Our investment in Yonder: a fresh take on credit cards

We are very excited to announce our investment in Yonder, the credit card challenger, raising a £20m seed round we co-led with our friends from LocalGlobe, with participation from Seedcamp and notable angels including Sharmadean Reid, Marshmallow founders Oliver and Alex Kent-Braham, and Rio Ferdinand.

Yonder is building a modern lifestyle credit card packed with rewards, no foreign exchange fees, and more. Their rewards programme is designed around real people’s lifestyles, inspired by hundreds of user research sessions to learn how people really spend their time and money. FCA authorised, customers can already apply in the United Kingdom without needing a credit score, allowing many expats, tech workers and young professionals to acquire a credit card with curated rewards.

Jeppe Zink, our partner from Northzone joining the Yonder board, added that “the potential for credit challengers today is as hot as it was for debit cards in the early 2010s. We’re going to see a new generation of brand-led providers that will entirely rethink what it means to take out a line of credit.”

We believe that Tim Chong, Theso Jivajirajah, and Harry Jell are the perfect founding team after so many years of experience in this space. Co-founder and CEO Tim Chong has been able to gather around him top-tier talent coming from Clearscore, Monzo, Vanquis Bank, Accenture and Deloitte, and will double the headcount over the next couple of months in order to be part of many more customers’ lives, solving credit card access for millions of people.

We’ve been investing in new consumer finance companies for a number of years (Klarna, Zopa, Anyfin) and have developed market conviction that, along with neobanking and openbanking layers, there is a huge, untapped opportunity to launch modern credit cards built on a superior loyalty program – while using open banking to build a more nuanced, personalised picture of its customers’ spending habits than relying on traditional credit checks alone. Yonder is here to build this category.