Lemonade Finance (YC S21), a leading fintech startup that lets users send money home from Canada and the U.K is expanding its offering. Led by former Opera Director, Rian Cochran, and former OPay Director, Ridwan Olalere, Lemonade will now offer full-stack financial services to immigrants.
In 2020, Lemonade Finance was founded to help immigrants send and receive money from home. It was a crucial problem because despite the presence of notable companies in the space, transfers back home for immigrants remained expensive, inefficient and slow. We created our solution with this in mind and began offering services that are instant and free. This immediately drew customers’ attention across North America.
Since then, we have grown quickly. We ended 2021 with a successful UK launch and with a total payments volume (TPV) of $240 million. Our latest move is even more ambitious, with plans to become a full stack financial services app for immigrants in North America and Europe. As part of these plans, we will begin issuing debit cards by the end of Q1, allowing customers to make online payments and in stores with the balance in their Lemonade wallet, and we will continue to expand our multi-currency offering. We will also soon begin to provide virtual accounts that will allow users to set up savings accounts with a fantastic return. Beyond these core services, Lemonade Finance will also offer credit facilities, delivering on our promise to provide a full set of financial services to help immigrants establish themselves in their country of residence.
According to our Co-founder and CFO, Rian Cochran, “We launched Lemonade Finance to bridge the gap for immigrants and to help people feel someone has their back in their new country of residence. This unique understanding of creating a new and better financial experience for immigrants is what Lemonade Finance is all about, so it feels natural to expand our offering to cover the full suite of financial services immigrants need to establish themselves in their new country of residence, and become their primary financial services platform. The feeling of home is full financial access without feeling locked out.”
Ridwan Olalere, our Co-founder and CEO also said, “we are excited to announce our full stack of financial services for immigrants. If you’re an immigrant, it’s easy to feel like financial services aren’t made for you and things like that make it difficult to truly feel at home in your new country. Lemonade Finance is about financial services that feel tailor made for immigrants and helps them hold on to the feeling of being home.”
It’s a big step-up for us, and we expect to close our seed round before the end of Q2, after raising a pre-seed round in 2021 in the wake of our entry into Y Combinator’s summer batch.
About Lemonade Finance
Lemonade Finance makes it easy for immigrants to send and receive money from home instantly. With the Lemonade app, immigrants can securely hold, send and receive foreign and local currency. The Lemonade app is used by thousands of Kenyans, Nigerians and Ghanaians across North America, Europe, and is now available in the U.K. You can download the Lemonade app on Google Playstore and App store.