Ukrainian startup Taplend allows you to “get money transfers from your friends on your PayPal account with no interest or fee at all” or to “borrow it from financial institutions on your bank account or card through the iOS application in just few taps.”
The startup will participate in a six-month acceleration program offered by the Italian accelerator SellaLab in cooperation with London-based fintech accelerator Level39. In addition, the startup will receive €75,000 in funding.
The program will allow Taplend to launch all over Europe, believes Viktor Ihnatiuk, Taplend’s CEO.
Despite the fact that fintech is thriving, Ihnatiuk managed to come up with only one service to partially rival Taplend – Ledge.me, “a social finance platform that empowers borrowers to crowdsource personal loans from their network”. However, Ledge.me doesn’t allow borrowing from banks or other financial institutions, which leaves Taplend the sole service of its kind.
The idea of the project dawned on Ihnatiuk while he was participating in the acceleration program offered by Technation, a Kazakhstan-based accelerator, in August last year.
he entrepreneur was entitled to the $25,000 funding from Technation, an accelerator backed by the Kazakhstani government. However, he never got the financing, Ihnatiuk told Ukraine Digital News.
Earlier this year, however, the startup secured $120,000 in funding, which is being transferred in several tranches, noted Ihnatiuk.
Although the service initially intended to target the US market, Taplend turned to the European market due to a range of difficulties the startup encountered in the USA, which included a failed cooperation with PayPal, a very high market entry threshold and high regulation in the fintech industry.
Even though the startup considers the European market a top priority at the moment, it is possible that upon the wish of one of its investors the service would be launched in Ukraine within a month, with a chance to later enter the Kazakhstani market, Ihnatiuk told Ukraine Digital News.
