NorthOne, a challenger bank targeting small businesses, freelancers and startup companies, has raised $21 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures.
Redpoint Ventures and investor Tom Williams will participate in the funding round.
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NorthOne plans to use the funding to boost its marketing efforts and accelerate its customer acquisition programs. The funding will also be used to hire additional staff in product and software engineering as well as expand its customer service team.
CEO Eytan Bensoussan co-founded NorthOne with his own upbringing in mind.
“I grew up in a family of small business owners where everybody would be going through occasional painful cycles of closing books and chasing invoices,” he told Crunchbase News. “So that in many ways influenced who we are trying to target.”
NorthOne spent a few years building out the product, conducting research with 100 small business owners across America, undergoing compliance testing and “finding the right partners.” NorthOne also aims to visualize cash flow for its customers so they can “prevent oops moments” such as buying a $10,000 oven when the money may not all be there.
“The role of a bank is not to just keep money safe and move it around occasionally,” Bensoussan said. “We want to go beyond banking and into the back office of companies and take the busy work right off their plates so the owners can have more time to focus on building their business.”
NorthOne, which launched in August 2019, offers FDIC-insured accounts through a partnership with Radius Bank. It allows customers to withdraw funds or make deposits at 300,000 ATMs around the country.
Related: Tandem raises £60m to fund international expansion
The bank offers dedicated sub-accounts to set aside funds for payroll, rent, taxes or other expenses as well as account integration with accounting, e-commerce and expense applications like Quickbooks, Xero, Expensify, Freshbooks, Wave and Shopify.
