UK savings app Chip notches up £4m funding
UK-based savings app Chip has completed its Series A crowdfunding round on Crowdcube, raising over £4 million.
The firm has currently 7,036 investors in this round, and it follows a previous crowdfunding round which fell short of £1 million last year.
According to the firm, this is a record-breaking number of investors in the UK.
The app uses artificial intelligence (AI) to calculate how much a user can save, and automatically transfers that money to their savings account.
This is not very different from the likes of Plum, which also automates savings through a chatbot embedded in Facebook’s messenger.
“We believe we’re building the best savings account – one which makes stashing away money as easy as spending it,” says Chip founder and CEO Simon Rabin.
According to the app, there are already 75,000 Chip account holders, and it has processed £58 million of savings since last year’s crowdfunding round.
Rabin says: “This record-breaking funding round will allow us to accelerate this, on-boarding millions more users and launching new innovative features.”
Alex Latham, Chip’s chief marketing officer, adds: “We are becoming the challenger bank for savings and the enthusiasm of our savers to invest in the company is a fantastic endorsement.”
Chip says it plans to reach a million users within the next four years.
In the meantime, the funds will be used to launch new products, like ChipX, a community lending service set to launch “in early 2019”.
