LocalGlobe Leads £2M Funding round for London Fintech AI Cleo

Banks’ apps replaced with AI digital assistant

Cleo secured £2M in a round led by Robin Klein at LocalGlobe. Other participants in the round include Super Angel Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype, and Entrepreneur First led by general partner Wendy Tan-White. Jason Goodman, the founder of advertising agency Albion and also an investor, will become a non-executive director of the fintech business.

Cleo, is an artificial intelligent assistant that interacts with your bank accounts to manage your money. The app is now managing more than £400m of assets, spread across tens of thousands of customers. Since launching in January 2017, it has answered more than a million queries from users. Typical questions range from “what is my balance?” to “what was my biggest spend this month?” – making Cleo a unique tool for digital natives to manage their money.

Cleo has shown unusually high engagement and retention for a new fintech service with over 70 per cent of users engaging with Cleo regularly three months after signing up.

The app allows people to securely connect all of their bank and credit card accounts and share financial insights via Facebook Messenger using natural language to:

• View their spending according to transactions, categories and merchants

• Automatically save money

• Send money to friends via Facebook Messenger without sort codes or logging into a bank

• Find better deals on bills, subscriptions and financial products

• Compare spending habits with those of peers

Barney Hussey-Yeo, founder and CEO Cleo: “Legacy banking software is unable to cater to the needs of a generation that is used to instant responses and real time interaction. We designed Cleo to make it easy for anyone to understand where their money is going, to easily save, or to send money to friends instantly through a familiar interface.”

Robin Klein, General Partner at LocalGlobe and lead investor in Cleo: “We were very impressed with the application of AI to engage a community of digital natives frustrated with the difficulties of communicating with traditional banks. In a short time, the Cleo team has already demonstrated product execution for growth and retention of its target demographic. People using the service really understand where their money is going and can find ways to save and replace with better financial products.”

Cleo provides insights across all UK bank and credit card accounts through Facebook Messenger. The data is secure because the app uses the same security software as world-leading banks.

The funding round will be used for product development, team growth and international expansion. Cleo is hiring across its marketing and engineering teams.