Image credits: Dyme
Keeping track of finance can be a tricky thing! People have much more money today than they did generations ago, but the amount of knowledge on managing money hasn’t kept pace, say experts.
Thanks to technology, we have a lot of convenient ways and solutions to stay on top of our personal finances. A host of new consumer finance brands is transforming how people spend, manage, and save their money.
Recently, the winners of the 2021 Future Hamburg Award were announced.
The Solution
Amsterdam-based Dyme is one such startup that has emerged to capitalise on these trends. With Dyme, users can gain insight into their recurring expenses, listing all subscriptions in one clear overview.
The app also lets users manage, cancel, and switch their subscriptions with a single click.
Raised €2M
In the latest development, Dyme has secured €2M from Peak Capital and other investors, including Paul Forster, founder of Indeed.com, and Hans van der Noordaa, former CEO of Retail Banking of ING.
The company will use the new capital for product development and grow from 300K to 1M users.
Based in Amsterdam, Peak Capital backs founders across Europe, particularly in the Benelux, DACH, and Nordics. The Dutch early-stage VC is fully backed by entrepreneurs. Recently, the VC Investor Peak announced that it would officially enter the German market on July 1, 2021, with a €66M fund dedicated to German startups
“It is the first international office for Peak and a deliberate decision for Germany and Europe, ] bridging two of Europe’s booming tech powerhouses, Amsterdam and Berlin,” says the VC firm.
Personal financial assistant
According to the company, the average Dutch person loses approximately €800 due to forgotten subscriptions, double insurance policies, and overpriced contracts.
Founded by Joran Iedema, David Knap, David Schogt, and Wouter Florijn in 2008, Dyme aims to take care of it for the users.
With Dyme, customers can easily change their energy supplier, renegotiate telecom contracts, cancel the gym subscription, and more.
The app acts as a personal financial assistant, reading the fine print and negotiating on their customers’ behalf to save them headaches and money.
Joran Iedema, CEO of Dyme, is ready to move faster: “We were one of the first companies to receive a PSD2 license in The Netherlands in 2019. Since then we’ve built a product that brings real value to a large and growing user-base: we help 300,000 users in The Netherlands and early users in the United Kingdom save considerable sums each month. Along the way, we’ve learned more about our customers’ pains and frustrations regarding their finances. We raised this new capital to solve them.”
How Dyme was born?
Before Dyme, the founders worked together on Cycleswap, a bike-sharing platform. It was sold to an American competitor in 2016.
Wouter came up with the idea for Dyme while he was organising his finances and ran into some issues. Further, he found a gym membership that he completely forgot about and did not use anymore, costing about €350 a year.
When Dyme was still an idea, there were talks of European law that would break banks’ monopolies on user data. What came to be known as ‘PSD2’ further boosted the actualisation of Dyme.
In October 2019, Dyme became one of the first Dutch B2C companies to receive a PSD2 license, enabling data import from all EU bank accounts.
Featured in Dragons’ Den
Last year Dyme was featured in Dragons’ Den, a British television programme. Investor Pieter Schoen offered €750K in exchange for 51 per cent of the shares in the show. However, Joran Iedema, co-founder, declined the offer to retain the control of the company.
Dragons’ Den is a reality programme in which entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of VCs to secure funding from them.
Stefan Bary, who led the follow-on investment from Peak Capital, says, “It’s fantastic to be fuelling Dyme as they carve out a unique position in the personal finance landscape. They are able to offer users convenient control over their financial situation with advice and more importantly, with real action. They have grown more than three times last year alone. With the new firepower to sharpen their product, I am confident they can help even more users, better and faster than before.”
