Change Ventures led the $1.7M seed round investment in Estonian fintech askRobin
AskRobin, an Estonia-founded fintech that operates a financial services marketplace for “underbanked” customers in Latin America, has picked up $1.7 million in funding.
The seed round is backed by VC funds Change Ventures, Vereeni Early Stage Fund, BENE Asia Capital, and Lemonade Stand. In addition, a number of tech entrepreneurs from Estonia participated, such as Ragnar Sass, co-founder of Pipedrive, and Taavi Tamkivi, founder of the anti-money laundering platform Salv.
“We started in Mexico in late 2017, where we initially developed a FB Messenger chatbot to bring basic financial education to people,” says askRobin co-founder and CEO Rain Sepp (who previously spent 13 years working at digital lending startup Credit24). “However, we soon realised that we need to go the whole nine yards and make sure we get the lending companies to actually get interested in serving those people and making them better offers”.
Since then, askRobin has evolved into something more comparable to Credit Karma in the U.K., which pairs free credit scoring with a marketplace of suitable financial products. “We bring our partner companies access to risk based customer segments, and get them competing for customers, resulting in improved product offers,” explains Sepp. This, he argues, is far better than the status quo.
- Read more on the transaction in TechCrunch
- A great read - the investment story in askRobin by Yrjö Ojaaar, the investment partner of Change Ventures