An AI-powered platform which helps save people money is targeting a million users across Europe after launching a venture capital-backed crowdfunding round.
FinTech start-up Plum was co-founded by Victor Trokoudes, who was an early employee at TransferWise, and CTO Alex Michael.
The chatbot uses artificial intelligence to help people manage their money.
Like rivals Cleo and Chip, Plum connects to a person’s bank account, analyses their spending patterns and activity and then uses its smart algorithm to automatically save small sums of money on behalf of the user.
The platform is also capable of analysing a person’s utility bills to suggest cheaper alternatives.
Plum has so far raised £1.35 million in funding and has now launched a crowdfunding campaign led by European VC firm Venture Friends to raise at least £850,000.
“We’re going to let the campaign run and see how the round evolves and we’ll decide later on whether we’ll overfund or not,” Trokoudes told BusinessCloud.
Plum, which currently boasts 130,000 UK users, will use the cash to support its plans of rolling out across Europe and one international location.
“We’re looking at the biggest markets so Germany and France are the first two that we will be considering,” Trokoudes said.
“In a year from now we want to have between 500,000 and one million users.”
The crowdfunding round on Seedrs follows the pre-launch of Plum Investments, a new division of the business which will allow users to invest in six funds for a monthly fee of £1.
Trokoudes says the start-up will focus on further developing the product and adding more funds to allow users to invest in AI, robotics and nutrition.
“We’re very ambitious and we want to grow our user base, it’s just about us being able to deliver further product enhancements in order to bring value to users,” he said.
“Our challenge is just constant growth from a product and user perspective.”
Plum’s crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs will run for another 60 days. At the time of publishing, it had already exceeded 66 per cent of its target.