European Personal Finance App Tink Raises $4 Million Series A

Tink, a personal finance mobile app that is popular in Sweden, has closed a $4 million Series A round led by Sunstone Capital, with participation from financial entrepreneur Sven Hagströmer and existing investors. The fresh capital will be used by Tink to expand internationally, including further developing the product and increasing head-count. The startup previously raised a $800,000 seed round in early 2013.

Launched in September in Sweden last year, and available for iOS and Android, Tink’s mobile app lets you keep a handle on your personal finances, by linking the app to banks accounts and credit cards. Targeting the young and mobile, specifically, it presents insights into spending habits via a news-feed style stream in a bid to make it, well, fun, as well as productive.

“Personal finance is generally something that people find boring, time consuming and stressful,” Tink co-founder and CEO, Daniel Kjellen, tells TechCrunch. “We remove the hassle from managing your personal finances and make it smart, fun and actionable to keep track. The user connects their bank accounts and credit cards to Tink and we continuously collect, sort and analyse everything about the user’s personal finances.”

In addition, Tink enables the you to set budgets and get “insights and fun facts” about your personal finances. “We have seen that this is very attractive for the young and mobile user who normally would not spend time on tracking their money,” adds Kjellen.

To that end, Tink claims over 200,000 users of the app — more than 2 percent of Sweden’s entire population have an account, apparently — and says in particular it is resonating with females in their early 20s. Competition-wise, the U.S. has a number of similar apps, as does a number of countries in Europe, but Kjellen thinks Tink’s feed-based UI, designed to be extremely time-efficient and let you dip in and out of the app, gives it the upper hand.

“In the US there are obviously products such as Mint and Level Money. In Europe we see the companies such as Numbrs (DE), Bankin’ (FR) and Money Dashboard (UK) offering more or less similar services to Tink. We believe we have a strong advantage by creating a fully automated mobile product where everything is presented in a feed format which makes it useful even if you have only have 2 minutes to spare,” he says.

Meanwhile, Sunstone’s Christian Jepsen echoes those sentiments when I ask him why he chose to invest in Tink. “Simplifying finance is never easy but this team does a fantastic job at it — and the users show their appreciation by recommending Tink to their friends and returning as loyal users,” he says. “While the U.S. market has seen a number of companies offering compelling apps in this area, the EU has seen very little innovation in this space. Sunstone invested in Tink because we believe they can achieve that.”