Nutmeg, the U.K. ‘online investment manager’ that aims to take the complexity out of financial products, has raised a £3.4m ($5.3m) VC round led by Pentech and Daniel Aegerter, the Swiss chairman of Armada Investment Group.
But perhaps more headline-grabbing is that legendary Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper also participated. Draper is probably best known for investing in Hotmail, as well as being an early investor in Skype in Europe, along with many, many other startups.
European Investor Klaus Hommels (who notably sits on Spotify’s board) also joined the round.
Nutmeg, which is gearing up for a U.K. launch this summer, says it wants to “democratise the stuffy world of financial management”, which, let’s face it, can be mind-bogglingly complex for outsiders. It does this through a neat web-based UI that tries to align any savings and investments with a user’s “life goals” without the need for them to get as involved as actually picking out stocks themselves or paying for financial advice.
Of course, there’s no such thing as free financial advice, even if it’s partially algorithmically driven and Nutmeg’s revenue model is based on an annual management fee set at 1 per cent (including VAT) or less. Additionally, “by collecting nutmegs, a loyalty scheme based around referrals and pounds invested, users can reduce their management fees to as low as 0.3 per cent”, says the company.
In a canned statement, Craig Anderson, a partner at Pentech, says “I believe Nutmeg will do nothing less than re-define the entire world of investment management”.
That’s the “entire world” folks. We’ll be watching.
Nutmeg is the smart, secure and straightforward online investment manager that will change the way people manage their money. Designed to be open, transparent and affordable, Nutmeg brings technology to finance. Our principles include great design, appreciation of feedback and a desire to always do more for our users. Risk Warning With investment comes risk. The value of your portfolio with Nutmeg could go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invest.
Pentech Ventures invests in technology companies in the social media, Internet, mobile, enterprise software, telecom software, embedded, SaaS and e-commerce sectors.
Timothy C. Draper is the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. His original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses. On behalf of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tim serves on the boards of DoAt, Glam, Meebo, Prosper, SocialText, and DFJ Plug ‘N Play companies. DFJ’s...
Klaus is one of the leading European business angels and is or has been involved in numerous successful internet investments including QXL/Tradus, Skype, Facebook, king.com, StarDoll, Xing and spotify. He invests in promising start-ups that have the potential to become major players in the internet space.Klaus started his career at Bertelsmann. He joined AOL Germany in 1995 where was as board member responsible for business development, content and advertising sales. He was also involved in the establishment of Freenet,...
Daniel started his first business at age 18 importing Macintosh peripherals into Switzerland At age 20 he moved to the US to start a computer trading business there, which grew to 30 mill in revenues within four years. This morphed into an early Internet commerce company that was the first to offer solutions for digital marketplaces. TRADEX Technologies raised venture capital, built a first tier customer base and subsequently was sold to Ariba in March of 2000 for $5.6 billion....
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