EXCLUSIVE – It’s been a busy few days for fintech startup PayJoy, which today announced that it closed a $6 million investment, only a few days after it reached another milestone. That milestone being its availability on iPhones in select U.S. stores.
Based in San Francisco, PayJoy hopes to make the smartphone a mainstream financial tool for those who cannot afford these devices. Established in 2015 at Stanford University, PayJoy provides payment plans to purchase smartphones for people with limited or no access to credit. The company was built on the axiom that smartphones are gaining popularity as financial tools in addition to their many other integral applications.
The company’s ultimate goal is to provide its services to those in developing economies, who have access to the internet but not the finances to afford a smartphone.
Monday’s round of investment, which brings PayJoy’s total funding to $30 million since its founding in 2015, will allow PayJoy to do just that. The funds will be used to build PayJoy’s presence in markets of Latin America, Asia and Africa.
PayJoy CEO Doug Ricket said in a Monday statement:
PayJoy’s approach is to partner with the major players in the mobile industry to achieve scale. These strategic investors have offered to introduce PayJoy through their long-standing deep regional business networks, which I believe will be tremendously beneficial in accelerating our business partnerships and getting millions of customers onto smartphones in 2018.
The funding was led by Santander InnoVentures, the fintech VC fund of Spanish Bank Santander Group, and Japanese general trading company ITOCHU Corporation.
Manuel Silva, Head of Investments, Santander InnoVentures said in Monday’s statement:
PayJoy’s mission is to help the less privileged join the digital economy and climb the economic ladder. PayJoy rethinks a basic financial service through the lens of innovation, technology, and data, and brings a simple and fair new offering to those who need it the most.
Currently, PayJoy is available in the USA and Mexico. It is able to approve applicants without a formal credit history or banking relationships by an underwriting process that lets it analyze an candidate’s profile through their working mobile number, valid photo ID, and Facebook account. The process essentially “turns the phone itself into collateral through its proprietary secure locking technology,” according to its website.
In the event that a customer is not able to pay their monthly installment, the phone locks automatically. When this happens, the customer can only dial 9-11, and, of course, PayJoy’s customer service, which will ask for a payment.
Last week, PayJoy, whose payment plans were only available on Android devices, became available for iPhone users in select stores throughout the US.