The 15 best UK fintech startups according to Dealroom

Image credit: Kuda Technologies

The financial technology sector is one of the most innovative and fast-growing industries globally. And the UK is home to some of the world’s leading financial institutions, with London at the center of the action.

There are many reasons behind this.

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Firstly, the UK is home to a large number of financial institutions, making it a natural place for fintech companies to establish themselves.

Second, it has a long history of innovation in finance, dating back to the early days of the banking system.

And last but not least, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has supported fintech firms and launched several initiatives to help them thrive.

In addition, the UK fintech ecosystem is supported by a number of accelerators, incubators and co-working spaces, which help startups get off the ground by offering resources, advice and networking opportunities.

Currently, there are many different types of fintech startups in the UK, ranging from those focused on payments and banking to those offering specialist financial services.

In this article, we have compiled a list of the top 15 UK-based fintech startups according to Dealroom. Check them out.

Kuda Technologies

Founder/s: Babs Ogundeyi and Musty Mustapha

Kuda is a fintech company that aims to make financial services accessible and affordable to every African. The platform offers a better alternative to traditional finance by delivering services, including free money transfers, smart budgeting and instant access to credit, through digital devices. The company is operational in Nigeria and the UK, and is expanding to several countries.

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Vyne is an account-to-account (A2A) payment platform designed for merchants. The fintech platform offers instant account-to-account bank payments, eliminating intermediaries while improving the consumer experience.

Transaction

Transak is a single application integration platform to enable fiat-to-crypto deposits from a global user base.

The company does this by providing API-driven fiat payment methods for 100+ cryptoassets and abstracting the complexities of user KYC, risk monitoring and compliance, payment methods and customer support. The company says the widget can be integrated into an app in just a few lines of code.

Lawn

Founder/s: Robert Pasco, James Pursaill

Plend is an ethical lending platform that provides wider access to truly affordable loans through The PLEND Score, a proprietary credit system with open banking. The fintech company offers long-term, sustainable loans at affordable interest rates for borrowers who miss out due to traditional credit scoring.

rhino.fi

Founder(s): Will Harborne, Dan Yanev, Ross Middleton

rhino.fi (formerly DeversiFi) is a multi-chain platform that offers all the best DeFi opportunities to buy, trade and invest in hundreds of different tokens on a single multi-chain platform.

Fox

CEO: Denko Mancheski

Reef is a substrate-based Layer 1 blockchain with smart contract functionality. Based on a Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism, the network offers low fees and scalability, in addition to a myriad of features including native token bridges, on-chain governance, periodic payments and much more.

SaltPay

SaltPay is a payment service and software provider that helps small and medium-sized businesses manage and grow their business. The platform allows businesses to accept online payments through multiple options, including NFC, POS payment terminals, payment gateway solutions and more.

In addition, the company provides various other services and software such as issuer payment processing, cloud-based payments and business management SaaS to global FinTechs, payment providers, banks and MNOs.

Mine

Founder(s): Ashley Tate, Chris Dalrymple and Andy Gunn

Mina is a payment solution for electric vehicle (EV) charging, which makes it easy for fleet vehicles to charge at home, at work or on the road. This results in one monthly bill for the fleet owner, which simplifies budgeting and managing expenses.

Mina’s Homecharge product exactly pays the driver’s energy supplier to charge the electric car at home. With Mina Chargepass, drivers can charge in public with a single RFID card at over 5,000 public charging points across the UK.

They can also check key insights including the carbon intensity and emissions with their Carbontrack product, cost per kWh, location and duration of each charge in their fleet.

Primer

Founder(s): Gabriel Le Roux, Paul Anthony

Primer is a payments automation platform that helps merchants with the infrastructure they need to build better customer shopping experiences.

The platform enables e-commerce merchants and online payment facilitators to connect and maintain the entire payment ecosystem through a unified payment API and checkout.

These connections include payment service providers (PSPs), payment methods, fraud providers, chargeback services, subscription billing engines, BI tools, loyalty and rewards platforms.

DNA Payments

Founder/s: Arif Babayev, Nurlan Zhagiparov

DNA Payments is a vertically integrated omnichannel payments provider in the UK and EU. The fintech company helps businesses receive payments through POS solutions or online. The company currently serves over 65,000 merchants across the UK and is on track to be the fourth largest payments provider in the UK by the end of 2022.

Hyperexponential

Founder(s): Amrit Santhirasenan, Michael Johnson, Richard Gunn

Hyperexponential is an insurtech platform that provides mathematical modeling software for the commercial insurance sector. The software helps data scientists and underwriters build and update their pricing models to make data-driven decisions faster with minimal IT management time and money.

Copper

CEO: Dmitry Tokarev

Copper is a provider of institutional solutions for the storage and trading of digital assets. The company provides a gateway to crypto assets for institutional investors by offering custody, prime brokerage and settlement across 500 digital assets and over 45 exchanges. In addition, Copper has built a secure suite of tools and services to acquire and securely trade and store cryptocurrencies.

Colendi

Founder/s: Bülent Tekmen, Bülent Tekmen

Colendi provides embedded fintech services that democratize banking for consumers, merchants and financial and non-financial institutions to overcome the limitations associated with legacy banking services.

Driven by artificial intelligence and big data, Colendi develops unique services based on scoring algorithms, and combines new generation financial technology solutions. The platform also provides quick and easy access to loans with the buy-now-pay-later model and other distinct financial services.

Embers

Founder/s: Aaron Shaw and Daniel Hogan

Ember is a software platform that automates the tax and accounting process for contractors, freelancers and small business owners across the UK.

Elliptical

Founder(s): Adam Joyce, James Smith, Tom Robinson

Elliptic has pioneered blockchain analytics for financial crime compliance and built an accurate crypto-identity dataset in the market. In addition, it works to prevent, detect and prosecute criminal activity in cryptocurrencies.

The company identifies illegal activity in cryptocurrencies, and provides actionable intelligence to cryptocurrency companies, financial institutions and government agencies.