Global retirement savings technology platform provider Smart has raised £165 million in Series D funding.
The London company powers the Smart Pension Master Trust, one of the ‘big four’ UK auto enrolment master trusts.
Chrysalis Investments led the round with a £75m equity investment, with additional investors to be announced in the coming weeks. The overall round will comprise £110m of primary and £55m of secondary equity.
The investment from Chrysalis, whose portfolio includes Klarna, Wise (formerly TransferWise), Starling Bank, The Hut Group and Graphcore, as well as wefox, the insurtech unicorn from Germany, will see Smart further grow its retirement technology platform offering in the UK, the US, Australia and the Middle East, with additional territories to follow.
Richard Watts, Head of Strategy and Co-Manager of Chrysalis Investments, said: “Smart is an innovator and continues to establish itself as the leading retirement technology platform provider globally.
“In just a few years it has disrupted the retirement savings industry, working with some of the world’s most well-known financial services providers to create a better way to save toward retirement and access funds during retirement.
“The world has changed. Just as companies like Wise and Klarna add huge benefits to their users via best-in-class financial technology, Smart offers user experience and technology to transform retirement for savers around the world.
“What Smart has achieved in the last 12 months alone was a real catalyst for our support and we believe that together we can help Andrew and Will achieve their global ambitions.”
Chrysalis Investments joins Legal & General, J.P. Morgan, the Link Group, Barclays and Natixis Investment Managers, the strategic investors to date in Smart.
Smart saw enormous growth in 2020, with assets on the platform growing by more than 160% to £1.8bn and the successful rollouts of the Smart platform with Bank of Ireland’s insurance arm, New Ireland Assurance, and with global insurance giant Zurich and the Dubai International Financial Centre in the Middle East, both at the height of the pandemic.
The co-founders of Smart, Andrew Evans and Will Wynne, said: “Chrysalis Investments joins us at a really exciting time.
“Smart’s achievements over the last 12 months are testament to our amazing team, and also to the incredible resilience of both our operating model and the Smart platform that we deploy for large financial institutions and national governments.
“With close to a million savers on our platform already, we now have straight line visibility through to well over five million savers on the platform within the next 24 months.
“We are very excited to welcome Chrysalis as they really understand the global scale of our vision and opportunity.
“Chrysalis’s investment adviser, Jupiter Asset Management, is a prominent leader in UK investment and Chrysalis itself has an astonishing track record of backing Europe’s most successful tech businesses. We are delighted to join the Chrysalis portfolio.”