Today while presenting at Wired Money in the UK, I proudly announced the closing of Moven’s Series A Investment round.

Led by SBT Venture Capital, this $8m raise included Route 66 Ventures, Standard Bank, and a few new angels. We are excited to welcome each of them to the Moven family and thank them for their investment in our mission to reinvent banking.

We would also like to thank Anthemis Group, our Seed round lead who also chose to participate in this raise. Their appetite for continued funding is a strong vote of confidence that all of us at Moven deeply appreciate.

Finally, we would like to recognize the Santerre Group, Kevin Plank from Under Armour, our NY Angel investors, and Jim Pallotta from Raptor Group for their stellar support throughout our Seed round and initial product development. We certainly would not have made it this far without them.

As many of you know, Moven has been in launch phase for less than a year, only recently exiting our Beta invite process in March of 2014 and opening up our service to the public. In that brief time Moven has become one of the most watched new brands in the global banking sector. Our work has been cited by Wired, AT Kearney, American Banker, Accenture, Forrester, EFMA and many others as a potential model for the future of banking.

While many “neo-banking” competitors’ initial product launches required $10m to $300m to execute, we are proud to say that the Moven team was able to launch what Techcrunch described as a, “feature set (that) is notable, and in some cases even tops that of…other more modern mobile banking/payments apps” with only $4.5m in spend. With $8m more in capital to invest, we believe that we will continue to generate significant progress with effective, strategic use of that investment.

For now Moven’s objectives are clear. First is to invest in the product and create the defining benchmark for the ‘downloadable smart bank account’ category in the US. With this new funding Moven can now fully capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of prospects and emails built over the last few months. And we can continue to invest in ground-breaking features and tools that will redefine the banking experience for every one of our users.

Second, is to exclusively align with strategic partners in other parts of the world to integrate the Moven app with their basic banking experiences. We have always envisioned the disruptive change occurring in retail banking as a global phenomenon. We will now be moving forward with a number of international partnership agreements that will give us presence on three continents while creating new revenue opportunities. You’ll be hearing a lot more from us about these partnerships and launches in the coming months.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been only 18 months since our initial funding, but if our accomplishments to date have been any indication then the journey has only just begun. We believe that in short order millions of customers will be using our app each day to help them spend, save and live smarter.

Thank you for your incredible support thus far and remember to keep on Moven!

- Brett King