France's Lydia raises $100m to help it build out its financial "superapp"

French startup Lydia become the second-most downloaded fintech app in France, allowing 5.5m customers to bank, invest and send money to each other. Giant investors like Tencent and Accel are also Lydia supporters, joining its $133m Series B. Tencent, Accel, Founders Future, Dragoneer and Echo Street joined the latest funding round for Lydia, which claims five and a half million users.

With this Lydia become a unicorn, having been valued at over $1bn in a new $100m round, flanked by US funds Dragoneer and Echo Street. Lydia’s most ambitious target is to become a financial “superapp” for millennials and Gen Z.

Lydia launched in 2013 with a P2P payments service but has since diversified to enable users to get accounts, payment cards, loans, insurance and gift cards. Recently, the firm joined forces with Bitpanda to allow its users to invest in cryptocurrency.

Over the next three years, Lydia wants to become the primary account for 10m users. It will also use the funds to spin out new credit and investment products (having recently launched crypto trading), as well as expanding into at least two new European geographies, including Portugal and Spain.

The superapp is really the future of banking services as we know them. The bank app has gained some improvement, but they haven’t really changed over the last few decades,” says Lydia cofounder and CEO Cyril Chiche. “Apps should really hide all the complexity [of banking]. It should be an interface as close to the actual intention.”

With the new funding in place, Lydia says it plans to hire 800 people over the next three years as it seeks to hit 10 million customers across Europe.