We checked in last Zaver, a Swedish B2C Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A at $20 million. The total investment to date amounts to 30 million dollars.
In Europe, Zaver competes at BNPL with Klarna, PayPal and incumbents such as Santander and BNP Paribas.
However, Zaver claims it can assess risk on BNPL basket sizes of up to €200,000 in real time due to its risk assessment algorithms. Other BNPL providers rarely finance anything over €3,000, at least in Europe.
Founded by Amir Marandi and Linus Malmén in mid-2016, while both were students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the company has a strategic alliance with Nissan Group for direct-to-consumer sales in the Nordic countries and customer relations with Volkswagen and Porsche.
This allows customers to even buy a car at BNPL.
Amir Marandi, CEO and founder, told me that the company is able to offer size-agnostic payment solutions because it spends most of its product development not “on linear regression models (like others) but on advanced rating algorithms danger”.
“While our competitors have focused their efforts on marketing, our focus has been decidedly on the engineering side of things,” he said.
He believes that declining acceptance rates for larger transactions in the payments industry means an opportunity for a “size-agnostic payment platform” of up to €200,000.
This may be where the BNPL industry is headed.
Early innovators such as Klarna, Trustly, Tink and iZettle capitalized on this shift to online payments, but the expansion of e-commerce infrastructure has set the stage for an increase in the average value of online transactions.
This change first appeared in 2012 when Elon Musk proposed selling a Tesla online and now today many OEMs are trying to go “direct to consumer” using BNPL.
Series A investors include FROS Ventures, Hållbar AB, Hobohm Brothers Equity, JOvB Investments, MAHR Projects, Skagerack Ventures and King.com founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi.
