Open banking fintech Bud inks $80m funding round
Open banking fintech firm Bud announced its $80m (£64m) Series B funding, led by Bellis Phantom Holdco, an indirect affiliate of investment funds managed by TDR Capital.
The investment, which was also backed by existing investors including Outward VC, will be used to develop the firm’s models and allow for further international expansion.
The open banking platform, which was founded in 2015, is currently used by customers including ANZ, Street UK and TotallyMoney to automate affordability checks, which previously required lending teams to spend hours trawling through transaction data and bank statements. Lending customers can expect to see an increase of about 85 per cent in capacity by combining open banking data with Bud’s AI capabilities in affordability assessments.
Other large-scale organisations, including HSBC and Credit Karma, use Bud’s technology to help customers understand their finances by providing data insights and personalised actions.
Bud co-founder and CEO, Ed Maslaveckas, said Bellis “sees real value in the technology and use cases we have developed”.
Gary Lindsay, Managing Partner at TDR Capital said: “We are hugely excited by the potential of Bud, not only in the ability of its platform to truly harness the opportunities from open banking, but also in its far-reaching potential to help power other businesses we are invested in.”
Bud’s Series B follows its $20m Series A investment in 2019, which saw Goldman Sachs, HSBC and ANZ fund the company’s vision for technological automation of complex financial data.