Kevin., a Lithuanian-based account-to-account payment startup, has secured $10 million of new capital in a seed funding round co-led by OTB Ventures and Speedinvest.
The investment brings the company’s total capital raised to $14 million. Also joining the funding round were OpenOcean, Javier Perez’s Global PayTech Ventures, and high net worth individuals including AmRest founder Henry McGovern.
Kevin. focuses on mobile and POS payments where customers predominantly pay using cards currently. The firm's POS product will enable customers to pay from their bank accounts for goods in physical shops through existing card terminals using NFC technology.
The new funds will be used to build out the product suite and to expand into new markets. Currently, the Company supports more than 2,700 merchants in 15 markets, including Sweden, Finland, Norway, Poland, Netherlands and Portugal. By 2022, kevin. expects to have operations in 28 markets in total, including in new markets such as the UK, Spain and France. The company has a team of more than 100 employees in seven countries and it plans to expand its workforce to beyond 350 employees in 2022.
Tadas Tamosiunas, CEO and co-founder at kevin., says: “We are seeing huge demand for our services with customers now seeing up to 40% of transactions being made directly through pre-linked bank accounts in mobile apps and more than 70% switching from cards to A2A in online payments.”
Javier Perez, the former president of Mastercard Europe, forecasts a surge in demand for A2A payments as a cheap alternative to debit and credit cards: “After a long career in the card payments industry, the increasing complexity of a cashless economy has brought its own problems - bureaucracy, inefficiency and ultimately higher costs for merchants and consumers. kevin. is poised to change that - enabling innovation with an easily scalable solution throughout Europe. The potential for this business is vast.”