Investors Move Quickly to Back Mondo in U.K.

The British challenger bank Mondo raised $1.4 million in 96 seconds, it announced Thursday.

The company raised the money from more than 1,800 people through the crowdfunding site Crowdcube as part of its roughly $8.5 million investment round, which is being led by Passion Capital.

Mondo is aiming to build a bank that would resemble an app store for financial services. Essentially, Mondo would be the deposit account, but customers would be able to choose things like payments and loans from a variety of companies. Those companies would connect with Mondo through open application programming interfaces.

The company hopes to have its banking charter later this year. As of last month it was testing its concept with prepaid MasterCard accounts with 2,000 users. An additional 35,000 people were on a waitlist.

"It feels like we've got an incredible opportunity ahead of us to build the kind of bank that we'd be proud to call our own," Tom Blomfield, Mondo's founder and chief executive, wrote in a blog post on Thursday to its new investors.

Blomfield also said that the rapid raise crashed Crowdcube's servers on Monday. He added that the company would be contacting its new backers to finalize their investments, as well as contacting those who tried to invest but were unable to. He said he hopes to include crowdfunding in Mondo's next funding round, which should take place later this year.

"While we tried to make the process as fair as possible, I'd like to apologize for the frustrations over the last few days, and in particular to anyone who missed the chance to invest," Blomfield wrote.

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