What is BVNK? The mysterious fintech that is quietly poaching talent from Revolut and Checkout.com

Beevank? Bavunk? Bank? If, like us, you’re wondering how to pronounce the name: it’s “BVNK“.

“The horribly cheesy story of the name is that it means turning banking on its head,” BVNK’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief product officer George Davis tells Sifted. “But if you catch any of us at office drinks, it might be”Bank’.”

However, BVNK is not a bank: it is a B2B crypto payment company.

BVNK officially launched just 11 months ago, in October 2021, and took no outside funding until it closed a $40 million Series A led by VC with internationally renowned Tiger Global in May.

Even by Tiger’s standards, it’s a rather abrupt entry into the European fintech scene.

In addition, the London-HQ’d startup attracted a $340 million valuation after money for that round. It’s similar to fellow European fintechs Monese, Yokoy and Uncapped, all of which have been on the scene quite a bit longer and have raised over $100 million in equity.

BVNK has also grown at an eyebrow-raising pace. It has increased the number of employees by 300% since October and revenue by 250% – and yet when Sifted asked dozens of well-known European VCs and founders, hardly anyone had heard of the company.

So what is BVNK?

The Stripe of crypto

Davis says BVNK’s mission is to be the “Stripe of crypto,” enabling transactions from fiat currencies — like the euro or US dollar — to crypto, fiat to fiat, and crypto back to fiat.

Their customers are other businesses. It sells them its API, which handles the off and on – buying and selling of crypto with fiat money – for the various currencies they want to use. BVNK targets both “crypto-native” companies and companies that want to be able to handle crypto – for example to allow their customers to pay with bitcoin – but don’t want to have to build the infrastructure to do so themselves.

BVNK says it has around 150 customers, although it will not name any. It says that 80% of them are payment companies – from foreign exchange companies to standard payment providers that operate the e-commerce cash register.

Further down the line, the company wants to be the go-to for major financial institutions that offer crypto payments — a goal that was a big part of its presentation to Series A investors.

BVNK charges a transaction fee every time money is moved through the platform, as well as foreign exchange fees. It says it has already grown revenue by 250% since October 2021.

BVNK’s main competitor is London’s BCB Group, whose clients include some of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, such as Bitstamp, Coinbase and Gemini. It is also up against smaller players such as Cryptopay and Mercuryo.

A very un-2022 growth plan

BVNK has increased its headcount by 300% since its official launch in October, from 40 to 160 – and plans to increase it to 250 in the next 12 months.

The new hires will be based around the world, and well over half of them will have product and engineering roles. BVNK will also hire people to work with local regulators as it expands into new markets.

It has already begun expanding into North America, where it has hired a handful of product and engineering staff on the ground.

“This is probably a bet to ‘win’ being driven by a land grab, a fintech investor who wished to remain anonymous tells Sifted about BVNK’s rapid growth and huge Series A round.

“It is ‘cheap’ right now to expand while crypto is not that popular, thus there will be fewer new capitalized competitors. And they are betting big on a multifaceted platform that requires a lot of regulatory money.”

That’s an unusually broad expansion plan for a European fintech in its first year of life — and certainly a rare tactic in 2022’s bear market.

But BVNK’s history actually began five years earlier.

A complicated story

Two of BVNK’s four-strong co-founding team, Jesse Hemson-Struthers and Donald Jackson, previously founded a cross-border payments company in 2017 in Cape Town called Coindirect. It was tailored for emerging markets: customers could bypass the cumbersome global Swift system (the messaging system used by banks to transfer money across borders), by transferring funds to stablecoins – cryptocurrencies that are linked to fiat currencies like the dollar – and then transfer them in euros or British pounds.

Davis says this was a profitable venture and the co-founders merged with BVNK in January of this year, absorbing Coindirect’s revenue.

There is no record of such a merger at Companies House, and when asked about this Davis says “we can think of it more as a rebrand”. Both Hemson-Struthers and Jackson stepped down from their directorships at Coindirect in August 2021. This was a week after BVNK was incorporated, two months before Davis says BVNK was launched and four months before Davis says the “rebrand” took place.

Coindirect’s existing profitability and global customer base could partly explain how just a couple of months later, BVNK’s co-founders were able to convince Tiger to invest $20m (half of the $40m Series A).

BVNK’s founders own 60% of the company, and if we take its valuation by money and the amount Tiger invested, we can assume that the American VC has a stake of around 17%.

Although BVNK’s head office is in London, where around 40 staff are based, the absorption of Coindirect means that the bulk of staff – around 70 people – are based in Cape Town. It is this presence in emerging markets from offset that Davis says is the company’s USP.

“We have this real core muscle in emerging markets from the cross-border payments business that we’ve had for a few years,” Davis tells Sifted, adding that thanks to Coindirect, the company understands how to move money out of emerging markets to more established crypto-users as a vehicle.

“And most of the time we have grown based on customer demand. Our customers don’t really want to use multiple partners globally – they want to come to one place that has global access.

“In the same way that Revolut is growing very aggressively globally, because it is important for them to have access everywhere, the same applies to us. We want parity in our European, African and Asian operations.”

A slice of the Revolut pie

It is not the only magazine BVNK takes out of Revolut’s book. Davis has been on an aggressive LinkedIn troll pitching BVNK since May’s elevation, targeting talent poaching from Revolut as well as payments rivals such as Checkout.com and more crypto-focused companies such as Paysafe. It has even poached Crypto.com’s former chief marketing officer, Maggie Ng, to be the chief marketing officer.

“Getting talent from Revolut was very important to us. What we love about Revolut’s culture is the drive and the ‘Get shit done’ aspect of it, says Davis.

“Series A transformed our ability to hire from large-scale fintechs.

“Everyone we hire has a passionate belief that crypto and fintech are going to converge, and that money will seamlessly move between the two. BVNK is really well positioned to capture that market because we’re combining the two together.”

Amy O’Brien is Sifted’s fintech reporter. She tweets from @Amy_EOBrien and writes our fintech newsletter — You can register here.