Stockholm-based startup Atlar has raised a $5 million (€5 million) seed round led by Index Ventures. The company is working on an application programming interface (API) that facilitates bank-to-bank payments for European businesses.
In addition to Index Ventures, La Familia VC, Cocoa and various business angels participated in the round, such as Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, former EVP of Global Sales at Adyen Thijn Lamers and N26 CFO Jan Kemper.
While European consumers are increasingly aware of open banking and payment initiation, many B2B transfers are still done manually. Commercial banking has not experienced the same level of innovation when it comes to payments.
And yet, corporate banks offer ways to initiate payments without connecting to a web portal and uploading a spreadsheet. But banks don’t necessarily run modern REST APIs. They expect a specially formatted text file on the SFTP server.
If you have a development team, you can build a custom integration. But many companies simply don’t have the resources to maintain these relationships. They prefer to pay a partner to handle all the technical details.
Atlar provides a modern API that hides all the complexities associated with banking relationships. Once a company uses Atlar, it can trigger transfers, reconcile transactions and process direct debits directly through Atlar’s API.
In particular, Atlar can be used for payments, insurance payments, deposits and loan payments. Companies operating in different European countries may have multiple bank accounts. That’s why automating payments can be a great upgrade for those businesses.
“Accepting payments as a business is now painless, but launching it at your bank is still very slow and manual,” Atlar founder and CEO Joel Nordstrom said in a statement. “That’s why Atlar is on its way to becoming the operating system for bank-based payments. By creating a new category, we hope to unleash a wave of innovation for our customers that will ultimately benefit European consumers and businesses.”
In addition to Joel Nordstrom, Joel Wagmark and Johann Elg are the other two co-founders. They all worked at Tink, the open banking company that Visa bought for $2.2 billion.
Atlar competes with Numeral, a French startup it covered earlier this year. So far, Atlar focuses on the Nordics, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And today’s funding round will be significant when it comes to European expansion.
