Cross-border payments platform LemFi secures $53m in Series B funding
LemFi has raised $53 million in Series B funding, led by Highland Europe.
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LemFi, a platform transforming how immigrant communities access financial services, has raised $53 million in Series B funding led by Highland Europe with participation from previous investors Left Lane Capital, Palm Drive Capital and Y Combinator. The new round brings LemFi’s total capital raised to $85 million to date.
Founded in 2021, LemFi enables users to open multi-currency accounts and send and receive money globally, reliably and at a low cost. With over one million users across Europe and North America sending money to emerging markets, including India, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan, LemFi recently crossed $1 billion in monthly transactions. This is set to increase further, with LemFi adding Asia, including China, to its platform, growing 30% month-on-month.
LemFi was founded by Ridwan Olalere and Rian Cochran who met whilst working at fintech unicorn OPay, incubated by Norwegian browser provider Opera.
Using the new funding, LemFi will focus on growing the company in three core areas: building out the platform to extend its financial services offering, scaling its payment network licences and partnerships to provide hyper-localised service, and hiring talent globally to support its next growth stage.
Ridwan Olalere, co-founder and CEO of LemFi, said: “When we started building LemFi, we were told remittance had already been solved. But for too many people, it is still too slow, cumbersome and expensive with customers telling us that in some instances it was cheaper to send money from the US via Canada than directly to their families back home. By targeting the communities most in need, we’ve built LemFi into the go-to remittance service for one million people, supporting them in building wealth across 20 countries. We’re not stopping there: this new funding will support us in our mission to build the financial services hub for immigrants globally from adding new features to expanding to new countries. We’re delighted to be partnering with Highland to help us scale LemFi into a fintech giant.”
Sam Brooks, partner at Highland Europe, said: “LemFi’s mission to provide trusted, reliable access to financial services for immigrant communities has inspired an incredibly loyal customer base and has generated impressive growth over the past several years. In addition to the success in initial geographies, we are excited by LemFi’s continuing international expansion given the extent of the global problem they are solving. Ridwan and Rian are fantastic leaders, and we are thrilled to partner with them and the LemFi team to help them scale and continue their growth into new markets.”
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