Juni, the banking platform for e-commerce and online marketing companies, raises €2M seed
Steve O'Hear @sohear / 2 years
Juni, a Swedish pre-launch startup that's building a banking app and platform for e-commerce and online marketing entrepreneurs, has raised just over €2.1 million in seed funding.
Leading the round is Berlin-based Cherry Ventures — the first deal, I believe, from newly recruited partner Sophia Bendz, who herself is based in Sweden. Various angel investors have also backed Juni, including NA-KD founder and CEO Jarno Vanahatapio and iZettle's former chief strategy and communications officer Johan Bendz.
Founded by Samir El-Sabini and Anders Orsedal and set to launch fully in early 2021, Juni wants to act as a 'financial companion" for digital businesses in the e-commerce and online marketing space. Features offered include a debit card with cashback on advertising spend, along with cash flow management, invoice and bank statement matching, and liquidity management. The Juni dashboard also provides a centralized overview of all your bank accounts, networks and payment services.
El-Sabini tells me that eventually the company may go the full route of applying for a bank license in 5-7 years, but for the foreseeable future is utilising the infrastructure of Banking-as-a-Service provider Railsbank, along with other fintechs, to plug those gaps. Besides, most of the value-add is the functionality built on top of core banking and it's here in relation to e-commerce and online marketing companies that Juni thinks it's spotted a big opportunity.
"We are helping e-commerce and marketing entrepreneurs understand their business financial health, giving them the right tools (credit plus cash-back) to improve it and grow, while at the same time automating their workload (fetching invoices and matching them to transactions). We aim to be the financial companion for all companies in our space".
"We all know e-commerce is a rapid moving industry (10 years growth in three months time this year!) making the need for singular platforms to support such e-commerce businesses all the more necessary," says Cherry Ventures' Bendz.
Former Spotify marketing exec-turned-VC Sophia Bendz on her love of early-stage investing
"E-commerce professionals are trying to keep up with the acceleration of the market and cannot afford to be bogged down triaging various softwares and systems with respect to their finances".
Although the official product launch isn't set until early next year, it's already possible to sign up for the waitlist with the open beta promised soon.
Meanwhile, the business model is straight forward enough. Initially, Juni will make money on interchange fees (minus the cashback it offers) and by charging a subscription in the best SaaS tradition. Credit is also an obvious revenue stream, too.
Sophia Bendz is leaving Atomico to join Berlin-based seed firm Cherry Ventures