#Tech news

Buy now, pay later on a Porsche? Zaver now has $30M to make it a reality


We last checked in on Zaver, a Swedish B2C buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A to $20 million. Total investment to date stands at $30 million.

In Europe, Zaver competes on BNPL with Klarna, PayPal, and incumbents such as Santander and BNP Paribas.

However, Zaverā€™s schtick is it claims it can assess the risk on BNPL cart sizes of up to ā‚¬200,000 in real time due to its risk assessment algorithms. Other BNPL providers rarely fund anything beyond ā‚¬3,000, at least in Europe.

Founded by Amir Marandi and Linus MalmƩn in mid-2016, while both were students at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the company has a strategic alliance with the Nissan Group for direct-to-consumer sales in the Nordics, and it has client relationships with Volkswagen and Porsche.

This allows customers to buy even a car on BNPL.

Marandi, CEO and founder, told me the company is able to offer size-agnostic payment solutions because itā€™s spent most of its product development not ā€œon linear regression models (like the others) but on advanced risk assessment algorithms.ā€

ā€œWhile our competitors have concentrated their efforts on marketing, our focus has been resolutely on the back-end engineering side of things,ā€ he said.

He thinks the declining acceptance rates for larger transactions in the payment industry means an opportunity for a ā€œsize-agnostic payment platformā€ going up to as much as ā‚¬200,000.

This may be where the BNPL industry is heading.

Early innovators like Klarna, Trustly, Tink, and iZettle capitalized on this shift to online payments, but the expansion of e-commerce infrastructure has set the stage for an increase in the average online transaction value.

This shift first appeared in 2012 when Elon Musk proposed selling a Tesla online, and now today many OEMs are attempting to go ā€œdirect-to-consumerā€ using BNPL.

Investors in the Series A include FROS Ventures, HĆ„llbar AB, Hobohm Brothers Equity, JOvB Investments, MAHR Projects, Skagerak Ventures, and the King.com founders, Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi.



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