We last checked in on Zaver, a Swedish B2C buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A to $20 million. Total investment to date stands at $30 million.
In Europe, Zaver competes on BNPL with Klarna, PayPal, and incumbents such as Santander and BNP Paribas.
However, Zaver’s schtick is it claims it can assess the risk on BNPL cart sizes of up to €200,000 in real time due to its risk assessment algorithms. Other BNPL providers rarely fund anything beyond €3,000, at least in Europe.
Founded by Amir Marandi and Linus Malmén in mid-2016, while both were students at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the company has a strategic alliance with the Nissan Group for direct-to-consumer sales in the Nordics, and it has client relationships with Volkswagen and Porsche.
This allows customers to buy even a car on BNPL.
Marandi, CEO and founder, told me the company is able to offer size-agnostic payment solutions because it’s spent most of its product development not “on linear regression models (like the others) but on advanced risk assessment algorithms.”
“While our competitors have concentrated their efforts on marketing, our focus has been resolutely on the back-end engineering side of things,” he said.
He thinks the declining acceptance rates for larger transactions in the payment industry means an opportunity for a “size-agnostic payment platform” going up to as much as €200,000.
This may be where the BNPL industry is heading.
Early innovators like Klarna, Trustly, Tink, and iZettle capitalized on this shift to online payments, but the expansion of e-commerce infrastructure has set the stage for an increase in the average online transaction value.
This shift first appeared in 2012 when Elon Musk proposed selling a Tesla online, and now today many OEMs are attempting to go “direct-to-consumer” using BNPL.
Investors in the Series A include FROS Ventures, Hållbar AB, Hobohm Brothers Equity, JOvB Investments, MAHR Projects, Skagerak Ventures, and the King.com founders, Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi.
