Griffin has spent two years proving a startup can hold a UK banking licence and still rent out its plumbing. Now it has $20M of fresh capital and a valuation above $100M to show for it.
Octagon Partners led the Series B, with Notion Capital, A+ Ventures, Nordic Ninja and Breega joining existing backers. The London company has raised roughly $95M in total since David Jarvis, a former Airbnb executive, founded it.
The premise is simple: other firms want to offer accounts, payments and lending without spending years chasing regulatory approval. Griffin already carries the licence, so clients integrate its rails and skip the paperwork.
Eighty customers and a famous ride-hailing name
More than 80 companies now build on the infrastructure, Uber among them. Griffin earns from the accounts and money movement it powers, and says it is steering toward its first full-year profit.
That profitability target is the interesting part. Banking-as-a-service enjoyed a stampede of enthusiasm a few years back, then compliance mishaps cooled the market and pushed regulators to scrutinise how licence-holders supervise partners. Griffin is betting survivors with genuine scale inherit the demand left behind.
The next layer is where the margin sits. Griffin plans card issuing and stablecoin services, both higher-touch than plain account infrastructure and both squarely in the path of regulators now drafting rules for tokenised money.
Jarvis frames the round as permission to build that second act, arguing cards and stablecoins are the obvious extension of the core stack.
For founders watching fintech funding thin out, Griffin is a useful data point: investors still pay up for licensed infrastructure with real revenue, even as consumer apps struggle. The burden now is execution, keeping supervisors satisfied while the product line widens.
