While many fintechs are struggling with falling valuations and laying off people to deal with the new market reality, the Swedish niche neobank Juni is going in a different direction.

Today, Juni announces a $106m Series B round led by the UAE-based Mubadala Capital, as well as $100m in venture debt financing from US-based TriplePoint Capital.

The Gothenburg-based startup, which was founded in 2020 by Samir El-Sabini and Anders Orsedal, has developed a financial management platform made for ecommerce businesses. It offers physical and virtual cards, credit cards, accounting, analytics and digital advertising platforms — and now has Google Ads integration. Since it launched, it’s been a hot investment.

It raised its Series A last summer — a $21.5m round with a $52m extension in the autumn — from investors like EQT Ventures, DST Global, Felix Capital and Cherry Ventures.

This new round is one of the largest in Europe this year.

Getting ahead of the game

“As a company, you don’t want to have to slow down your growth. So we decided to take the opportunity to raise these funds in order to have a very strong financial position for the next few years,” El-Sabini says, explaining why the startup chose to raise so soon after its last round.

El-Sabini isn’t keen on sharing numbers on customers, revenue or growth and says “we’re very secretive about many of our underlying KPIs”. He does, however, mention that Juni has “many hundreds of customers” — the UK being its biggest market. It’s planning to add another 60 people to its 200-person team this year.

“We are very positive about our position and this year is going to be a fundamental year for us. We aim to grow 10x, both in terms of customers and the payments volume,” El-Sabini says.

B2B focus

By focusing on B2B, like other fintechs such as BNPL Billie and Danish Pleo, Juni hasn’t been impacted by the slowdown in consumer spending.

“When the market is under pressure, you see that a lot of customers need to save costs and be more efficient. We’ve noticed that demand for our products is growing because you want to have the best liquidity possible,” El-Sabini says.

Juni’s focus will now be on growing the business via its new credit card offering for all markets within the European Economic Area and the UK. It’s yet to launch its special features (with the national currency) on home turf in Sweden but is planning to do so this summer.

The global ecommerce market is predicted to reach trillions in sales by 2025 and although sales have dipped in the last few months, El-Sabini optimism about the market is still strong.

“When we look at opportunities in Europe, we see hundreds of thousands of ecommerce companies and I think we will see a diversification of these going forward,” he says. “So, I’m not so worried about the number of customers — I’m worried about us being able to be at our best and make sure that we get the customers, that they trust us and that we can build something long-lasting together.”

Mimi Billing is Sifted’s Nordic correspondent and tweets from @MimiBilling