Tera Ventures leads the €2.5 million seed round investment to Montonio
Photo: Montonio team
Meet Tallinn-based Montonio the new one-stop shop for online businesses looking to take their e-commerce sales to the next level – who have just raised €2.5M from current and former Bolt, Wise and Pipedrive executives and VC firms. The investment round was led by our member Tera Ventures.
The company has built a unique financing solution that lets the customer obtain buy now pay later (BNPL) offers from multiple lenders in real-time, compare them, and sign the one they find most suitable. Compared to the large BNPL players on the market, like Klarna, the solution decreases the credit costs for the customer by up to 50%, while significantly increasing the conversion rates for the merchant.
Markus Lember, the CEO says that: “even though the BNPL market is full of new players, the product has been around in the Baltic states for decades. Unfortunately, the loan providers fail to differentiate from each other. Quite often the consumer has only one provider to choose from at the checkout, regardless of the pricing offered”, he explains. “Thus, we see that the market needs some competition for the end-user – and that’s the issue our product solves.”
The company has partnered with more than 1,300 e-commerce merchants across the Baltic states and other European countries. “We are seeing BNPL and open banking start-ups reach historically high valuations and record round sizes – and so was our current round nearly 3x oversubscribed”, comments Lember. “Our quick high growth has validated the hypothesis that we can grow organically and without relying on too much investor funding.”
Apart from financing, the company has developed an e-commerce payment solution based on open banking, that can cut costs up to 100x in comparison to traditional card payment schemes like Visa and Mastercard. The solution has been extremely well received and used by a quarter of the company’s native Estonia’s population in just the first half of 2021 alone.
Stanislav Ivanov, Founding Partner at Tera Ventures: “Montonio represents a new wave of e-commerce technology companies that first and foremost are focused on user experience and making sure that check-out is a seamless part of the overall shopping process. Utilizing latest technologies and partner integrations, Montonio is able to offer better service and lower costs which enables higher conversions and increased profitability for merchants.”
The €2.5M seed round was led by Tera Ventures, with participation from US-Poland ffVC, and other VC firms. Several business angels participants in the round, including Bolt’s CEO Markus Villig, Bolt’s first investor Mikko Silventola former Pipedrive executives Sven Kirsimäe (current CTO of Rendin) and Kair Käsper (current co-founder of Klaus), Wise’s former heads of operations Triin Hertmann (current co-founder of Grünfin) and Martin Sokk (current co-founder of Lightyear) just to name a few.
The investment will be used to expand into new markets across the EU and to gain market share in their existing markets.
Further info:Stanislav Ivanov
Founding Partner
Tera Ventures
Founding Partner
Tera Ventures