Cleo, a chatbot that wants to replace your banking apps, raises £2M led by LocalGlobe
Summary
Cleo, the London-based fintech startup that offers an AI-powered chatbot to help you manage your finances, has closed \xa32 million in further funding, adding to an impressive list of backers that already includes Skype founder Niklas Zennstr\xf6m.The new round is led by LocalGlobe, the seed VC firm founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, with participation from a number of existing investors. It offers a conversational interface and, in lots of ways, is a replacement for your existing banks apps, enabling you to ask for insights into all of all your spending across multiple accounts and credit cards, broken down by transaction, category or merchant, once you give Cleo permission to access that data.In a spew of updates since the chatbot officially launched in January, Cleo also lets you take a number of actions, including some based on the financial data it has gleaned. This, he says, gave him a unique insight into how opaque financial services, and particularly the incumbent banks, are in the way they cross-sell products that arent always in the interests of customers and dont do a good job of helping them understand and manage their spending, despite sitting on a ton of relevant data. He cautions me not to underestimate the importance of Cleos conversational style in helping the app compete purely from a user experience perspective, particularly amongst the digital natives it is targeting. (Im told that a recent survey of around 1,000 Cleo users revealed that 77 per cent have stopped using their banks own app within three months, while the chatbots high retention rates were a big draw for investors.