Raising Partners supports Penfold to raise £3.1m

Raising Partners are excited to announce the successful fundraise of recent client Penfold which closed at £3.1m, welcoming over 750 new investors to their shareholder community.

Penfold is a digital pension that makes it effortless to save for later life, so you can stop worrying about the future and enjoy today. Having launched in 2019, their customer base has grown to over 10,000 active users with more than £25m in savings already accrued. The business has received full FCA permissions to act as a full pension operator and counts the early backers of Spotify, Funding Circle, Adyen and Dropbox amongst its growing shareholder base.

Penfold came to us requiring comprehensive strategic support across all areas of their campaign with the remit of converting as many of their customers into investors as possible. Once this was established, we worked swiftly to equip the Penfold team with the key assets, namely a compelling video script, the pitch content itself, a brand new updated investor deck and a whole raft of marketing communications and social media graphics.

The raise itself was significantly oversubscribed with more than 15% of Penfold’s customer base pre-registering to invest in their crowdfunding campaign. Lead investors in the round included Bridford Investments, the family office of Jorg Mohaupt, Partner at Providence Equity Partners and one of the early backers of Spotify, alongside a number of serial FinTech angel investors.

“Penfold is on a mission to revolutionise the outdated pensions industry by transforming the way we save for retirement and manage our pensions for the better.

With more than 20% of British adults (almost 8 million people) stating that they don’t think they’ll ever be able to save enough to retire, it’s clear there is a huge need for Penfold in the market as they work to ensure that no one is left behind when it comes to saving for retirement.

We’re thrilled to have played a role in the success of Penfold’s fundraising journey to date and look forward to what the future holds for Chris and the team as the business continues to grow” – Helena Murphy, Managing Director Raising Partners

Penfold was founded because traditional pension providers weren’t working anymore. Their outdated, clunky technology and baffling jargon has left consumers confused and disinterested. And so, Penfold built their own entire pension infrastructure, automating a whole range of traditionally manual processes, offering their own HMRC registered scheme. Unlike the majority of its competitors, the innovative FinTech start-up no longer relies on legacy third party platforms or service providers to provide its pension, giving the team complete autonomy and flexibility over the customer experience. Crucially, however, Penfold is able to profitably serve absolutely anyone, even those with zero initial savings, so that no-one is left behind.

Penfold allows users to set up, manage and track their pensions online or on their devices. Contributions can be paused, topped up with one off payments and users can also track down and combine multiple pension balances. Users can choose where their money is kept or invested and the dashboard explains how much they have saved and how far off they are from their ultimate end-goal. In summary – it makes pensions completely painless.

The Penfold team will now use the funds raised to accelerate their growth and scale their customer base as they launch their workplace pensions product in the coming months, ahead of a larger Series A round, likely to take place in early 2022.

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