Kadmos, the end-to-end salary payments platform for cross-border employers, has raised €29 million in a Series A funding round “led by Blossom Capital.”
The investment round, which follows an €8.3 million seed round back in December, also included existing investors Addition and Atlantic Labs.
The funding “follows significant levels of demand for the product.” Kadmos is already working “with several high-profile shipping companies and has built a robust waitlist ahead of full-scale customer onboarding this summer.”
This new financing will be “used for technology and product development.” Kadmos claims that it is uniquely positioned “to capitalize on the growing global cross-border B2C payment volume projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2022, involving 169 million migrant workers across the world, according to the UN.”
Kadmos was “founded to tackle the severe restrictions placed on the financial freedom of cross-border employees and to use modern financial technology to allow migrant workers to have a streamlined salary experience, just as they would expect working in their home country.”
Migrant workers have so far “received little attention from the recent fintech boom and Kadmos’ mission is to bring the latest financial technology to these underserved communities of workers to help them protect and secure their salaries so they are able to remit their pay home to their families.”
The traditional financial system “presents employers with unnecessary complexity when paying salaries across the globe, and often requires employers to pay large fees to simply transfer salary payments.”
For example, the shipping industry is “still dominated by expensive, slow, and untransparent payment processes.”
Many shipping companies “resort to bringing significant amounts of cash on board to pay their employees, which is both costly and insecure.” Additionally, seafarers “face unfavorable exchange rates and high fees to send money home to their families and often wait days or even weeks to get access to their salaries.”
In the form of seamless and easy-to-use web and mobile apps, Kadmos has “developed a secure salary payments platform for shipping companies that enables them to efficiently pay their crews.”
Kadmos provides seamless integration “with the Kadmos web application, where companies can automatically add their employees through an API-connection to various crewing software.
Kadmos provides each employee “with access to the mobile app, where salary payments are instantly paid and which allows employees to transfer money home or use a debit card to spend or withdraw cash seamlessly.”
Digitalizing the payment process “means the funds can be kept in secure currencies within the Kadmos app, ensuring low transaction fees and market-leading foreign exchange rates.”
This ensures workers “keep more of their salary when they send money home.” These benefits have a knock-on effect for employers as they “can better attract and retain employees by using an efficient payment process like Kadmos.”
Kadmos was “founded in February 2021 by MIT graduates Justus Schmueser and Sasha Makarovych.”
Justus Schmueser, Kadmos co-founder said:
“The financial restrictions placed on migrant workers are truly shocking. Employees need to wait days or weeks for their hard-earned salaries to reach their families and are then forced into paying exorbitant transaction fees or have to carry large sums of cash at their own risk. At Kadmos, we are working to change the status quo through cutting-edge financial technology and ensuring the hard-working people who power the global economy can keep more of their well-deserved salaries. The speed and size of our latest funding round underline the potential for our platform and we’re honored to partner with such a reputable and prestigious venture fund in Blossom.”
For more details on this update, check here.