Bud raises $80m to scale its lending and personalisation AI in global markets

Bud, an open banking fintech (www.thisisbud.com) founded in 2015, has today announced its Series B funding totalling $80m. Bellis Phantom Holdco ltd, an indirect affiliate of investment funds managed by TDR Capital LLP, is the largest investor followed by SEI investments and other existing investors including Outward VC.

The Series B investment demonstrates the value of Bud’s technology, which is based on transactional AI models that enable financial institutions to personalise digital products and automate lending decisions. The funding will be used to further develop Bud’s models and facilitate international expansion, while enabling Bud to exceed the demands of its growing client portfolio.

Bud’s intelligent open banking platform is used by customers including ANZ, Street UK and TotallyMoney to automate affordability checks, which previously required lending teams to spend hours trawling through transaction data and bank statements.

Other large-scale organisations, including HSBC and Credit Karma, use Bud’s technology to help customers understand their finances by providing thoughtful data insights and personalised actions. This enables Bud to connect people with better, more personalised financial services including rewards-based products and insurance, underpinned by advanced encryption services to keep their data secure.

Bud has differentiated in the market with its ability to build a highly accurate picture of a customer’s finances by understanding “messy” transaction data.

Bud Co-Founder and CEO, Ed Maslaveckas, said of the investment: “Bellis sees real value in the technology and use cases we have developed. Bud’s transactional intelligence services allow applications to become truly personalised for the first time. For example, our lending customers can expect to see an increase of about 85% in capacity by combining open banking data with our AI capabilities in their affordability assessments.

“Over the past three years we have been developing this core technology, which has now reached a level of transaction enrichment which is 33% more accurate than industry leaders. The extensive investment in our technology has paid dividends, enabling us to enter a new market and get to over 93% accuracy in just six weeks.”

TDR Capital LLP is a leading private equity fund manager which manages funds which make long term investments and work with management teams to drive multi-year growth.

Gary Lindsay, Managing Partner at TDR Capital said: “We are hugely excited by the potential of Bud, not only in the ability of its platform to truly harness the opportunities from open banking, but also in its far-reaching potential to help power other businesses we are invested in. The effective integration of technology and data science has long been a core part of TDR’s operational strategy and this investment is consistent with that approach.”

Bud’s Series B, follows its $20m Series A investment in 2019, which saw Goldman Sachs, HSBC and ANZ fund the company’s vision for technological automation of complex financial data.