Ali Niknam/Bunq.
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Bunq raises €44.5m after court papers reveal disagreements with investors
The funding from CEO Ali Niknam and existing investors comes at a flat €1.65bn valuation.
Dutch neobank Bunq has confirmed a €44.5m funding round, despite court papers revealing a recent fallout with minority shareholder Pollen Street Capital.
The funding takes Bunq’s total raised this year to nearly €44.5m and comes at a valuation of €1.65bn, a figure that maintains the fintech’s “Series A” valuation from June 2021.
Investors in this latest round include CEO and founder Ali Niknam, Pollen Street Capital and Bunq’s chief information officer Raymond Kasiman, all existing shareholders in the business.
Bunq recently hit 9 million users in Europe and doubled its deposits in just four months to over €4.5bn.
“It’s been a truly magical year for bunq: we’re rapidly expanding and have seen massive deposit growth,” said CEO and founder Ali Niknam on the latest raise.
“With more and more people entrusting their money to us, we’re convinced that we should double down on our momentum and cement the way forward for future growth.”
Not all is well at the neobank however, with court papers last week revealing a fallout between Niknam and Pollen Street Capital.
The documents reveal a spat over the funding round, with Bunq and Niknam seeking court action to force Pollen Street to proceed with an investment in the business based on a brief bullet point email from one of the investors’ partners.
It explains that Pollen Street pushed back and wanted Bunq to agree to a slower growth plan and to explore the sale of Capitalflow, a business Bunq acquired in 2021 for €141m.
Bunq then took the issue to court as it argued Pollen Street should honour the commitments in its earlier email.
The court threw out the claim, writing “several brief staccato bullets in a Sunday afternoon email are not the way a reasonable person in the same circumstances as the parties would understand business to be transacted on the subject matter of this dispute.”
Regardless of the dispute, it now seems Niknam and Pollen Street Capital have buried the hatchet to pull this latest funding round together.
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