Romanian Fintech Pago, which offers an app to manage payments, announces that Mozaik Investments has acquired 51.12% of its shares from Banca Transilvania. The startup is on its way to scaling its financial solution in Europe, beginning with countries like Poland and Italy. The deal is of undisclosed amount. The estimated valuation of the company now is €10M.
Mozaik Investments is a Romanian-Austrian investment company, co-founded by Roland Haas, who is also the CEO, entrepreneur and investor Sacha Dragic, and former banker Vlad Busila in 2019. They are targeting companies in CEE with high growth potential, joining them with both capital and financial know-how. Their investment tickets vary between €2-5M, and the holding period can reach up to 10 years.
BT Investments, which owns Banca Transilvania, became a majority stakeholder in Pago in 2017. Their goal was to support tech startup entrepreneurs and the country’s digitalization. They will continue to offer their support to Pago as an operational partner.
“With this transaction, Pago is moving to the next phase of growth, in which we will focus on international expansion and on adding new features for our users in Romania. We already started a recruitment campaign with the objective of adding 20 new members to the team over the next 6 months,” Adrian Cighi and Alexandru-Gala Popescu, Pago co-founders, shared in the official press release.
What Fintech solution is Pago offering?
The Romanian Fintech startup was co-founded in 2016 by Adrian Cighi and Alexandru-Gala Popescu. Adrian has a background in finance, accounting, and disruptive strategy programs, having previously worked as an investment analyst. Alexandru has a background in computer science and has co-founded various other projects in verticals like management and web development.
Pago is a mobile application for managing and paying all the utility bills from one account. The solution offers real-time updates, the bills are organized by the due date, and the payments can be done fast. Users can purchase insurance policies, pay their taxes, and with their latest update, they can also make instant money transfers and donations.
The money transfer service is available to any card issued by a bank in Romania or to Revolut cards, using only the phone number to send money, no other details necessary, like the IBAN. Their financial solution also makes money requests possible, and the users receive an SMS with a payment link.
The tech startup collaborates with over 380 utility providers in Romania, has over 230K active users in Romania and Poland, and has been used for more than 10M bill payments so far.
Their business model is based on different types of subscriptions, which come with different transfer options. Between 1-3 transfers are free per month, and then the transactions are around €0.20 each, no matter the value transferred. Pago also offers rewards to users with each transfer, which can then be used to pay bills.
Stay tuned for more updates on Pago’s milestones, and future goals, as next week The Recursive will chat with the co-founder Adrian Cighi.
