Having spent most the day coding, I remember us being almost as excited about the pretzels at that point. It would be fabrication to say that we had some idea then that ten years later - to the day - we’d be back at the notary and bringing on a new investor that would be supplying us with €110m of capital to grow our business and valuing what we – as Mambuvians past and present – have built at well over a billion euros.
This humbling milestone is a culmination of years of contribution by hundreds of people, periods of intense struggle and moments of great victory. I have to acknowledge we have had our fair share of good fortune and external events where we had little direct control, but were able to anticipate and face (mostly) prepared. And yet, given the scope of what we’re trying to achieve with Mambu, this, 10 years and a unicorn badge later, really feels like just the beginning.
When we created Mambu we wanted to empower people to create great banking experiences for anyone and anywhere around the world. We thought banking was generally an unpleasant experience and one that was overly complicated and exclusive to millions of businesses and billions of people. Our vision was - and still is - to create a global platform that enables more than a billion people to have access to better banking services. We wanted to be able to empower our customers to create any financial product anywhere in the world and create amazing customer experiences. We wanted to do this by providing mission-critical banking capabilities as a service that enable business models that are agile and continuously evolving. And we wanted to do this sustainably and fairly to all who contribute to this journey, and make a positive impact on the planet.
This latest investment round allows us to accelerate all of the above from a business perspective and continue to focus on what makes Mambu unique. We have many geographies we’ll be expanding to. We have exciting product and technical capabilities that we’ll be both launching as well as building over the next couple years. We are, more than ever, ready to double down on our incredible ecosystems of commercial and technical partnerships. We’re just as energised about helping a large bank transform its operations as we are about embedding finance into a telco operation or enabling a government to distribute COVID support funds to the majority of the country’s population. But it’s not just what we’ll be doing that stands out, it’s how.
We are about building a modern progressive tech company that both embraces the social responsibilities of the corporation but also innovates with new practices. For the last five years, Mambu has been successfully implementing a four-day-work week summer schedule giving Mambuvians 50% more down time at no financial cost. For the last two years Mambu has been carbon neutral. And as of this year, we’re making sure every Mambuvian gets to enjoy and participate in the increase in value of Mambu shares. We’re just as proud that we have top-quartile employee engagement in our peer-groups as we are about our industry-leading customer satisfaction scores. We know we’re building a place where thousands of people will be spending the majority of their waking hours so while they’re working with us, why not build something that we’re proud of and that’s worthwhile.
With a lot of fresh capital in our pockets, a global community of Mambuvians, Mambu customers and partners and an industry that’s still in the very early days of reinventing itself in the fintech era, we’re incredibly excited about both bringing our new partners at TCV, Tiger and Arena on our journey.
For all our stakeholders: Mambuvians past, present and future, our customers, our partners and our shareholders - we’re incredibly honoured and thrilled for the opportunity to leverage this capital to accelerate building a platform, a business and a culture that we’ll be proud of for decades to come.