FERO raises $3m Seed Round to enhance online payment journey

By Gloria Methri

Dutch FinTech FERO has announced the successful closure of a $3 million seed round from Coatue, Volta Ventures, and Antler. This capital will enable FERO to expand and enhance its online payment solution and tackle the revenue loss faced by merchants at the point of checkout.

After working for Ekata, a global payments fraud solution, and then Mastercard, co-founders Craig Savage and Maximilian van Boxel saw firsthand how complicated payment processing has become at checkout for end-merchants. Data shows that most online shoppers who reach the checkout stage fail to complete their purchases.

“As a payments data scientist, I was shocked when I started to uncover the level of abandonment during the checkout and payment journey. Today, upwards of 45% of customers place items in their shopping cart, but never finalise their purchase due to payment-related issues. This translates to over $5.2 trillion of lost revenue per year,” said Craig Savage, Co-Founder and CEO, FERO. “We founded FERO to help retailers deliver a more seamless and customised shopping experience to their customers.”

FERO’s solution analyses each shopper, their behaviour, and activity, to predict the likelihood of purchase completion. Through the sequenced application of segmentation, multi-classification prediction, and reinforcement learning, FERO learns a shopper’s purchase preferences and delivers the most optimal payment experience. This includes individually customised payment methods and subsequent payment journeys like reducing the friction caused by 3D secure authentication challenges.

“While payment innovations have made transactions faster and more seamless, few solutions have looked at the behaviour of shoppers to understand why so many items are left un-purchased in the online shopping cart,” said Elena Sakach, Partner, Coatue. “It is exciting to see the FERO team take a unique approach that leverages behaviour analytics to deliver purchase solutions that will improve the shopping experience and drive revenue for retailers.”

With the capital from this seed round, FERO will build out its team across Europe and the US, and further enhance its product offerings to serve more retailers around the world.