A former product lead at Revolut has raised $30m in Series B funding for Apron, a fintech aiming to become the financial superapp for small and medium businesses (SMBs).
The funding round was led by existing investor Zinal Growth, the tech fund founded by Checkout.com founder Guillaume Pousaz. Index, Bessemer and iPod inventor Tony Fadell’s investment firm Build Collective, also all previous investors, participated too. Apron has previously raised $20.5m in funding.
CEO and founder Bogdan Uzbekov spent three years at Revolut as a product lead and country manager. He founded Apron in 2021 after taking a role at US fintech Block (formerly Square) where he worked on its consumer money transfer app CashApp.
“The SMB finance superapp”
Uzbekov tells Sifted his experience at CashApp underlined how the user experience for consumer payments was far more developed than B2B payments. In particular, he noticed that while Square’s payment terminals eased consumer card transactions to businesses, it didn’t do much to rectify the clunky process of businesses paying each other.
“It was like business payments were a decade behind consumer payments,” he says.
Apron wants to become an all-in-one platform where companies of up to 100 employees can pay suppliers and employees as well as sort through and send invoices.
It monetises through a tiered subscription model for both businesses and accountants, which costs up to £49 a month. Apron also charges a 2.9% fee for another product which enables businesses to pay suppliers with a credit card, even if it’s not an accepted mode of payment.
Apron plans to add a business expenses card product and a new product to ease the invoicing process between large suppliers and small businesses.
“We’re focusing on distribution and growth at this stage as well as investing into new products,” says Uzbekov. “We’re gross profit positive but we’re not at the stage where we want to achieve profitability.”
According to Companies House filings, Apron made a loss of £3.9m in 2023.
The Revolut founder factory
Revolut is becoming a true founder factory; earlier this year, Sifted reported that there are at least 15 businesses founded by former Revolut employees in the last year or so.
There may also be more waiting in the wings. In August, the UK fintech giant closed a sale of current employee shares that increased its valuation from $33bn to $45bn — and gave them a £500m payout that could encourage more of them to take the dip into entrepreneurship.
Uzbekov describes his experience at Revolut as key to shaping his resolve as a founder.
“I often describe Apron as taking the execution from Revolut and the product depth from Square,” he says. “Revolut is incredible at building things and solving hard problems — I definitely learned that from Revolut.”
