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Mike Butcher

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Group-Payments Startup Payumi Poised To Launch After Seed Round

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The whole area of making payments as a group of people, whether it be for joint gift purchases (weddings), or even simple things like housemates paying bills etc. has been an area several startups have tried to tackle.

ShareAGift in the UK focuses on joint gift purchases, but is more an affiliate gift sales model. In the US there is WePay and PayDivvy, both of which err on the side of being deposit account providers. WePay has moved to being a B2B play, trying to woo small merchants away from PayPal. In France there is Leetchi and FriendFund in Berlin. Many have substantial backing from VCs.

Now, Payumi in the UK is poised to come out of public beta and hopes to cover all the ‘group payment’ bases and has sealed a £150,000 ($186,000) round of seed funding taking its total seed funding to £250,000.

Investors include Nick Hynes, CEO of Somo Mobile Marketing, Warren Cowan, Alicia Levy and Andreas Pouros, the founders of Greenlight Marketing, Emma Wilson and Mike Teasdale, the founders of Harvest Digital, Paul Cooper, Partner at Clarity Capital Partners and Patricia Burnett, former Managing Director of The White Company. The latest round adds to the £100,000 initially invested by Co-founder and former i-level CEO Stephen Rust.

Interestingly all these Angels utilized the UK’s new Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) tax policy framework which is brand new as of a couple of months ago. SEIS could well set off a “Summer of Love” for startups in the UK if it manages to take off.

It is integrated with Facebook and all payments on the site are handled via PayPal. It’s free for individual payments of up to £20 and charges a small flat fee of between 50p and £2 for payments over £20. The person collecting can choose whether to absorb these as part of the total being collected or pass the fee onto their friends.

The Hoxton Square / Tech City / Silicon Roundabout / East London (pick your favoured phrase) based startup was founded by founded last summer by Khurram Farooq, Moin Maniar and Stephen Rust, Payumi has been in public beta but launches fully next month.



500 Startups Bites Into Moonfruit’s Simple Site Builder For Design Fans

In 2011, with web usage, bandwidth, smartphones and tablets all on the rise, it can hardly have escaped the average small business they they must have an online presence. But with “hosting solutions” baffling the majority and even mapping a domain to a free WordPress site still beyond most, the options can be bewildering. At the same time people are more aware of design than ever. UI amongst the best new startups has changed the game and even old laggard portals have undergone a facelift. The iPhone and iPad have brought a new expectation in interface. So the opportunity to make all this easy is potentially huge.

Thus today, simple web site builder Moonfruit has raised new funding from Silicon Valley fund 500 Startups and is re-launching with a new site capable of creating these new design-focused and socially integrated sites for small businesses.

It’s main competitor in this space is Wix. However, its problem is that it is really a surface layer to a building platform (via Flash) and thus there is no rendering on other platforms like mobile. With its new funding Moonfruit is using an extremely consumer-friendly Flash builder for all those web newbies which then renders sites in either Flash or HTML or whatever you are using on Web, mobile or any Tablet browser. Most of Moonfruit’s revenues come from premium paid subscribers are small businesses who want better designed tools to design these better looking sites for the new design-conscious era.

Terms have not been disclosed but the strategic funding with Valley maverick Dave McClure is designed to springboard Moonfruit’s business development in the US. Moonfruit already raised $2.25m in a Series A last September from the US-based Stephens Inc. bank to grow in the US, and is currently the no.1 DIY website builder in the UK, while 30% of its customers are now in the US.

Growth is palpable. Some 3.4 milion sites were built on Moonfruit as of February 2011, versus 2.4 million in the same period last year. It now has 300,000 users, 50,000 premium paying subscribers (a 40% increase from January 2010) and turnover has increased by 51% since Jan 2010.

McClure, Founding Partner, 500 Startups, told us this is a later stage deal than it normally goes for, so therefore a lot of the risk has been taken out of it. But that it was the “great design sensibility, and solutions to everyday problems” that lead it towards Moonfruit.

Cofounder Wendy Tan-White notes that the overwhelming number of entrepreneurs in the United States are still small businesses: 99.7% of companies. Thats a big potential market being left on the table by more slightly more tech solutions like WordPress.

From April Moonfruit is also adding easy blogging with RSS into its core site offering. Where as you can’t edit most blog templates without getting into CSS/HTML, Moonfruit’s will combine ‘literal’ design editing with dynamic, on the fly publishing. Shops are coming in July, editable from an iOS app. A highly customised version of Zendesk is also now integrated.





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