London-based CompareEuropeGroup has succeeded in closing a €20 million Series A funding round, with investors including ACE & Company, Pacific Century Group, Nova Founders Capital and SBI Holdings (formerly Softbank Investments). Also taking part in the round were Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga; Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal and first outside Facebook investor, among others.
Founded in 2015 by Antonio Gagliardi, Thomas Munk and Mads Faurholt-Jorgensen, CompareEuropeGroup is a financial management platform for insurance, banking, and telco products. It seeks to digitize and automate banking, insurance and telco advisory and brokerage jobs, with a view to making personal finance advice unbiased and available around the clock. Their overall mission is to raise the level of financial literacy in the region, provide more choice for their customers and be a long-term partner in the services it seeks to provide in Europe.
The company makes use of AI to assist its users to find and choose the most suitable products to meet their needs. Customers are then informed when better products become available. Co-founder and chief marketing officer Thomas Munk explained:
We want to radically improve the way consumers buy banking, insurance, and telco products. Today, they are forced to either spend an incredible amount of time to collect the product information from many sites or branches or rely on the advice of agents and brokers whose incentives are often misaligned with theirs. That’s simply not acceptable in 2017.
The company intends to use the new inflow of funds to improve user experience by developing its proprietary technology and advancing its big data and machine learning capabilities. It also plans on taking in much more people and increasing its headcount, which currently stands at just over 100 people.
Currently, CompareEuropeGroup’s service is live in five European countries Denmark, Portugal, Finland, Belgium, and Norway, with the continued effort of branching out and covering more ground.
