The Finnish fintech Enfuce has today announced its €45m Series C, the largest funding round for a female-founded fintech in the Nordics this year.

The round was led by UK-based VC firm Vitruvian Partners, known for having invested in startups like Marqeta and Wise — both now publicly listed at unicorn valuations. Enfuce is one of only a few female-founded fintechs in Europe, along with the likes of MoneyHub and Juno. The two founders, Monika Liikamaa and Denise Johansson, are both in their 40s and both come from a banking background.

Founded in 2016, the company describes itself as a CaaS (card-as-a-service) platform for card issuing. It has  plenty of customers in the non-banking community including Danish expense management startup Pleo, Swedish financial services companies Gee Finance and Qred as well as loyalty programmes like ST1.

“When we started, we wanted to make it easier for banks to offer better services, but what we realised was that banks have difficulties buying services from startups. Then we decided to focus on the fintech scene instead,” says Liikamaa. “Five years down the line, the big banks are now starting to contact us.”

After years of pulling it off without a marketing director, Enfuce hired one in February and in recent months it saw its monthly recurring revenue hit the €1m mark. It now has 13m card users on its platform.

“In the past seven months, we got more customers than we did in the previous four and a half years. I don’t know if this is typically Finnish, but we have the world’s best platform but we suck at marketing it,” Johansson says.

With the increased revenue, Enfuce had four investors to choose from when finalising its Series C fundraising.

“It’s terrible to have to pick but it is still a much nicer situation than what we’ve had in previous rounds. People talk about smart money, but in the beginning, we were happy to get any kind of money,” Liikamaa says.

Apart from Vitruvian Partners, Enfuce is also backed by Finnish Maki.vc and Tencent, which also participated in the latest funding round.

Now, with €45m to invest in further international growth, Vitruvian Partners’ know-how will be useful when scaling. Enfuce has recently expanded to Germany and France.

Monika Liikamaa will be speaking at our upcoming Sifted Summit October 5-6. Get your tickets here.

Mimi Billing is Sifted’s Nordic correspondent. She also covers healthtech, and tweets from @MimiBilling