Revolut alumni are helping build the Pillar of success needed by every immigrant

London-based fintech startup Pillar has raised £13 million in a pre-seed funding round. The startup aims to provide immigrants with access to credit products upon arriving at a new home in a new land. The capital is slated for usage in further fleshing out the platform as well as laying the bedrock for sustainable growth plans.

Having lived on three different continents, and 12 cities myself, I know exactly the pain point that Pillar is seeking to address. While I might have been one of the most trustworthy and lowest loan risks in one country, the minute I cross a border, enter a new system, etc., I’m back to square zero. Again.

Thanks to the advancement, uptake, and adoption of open banking-led data methodologies, former head of lending at Revolut, Ashutosh Bhatt, and experienced fintech industry CTO Adam Lewis are establishing a platform that could do away with this financial nightmare once and for all.

“Ever since I moved to the UK and found I couldn’t access any of the everyday products I had in India this has been a problem I have been passionate about solving. I arrived earning a good salary at Barclays and found I couldn’t even get an iPhone! Fourteen years later, and the world of credit still hasn’t changed, so we have set upon building a globally scalable platform that breaks down data silos and credit borders as well as solves this massive problem faced by financially secure people moving to a new country,” explained Bhatt.

Pillar’s £13 million pre-seed round was led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC, with a who’s who of angel investors including the founders of WageStream, Peter Briffet and Portman Wills, former VP and investor of AirBnB Oliver Jung, Revolut former CFO, Peter O’Higgins, former Revolut CMO Chad West, expansion expert Neil Shah, and collections leader Hardev Tumber.

“One of the big problems consumers face when moving to a new country is how to access the financial products that they need,” commented Backed VC’s Andre de Haes. “The team at Pillar has come up with a genuinely innovative solution to address the issues those consumers face and we look forward to assisting the team’s growth going forward.”