Riga, 7th June 2021

Black Pearls VC leads €2.1M round in Latvian fintech Nordigen

07 June 2021

Latvia’s Nordigen is bursting the open banking hype bubble with a free API and 2.1 million euros from a set of new investors, while giving Tink, Plaid and Truelayer a run for their money. Since announcing their new freemium model on December 1st of last year, the challenger fintech has gone from supporting 300 to 1,000 European bank APIs in just a few months. Nordigen’s new business model attracted investment from Black Pearls VC, Inventure, Highgoal Capital, ID4 Ventures, Calchas Holding and angel investors Artis Kehris, Henry Nilert, Gerri Kodres and Riivo Anton.

We integrated more banks in the last six months than Tink managed in a whole year. Having less legacy technology to maintain means we can move a lot faster.

Rolands Mesters, CEO and co-founder of Nordigen

The startup is challenging Tink and other overvalued industry incumbents still charging for access to bank APIs. Instead of making open banking more accessible, they’re taxing access to data that’s free under European banking laws. Some of the large players still use reverse engineering solutions and outdated technology, like screen-scraping, as the default for connecting to European banks. Nordigen is committed to focusing solely on open APIs created by banks. It aims to fix the market inequality by maintaining a freemium model and matching the API coverage of competitors.

It's time to wipe out screen scraping in Europe. It's expensive and hacky. Banks have built amazing APIs to let people migrate their account information securely and without friction. Nordigen allows developers to connect to these bank APIs for free

Rolands Mesters

Nordigen's business model is built on banking data analytics and providing data insights. After partnering with Tink and experiencing firsthand having to pay for an API, Nordigen decided it could do things better. Investing additional capital into improving its already robust API platform will allow Nordigen to handle the influx of clients also fleeing exorbitantly priced open banking data services. It already quadrupled the number of API users within four months and has recently launched a self-service platform.

Establishing trust between the growing number of online transactions is a significant pain point for numerous industries. Nordigen’s experienced team and the world’s first free open banking data hub convinced us to support the company in this round. Access to banking data is becoming a commodity and Nordigen is creating the next valuable layer on top by turning fragmented financial data into usable information for various types of businesses.

Aleksander Dobrzyniecki, Partner at Black Pearls VC

Use cases for open banking are rapidly expanding in several industries. The “buy now, pay later” industry experienced rapid growth during the last year, and the personal finance vertical is prime for the next superapp to appear on the scene. Credit cards and various lending applications have a crucial need for reliable data analysis and insights. The expansion of open banking allows fintechs to access user data and build better customer experiences.

About Nordigen

Nordigen is the first free open banking API in Europe providing connections to all major European banks. Since launching in 2016, Nordigan has been an industry leader in building solutions for turning raw transaction data into actionable insights. As a licensed Account Information Service Provider (AISP) authorised in 31 European countries, the company ensures that there are no more upfront commitments and no hidden costs - just free access to PSD2 data. Their services are already used by some of the most innovative banks, lenders, and fintechs in Europe, and clients using the free API have already quadrupled in over just a few months.

About Black Pearls VC

Black Pearls VC is a Poland-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on seed, post-seed, and Series A investments in leading tech startups from Northern & Central Europe. Focusing on supporting ambitious entrepreneurs in building companies with a global reach, Black Pearls VC is usually one of the company’s first investors, helping founders scale and reach their goals. Black Pearls VC focuses on deep tech startups working across various sectors and believes in supporting entrepreneurs who develop novel and ambitious technologies. It usually invests at an early stage with initial investments ticket ranging between €100k - €1m and follow-on investments in later rounds. Black Pearls VC is a part of Kauffman Fellows network of over 400 venture firms and organizations.