UK ‘social bank’ startup Kroo raises £17.7m

Targeting an early 2022 launch, Kroo says it wants to remove friction from financial interactions between friends and family, reducing the “anxiety that can surround social finances”.

It offers a prepaid debit card and tools to track personal and social finances – enabling users to easily create groups with friends, track spending, and split and pay bills quickly and securely.

The startup is also promising a socially conscious ethos, pledging to donate a percentage of profits to social causes. A tree-planting referral scheme has already been launched, so that every time a customer successfully refers a friend, Kroo plants 20 trees with the aim of creating a forest of a million trees.

The company is applying for a full banking license and has built its own technology platform that is microservices-based and cloud-native.

The funding will be used to drive its mobilisation phase – scaling up operations, growing its team across engineering, marketing, product, compliance and customer service, and further developing its product offering and app.

Andrea de Gottardo, CEO, Kroo, says: “We want to build the world’s greatest social bank: a bank dedicated to its customers and to the world we live in.”