- UK fintech Kord has secured £6.4 million in Series A funding, led by Guinness Ventures, following a year in which its revenue grew almost seven times.
- Founder James Owusu spent eight years onboarding banking clients before building a £2.5 million property portfolio. During this time, he saw firsthand how inefficient these processes could be for clients.
- Kord now has over 100 paying customers and says no other company currently offers both identity verification and client money management on a single platform.
James Owusu spent eight years onboarding banking clients for mortgages and private wealth accounts while building a £2.5 million property portfolio. He noticed that people handling onboarding often do not realise how stressful the process is for clients.
“It’s not great being the person doing the onboarding, but equally not great being the person going through the onboarding,” Owusu tells Tech Funding News.
This gap inspired Kord, the identity and payments platform that just raised £6.4 million in Series A funding led by Guinness Ventures, with Beringea, SFC Capital, and angel investors also joining. The company’s total funding is now £9 million.
Growth driving the investment round
Kord’s rapid growth caught investors’ attention. The company’s revenue jumped from £600,000 to nearly £4 million in one year, almost a sevenfold increase, according to Owusu.
“Our growth has been strong. Those strong metrics made the conversation much easier,” he says.
Guinness Ventures and Beringea focus on supporting companies that are already generating revenue, not early-stage startups. Guinness Ventures, which led this round, has also invested in UK companies like Wolf & Badger and Doctify.
“Every high-value transaction depends on trust, yet the systems underpinning many regulated industries remain fragmented, manual and increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated fraud. Kord has built the infrastructure layer that modern businesses need: combining identity verification, compliance and payments into a single platform that dramatically improves both security and efficiency,” says Malcolm King, chief investment officer at Guinness Ventures.
Kiu Kim, investment director at Beringea, adds, “Kord is solving a real and growing challenge for businesses operating in regulated industries. The business is delivering clear and tangible value to customers, and its platform has become a critical part of their day-to-day operations.”
Integrating identity verification and payments
Kord wants to make onboarding easier for law firms and estate agents by combining identity checks and payments into one step. Once a client completes Kord’s identity and anti-money-laundering checks, they can pay the firm directly through Kord’s wallet, so there is no need to transfer funds to another account.
“We’re creating a closed-loop environment where you get onboarded and make a payment on the same system. Nobody has to worry about money going to the wrong place or a bad actor getting involved,” Owusu notes.
This is a big problem. Failed UK property transactions cost consumers £560 million and the wider economy £950 million each year, mostly because firms handle identity checks, compliance, and payments using separate systems. TFN has previously covered Conveyd’s £2.5 million seed round, which tackles the same broken property chain from the conveyancing side and lists Thirdfort among its competitors.
A market gap unlikely to remain
Owusu points out that Kord has no direct competitors that offer both identity verification and client money management. Thirdfort, the UK leader in identity verification, works with over 1,500 law firms and property businesses and recently added deepfake-detection technology, citing £1.6 billion in annual UK property fraud.
However, Thirdfort does not offer client money accounts like Kord. Owusu expects this gap to close soon. “As soon as we go live and start talking about it, people will see the same gap we see and want to close it,” he adds.
The identity verification market is forecast to grow from roughly $15.8 billion in 2026 to $26.8 billion by 2031, driven largely by AI-generated fraud and deepfake attacks. TFN also reported on Wultra’s €6.8 million Series A for post-quantum identity infrastructure, part of the same wave of investor interest in digital identity security.
Kord now serves over 100 customers and has processed £5.4 million for them in the past year. The company has 48 employees, about 30 of whom are based in London. 60% of the new funding will go to sales and marketing, 20% to technology development, and the rest to senior hires, including a chief financial officer and a chief marketing officer.
It remains to be seen whether combining onboarding and payments will give Kord a long-term advantage or just an early lead. This will depend on how quickly competitors like Thirdfort move into payments. Kord is working to set the standard before others catch up.
