Smart secures £165m in Series D funding led by Chrysalis Investments

By Megha Bhattacharya

Smart, the global retirement savings technology platform provider that powers the Smart Pension Master Trust, announced today that it is concluding a £165m Series D funding round. Chrysalis Investments, one of the UK’s leading crossover investors, has led Smart’s Series D funding round with a £75 million 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.

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 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.

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 focused on our core goal: offering the very best technology to improve the lives of retirement savers around the world. We also recognise that there are tremendous opportunities for us to cost effectively deploy capital in M&A to bring members and assets onto our technology platform in the UK, the United States and beyond and we will be pursuing such opportunities with the energy those markets’ retirement savers deserve.”