Hubuc , the on-demand financial services platform, managed to raise about 10 million dollars (8.8 million euros) in a new round of financing led by American investors, among which the funds WndrCo and Runa Capital , the Silicon Valley accelerator, stand out. Y Combinator , Village Global , and a group of independent investors, including the former CEO of Mozilla and the former vice president of Uber .
With this new injection of funds, the company’s plans will focus on using part of these resources to open an operations center in Barcelona , so that those workers who wish to work in person can do so without any problem. This is because the fintech’s 30 employees currently work remotely and from different parts of Europe . Following the funding round, the startup also added Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of Dreamworks Animations, to its shareholder staff , who will serve as CEO of WndrCo. The 20 best travel apps that cannot be missing on your mobile.
This is not the first time that Hubuc has received external financing, since in 2020 it obtained 350,000 euros from investors such as SeedRocket 4Founders, Lanai Partners or Reus Capital.
Hubuc, the “Amazon” of the financial sector
Hubuc is a startup that was founded in Barcelona by Ignacio Javierre and Hasan Nawaz at the end of 2019, with the aim of democratizing access to banking services. In the creators’ own words, the business idea is “to become the Amazon Web Services of the financial sector”.
To do this, the Catalan company offers customers a platform with which they can introduce their own payment or financial management system within their operations.
“Hubuc is an integrated financial power behind those brands that want to offer all kinds of financial services. From a single API and with just one contract , Hubuc takes care of everything related to compliance and gives you access to banking and fintech services so that companies can create new revenue streams , increase customer loyalty and improve the user experience » , reads the description of the web.
Cards with tailored services
Among its most prominent clients is Okticket , a platform through which a company’s employees can scan the tickets they want to spend as business expenses and that Hubuc has simply turned into a card with which they can pay these expenses directly. Thanks to this technology, that card can only be used, for example, in restaurants and during business hours.
Likewise, Hubuc works together with Declarando , a kind of online agency for freelancers that now has a card so that its clients can pay their work expenses directly with it.
In addition, they have an agreement with Mastercard and Visa to be able to issue this type of card. “Our vision is to become the platform that facilitates access to financial services for any company and can integrate them into their products ,” they summarize from Hubuc. «We allow companies to give much more powerful functionalities to the card than those offered by a conventional bank. We have the ability to issue the card and parameterize its use, as well as the possibility of issuing an IBAN account: from here, the client takes these two elements and uses it as he wishes» .
The startup emerged as a response to a trend that has been generated in the market, where non-financial companies are creating their own banking services. Some examples are Uber, with Uber Money; Shopify, with your Shopify Debit Card; or El Corte Inglés, which was one of the first companies to offer its own card.