Identity and fraud-prevention platform FrankieOne closed a star-studded $20 million Series A round, off the back of phenomenal growth, to power its international expansion.
The round was led by Australian venture capital (VC) heavyweights AirTree Ventures and Greycroft, a US-based VC firm whose prior investments include Bumble, HuffPost, and Venmo.
Harry Stebbings’ UK-based 20VC, as well as Reinventure, Tidal Ventures, APEX Capital, and Mantis VC also contended to join the highly competitive and oversubscribed round.
In an Australian first, multiple celebrity investors have joined the mix, including international music sensations The Chainsmokers, Robinhood Founder and Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev, Monzo Founder Tom Blomfield, plus senior executives at Revolut and Public.com.
FrankieOne experiences exponential growth
FrankieOne’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has exploded by 20 times annually.
This is driven by significant global growth, with sales outside of Australia comprising approximately 50% of the company’s revenue, compared with 1% only six months ago.
FrankieOne has managed to attract over 80 new clients across banking, BNPL, digital exchanges and fintech, including tier 1 companies such as Afterpay, Westpac, and Zipmex.
All growth has been organic, as the company has not had a sales or marketing team.
Serial Australian Fintech entrepreneurs Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper co-founded the FrankieOne startup in 2017, after attempting initially to become a neobank.
During this process, they discovered how disjointed customer onboarding was in banks and other fintechs. They turned their attention to focus on resolving this global problem.
FrankieOne’s Chief Executive Officer Simon Costello, expounded on their inspiration.
“The ameliorated customer experience arising from the seamless onboarding process has offered us a significant competitive advantage and driven FrankieOne’s eventual success.”
“With severe penalties for incorrect customer onboarding, the primary focus for banks and fintechs has been on compliance, which comes at the detriment of the customer experience.”
“What we have learned is that it does not need to be one or the other. Regulatory and technical challenges are often a major roadblock in a fintech’s ability to rapidly scale internationally.”
“Our mission is to create a platform that provides fintechs with the convenience of consuming the world’s identity verification and fraud-prevention services via a single unified API.”
“This facilitates fintechs to “switch on” geographies and services as they need, and therefore enables these financial institutions to focus on innovation and their core business.”
With a strong global presence in Asia Pacific, Europe and the USA, the funds raised from the Series A round will be put towards furthering their international footprint, which already connects more than 350 third party providers and data sources across 46 countries.
FrankieOne will offer transaction monitoring for both fiat and cryptocurrencies this year.
Comments on FrankieOne’s Serie A funding round
Simon Costello further expressed gratitude towards the participating investors.
“We are grateful to have attracted a high-calibre cohort of prominent investors who believe in our mission. We look forward to helping more fintechs scale with our next phase of growth.”
“We are lucky to attract high profile global investors who recognise the huge market potential for FrankieOne as more companies embrace embedded finance and become fintechs.”
FrankieOne is doubling its headcount including welcoming senior hires such as former McKinsey associate partner Warren Oakes as FrankieOne’s Chief Operating Officer.
The growth trajectory is expected to continue as they look to bring in sales and marketing talent to double down on the organic customer growth achieved to date through referrals.
John Henderson a Partner at AirTree Ventures said, “Know your customer (KYC) and digital identity verification are board level issues for financial services companies globally.”
“The current, manual systems used by fintechs and FTSE100 companies alike are both bespoke and broken. The world needs a better solution, and we believe FrankieOne provides it.”
“With the progress and traction seen by FrankieOne, we’re excited to be leading their Series A as they position themselves to be the leading identity verification and fraud risk provider.”
Will Szczerbiak, a Partner at Greycroft said, “Financial services providers and companies are paying top dollar in their efforts to acquire and onboard new customers.”
“Upon signup, clients undergo checks like KYC, identity verification and anti-fraud that can lead companies to reject great customers because of reliance on inadequate systems.”
“FrankieOne’s APIs extracts the complexity away from the process and thus allows their clients to onboard more great customers while delivering a delightful end user experience.”
“It is a unique approach that scales globally and we are excited about the partnership.”
