We've raised €180M to build the money app for people and businesses

Today we are announcing a €180 million Series C led by Westerly Capital, with every one of our existing investors taking part. It brings the total we have raised since 2019 to €310 million.

Funding announcements tend to be about the size of the number. I would rather use this one to explain what the money is for, and just as importantly, what it will not change.

Where we are

We started Pocket in Amsterdam in 2019, in a flat with a very unreliable radiator, because moving money between countries was slow, opaque and expensive, and almost nobody seemed bothered. Three of us had lived in four countries between us and lost a small fortune to exchange-rate mark-ups that never appeared on a receipt.

Seven years later, 9 million people use Pocket to hold, spend, send and save money in 38 currencies. 240,000 businesses use it to get paid, pay their teams and suppliers in 160 countries, and keep their books straight. Most transfers arrive in seconds, and every one of them uses the mid-market rate, with the fee shown before you press send.

We are now 640 people across Amsterdam, London and Lisbon. We have been profitable for the last four quarters, which means this round is not about keeping the lights on. It is about doing more, faster.

What the money is for

There are four things we want to do in the next two years, and this round pays for all of them.

• Pocket for business. Business accounts are our fastest-growing product. We will open in more countries, add local collection accounts so businesses can be paid like a local in more currencies, and build deeper connections to the accounting and commerce tools our customers already use.

• Pocket AI. Our assistant already answers questions about your money and flags payments that do not look like you. We want it to be genuinely useful every week: spotting the forgotten subscription, warning you before a tight month, matching receipts for a finance team. All of it with the same rule we started with, that it only reads your own data and never trains shared models on it.

• Faster transfers to more places. About 71% of our international transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. We want that above 90%, which means connecting directly to more local payment systems and holding more money in more countries.

• Security and resilience. Moving money is a trust business. A significant share of this round goes to the people and systems that keep accounts safe, detect fraud before it happens, and make sure Pocket works on the worst day, not just the average one.

Pocket has grown by doing the honest thing with fees and doing it well. That is a rare combination, and it compounds.

Sanne de Vries, partner, Westerly Capital

What isn't changing

When companies raise money, customers sometimes worry the product will get worse as pressure to grow increases. So here are some things we are committing to in writing:

1. Holding money stays free. No monthly fee on the Standard plan, and no charge for keeping money in any of the 38 currencies we support.

2. We use the mid-market rate. Our fee is visible and stated up front. We will never add a hidden mark-up to the exchange rate.

3. No surprise price rises. If a fee changes, you will hear about it at least two months before it applies, with the reason.

4. Your data stays yours. We do not sell it, and we do not use it to train models shared with other customers.

These are not new promises. They are the ones that got us here, and changing them would undo the reason most of our customers chose us in the first place.

Who we're hiring

We plan to grow to around 900 people over the next 18 months. The largest teams will be in engineering, especially payments, ledger and fraud, followed by risk and compliance, customer support, and business banking. We hire in Amsterdam, London and Lisbon, and we work from the office three days a week.

If you have read this far and any of that sounds like your kind of work, I would love you to have a look at our open roles. And to our customers: thank you. Every one of the 9 million of you who told a friend about Pocket made this round possible.

Nadia Mensah, co-founder and CEO