Tera Ventures and founder of Monese to buy out the startup's main business line for retail banking
Estonian Tera Ventures and Monese founder Norris Koppel will acquire the startup's retail banking business. Monese's previous major investors have exited the startup. They include Swedish VC Kinnevik (which led Monese's $60M Series B in 2018, after which it held a 21% stake in the fintech), US payment platform PayPal, British Airways owner International Airlines Group and London-based VC Augmentum Fintech (all of which participated in Monese's $60M Series B), and London-based financial services organization HSBC (which invested $35M in 2022).
Monese's second business line, XYB, which recently became a separate company in April 2024, is an end-to-end coreless platform for banks and other businesses. XYB spun off as an additional business line of Monese in 2021. In 2023, XYB was launched officially. The solution helps banks and other non-bank financial institutions to make new financial services solutions accessible faster. XYB has also secured new funding from both existing and new investors. The amount of the deal and the names of the investors are undisclosed. In addition, the company plans to have a new ownership structure and a new manager.
Founded in 2015 by Norris Koppel, Monese's solution is a mobile-based multi-currency account and accompanying debit card that supports cash deposits and withdrawals. There's no credit check, and customers don't need local proof of address, but they do need to provide a photo ID and a selfie and be EU or UK residents. It is possible to convert sterling, euro, and Romanian lei into 16 European currencies on the platform. Monese has over 2M customers in 31 countries. To date, the company has raised approximately $208M in funding.
In the 2022 financial year, Monese made a loss of £30,5M losses. In February 2024, it was announced that the company had lost the trust of one of its main investors, Swedish VC Kinnevik, which decided to write off its previous investment.
Tera Ventures is an international investment firm based in Estonia. The founding partners are Andrus Oks and Stanislav Ivanov. Tera Ventures invests €45M from its second fund in startups from the Baltics states, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
