Italy's CDP Venture Capital leads $27M round into TrueLayer

TrueLayer, the London-based payments fintech, has raised a $27M investment round led by CDP Venture Capital, the Italian state-backed investor, with a consortium of new and existing investors taking part.

The company's pitch is that open banking can loosen the grip of card networks on online checkout. TrueLayer uses open banking technology to let customers make account-to-account payments — known as pay by bank — as an alternative to handling transactions through card giant intermediaries Visa and Mastercard. The company is backed by Stripe and Tiger Global.

Founded in London in 2016 by two Italians, Francesco Simoneschi and Luca Martinetti, TrueLayer set out to build a modern payment network for Europe. Italy is already a substantial part of that footprint: TrueLayer says it now employs around 70 people there, roughly a quarter of its workforce, with Milan serving as one of its core engineering hubs.

That footprint is the target of the new funding. The capital will be used to help further build the company's presence in Italy, and TrueLayer expects to continue hiring there through 2027. In total, the business has raised around $350M to date.

The round puts a state-backed Italian investor at the centre of a company whose founders are themselves Italian, a detail Simoneschi leaned on in commenting on the raise.

"We started TrueLayer with a simple belief: Europe deserves payment infrastructure built in Europe," said Simoneschi, co-founder and CEO of TrueLayer. "Having Italy back that belief means a great deal to us personally, especially to our talented team in Milan, who work hard every day to build the future of European payments."

The raise is a bet on the competitive position TrueLayer has staked out against the card duopoly: account-to-account rails that skip the intermediaries that take a slice of each transaction. For CDP Venture Capital, it is a wager on an Italian engineering base inside a UK-regulated payments business — and on Milan's role in the wider European payments build-out that TrueLayer has been pursuing since 2016.