Mobile-First Banking App Numbrs Bags Further $3.8M For U.S. Launch

Numbrs, the mobile-first banking app founded out of Swiss company builder Centralway, has raised a further $3.8 million from its parent — money that will be ring-fenced for a planned U.S. launch early next year. In addition, the young startup is opening a New York office for which it’s hiring a marketing team.

The new investment adds to the original $7.7 million put into Numbrs by Centralway to continue making headway in Germany, while I’m told that the previously announced plans to enter the UK market this Fall are still on track, including moving into a London office in the next few weeks, to be shared with Centralway and another of its portfolio companies, Sandbox Network. (In fact, they’ll be based at Summerset House, sharing the newly-developed top floor with hail-a-cab startup Hailo.)

Numbrs bills itself as a mobile banking app to rule them all, offering a financial dashboard similar to something like Intuit-owned Mint.com, which enables a user to intelligently track and predict their spending, but with the added functionality of being able to actually make transactions and pay bills from within the app, too. Something it claims is a key differentiator.

Another key feature of the Numbrs app, and central to its planned advertising-based revenue model, is what the startup calls the Future Timeline, a technology that predicts what a user’s finances will be like in the future by analysing historical patterns of incoming and outgoing payments, thus enabling financial targets to be met. As we’ve noted before, this is the sort of data that advertisers would, undoubtedly, be interested in.

The plan to accelerate a U.S. launch — Numbrs’ mission is for the app to be compatible with banking systems the world over, after all — came about after strong interest from North America following the startup’s German launch (which saw the app exit Beta last week, incidentally).

In a statement, Julien Arnold, founder and CEO of Numbrs, talks up the U.S. market’s readiness for a new mobile-first banking app. “It is the right market at the right time”, he says. “The last few months have clearly demonstrated that U.S. users very much appreciate the design and functionality Numbrs provides, and in contrast to certain other potential internationalization targets, have a strong willingness to try new innovative financial applications”.

To that end, I’m told by Centralway’s Severin Ruegger that quite a few U.S. companies have been in contact with Numbrs, including Intuit, and a number of top-tier VCs.