LemFi, a platform transforming how immigrant communities access financial services, has raised $53 million in Series B funding led by Highland Europe with participation from previous investors Left Lane Capital, Palm Drive Capital, and Y-Combinator. The new funding round brings LemFi’s total capital to $85 million.
Launched in 2021, LemFi is building the trusted financial services platform for immigrant communities worldwide. Starting with payments and remittances, LemFi enables users to open multi-currency accounts and send and receive money globally, reliably and cheaply.
With over one million users across Europe and North America sending money to emerging markets, including India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan, LemFi recently crossed $1 billion in monthly transactions. This is set to increase further, with LemFi adding Asia, including China, to its platform, growing 30% month-on-month.
Every year, millions of people relocate to start new lives abroad, and money transfers remain an essential financial support mechanism for their home countries. And for emerging markets, remittances are an important foreign exchange source and can sometimes exceed foreign direct investment.
LemFi became the trusted financial partner for diaspora communities in Canada, the UK, and the USA, and it sent money home to 20 countries. And after spending four years building trust among its user base, LemFi is now in the perfect position to provide further services and features to create a global full-stack financial services hub for immigrants.
LemFi’s founders Ridwan Olalere (CEO) and Rian Cochran (CFO) met while working at fintech unicorn OPay, incubated by Norwegian browser provider Opera. And Olalere had previously worked in software development before becoming OPay’s product lead, where he met Cochran, the company’s finance director. After Olalere left for a stint as an Uber Country Manager, the duo combined their experiences across fintech and payments to build LemFi. They now oversee a 300+ strong multicultural team across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, drawing on their experiences to make financial services universally accessible.
With the new funding round, LemFi will focus on growing the company in three core areas: building the platform to extend its financial services offering, scaling its payment network licenses and partnerships to provide hyper-localized service, and hiring talent globally to support its next growth stage.
KEY QUOTES:
“When we started building LemFi, we were told remittance had already been solved. But for too many people, it is still too slow, cumbersome and expensive with customers telling us that in some instances it was cheaper to send money from the US via Canada than directly to their families back home. By targeting the communities most in need, we’ve built LemFi into the go-to remittance service for one million people, supporting them in building wealth across 20 countries. We’re not stopping there: this new funding will support us in our mission to build the financial services hub for immigrants globally from adding new features to expanding to new countries. We’re delighted to be partnering with Highland to help us scale LemFi into a fintech giant.”
- Ridwan Olalere, co-founder and CEO of LemFi
“LemFi’s mission to provide trusted, reliable access to financial services for immigrant communities has inspired an incredibly loyal customer base and has generated impressive growth over the past several years. In addition to the success in initial geographies, we are excited by LemFi’s continuing international expansion given the extent of the global problem they are solving. Ridwan and Rian are fantastic leaders, and we are thrilled to partner with them and the LemFi team to help them scale and continue their growth into new markets.”
- Sam Brooks, Partner at Highland Europe
