Kadmos founding team.
News Digital Banking
Kadmos raises €29m Series A to streamline payments for migrant workers
The payments platform aims to make being paid internationally as easy as it is domestically for the more than 169m migrant workers.
“In an ever-globalised world, it's criminal that it is so difficult for cross-border employers and their employees to pay and be paid,” Kadmos co-founder Sasha Makarovych said.
End-to-end salary payments platform for cross-border employees Kadmos has just raised €29m in Series A funding to solve this problem.
Kadmos is aiming to make being paid internationally as easy as being paid domestically, Makarovych said.
According to the company it is already working with “several high-profile” shipping companies and has a “robust” waitlist ahead of full-scale customer onboarding this summer
“The financial restrictions placed on migrant workers are truly shocking,” Kadmos co-founder Justus Schmueser said.
“Employees need to wait days or weeks for their hard-earned salaries to reach their families and are then forced into paying exorbitant transaction fees or have to carry large sums of cash at their own risk.
“At Kadmos, we are working to change the status quo through cutting-edge financial technology and ensuring the hard-working people who power the global economy can keep more of their well-deserved salaries.”
Kadmos plans to use the money raised for technology and product development and to grow its 30-person team.
It sees itself as uniquely positioned to capitalise on the growing global cross-border B2C payments volume projected to reach $1.6 trillion and involving 169 million migrant workers across the world, according to the UN.
The company was founded to tackle the restrictions on the financial freedom of cross-border employees after one of Makarovych’s relatives, who worked as a seafarer, shared his struggle in getting paid.
The fintech is now branching out beyond the shipping industry to include other industries with similarly complex salary payments such as construction, healthcare and hospitality.
It aims to transform access to financial services for millions of underbanked and underserved people, it says.
The funding round was led by Blossom Capital and included existing investors Addition and Atlantic Labs who were involved in the company’s $8.3m seed round in December.
“With outdated banking practices and multiple intermediaries that charge excessive fees, it’s clear that the process for cross-border payments is broken and Kadmos’ fintech platform is exactly the technology to fix it,” Blossom Capital managing partner Alex Lim said.
