secure and scalable pathway for end users to connect to their finances and make payments. No interruptions, no compromises, just immediate access to financial institutions. Yapily is the API middleware allowing your turnkey solutions to thrive in the age of open data and open banking. We work behind the scenes, providing API connectivity to all banks via a single integration to retrieve data and initiate payments. Only we never interact with end users.”
Stefano Vaccino, Founder and CEO of Yapily, further stated that by using the Yapily API and infrastructure, he and his team are not only providing their partners with “strong and powerful” connectivity to boost their user experiences but they are also giving them services which can “fuel greater financial management and accessibility.”
Stephen Nundy, Partner at Lakestar further commented that Lakestar is investing in “market leading technology” that is ahead of the competition, both in terms of seamlessness to the end-user, and in security and control. Nundy added:
“Their ‘Open API first’ approach, with no screen scraping or reverse engineering of functionality, ensures all parties are getting the performance, scale, and security expected of such a critical piece of API infrastructure.”
Yapily is planning to use the investment round’s funds to continue the growth and development of its products.