Published : 8 years ago, on 15/07/2016

Fintech start-up just received largest UK crowdfunding investment of all time

Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX),today announced that goHenry, the UK’s first fully digital family banking solution designed to help young people manage their money, has achieved 470 percent annual growth with help from the VMware® Managed Virtualisation offering from Rackspace.

 goHenry recently achieved the record largest amount of equity raised from crowdfunding in the world (£4m), which went far beyond its initial target of £2 million. This is the latest in a line of investments in the fintech space which brought £524m to the UK in 2015 alone. The capital was raised so that the business could accelerate its UK growth and begin its international expansion, while continuing to enhance its product. The start-up is already one of the UK’s fastest growing companies with annual growth currently standing at more than 470 percent.

 The business was founded with a mission to make the next generation of young people better at managing their money than the last. It’s a subscription service operating in the fintech space, which provides 8-18 year olds with a prepaid debit card and app with unique parental controls. Parents can use the app to easily manage pocket money, set spending limits and rules on where the card can be used, and much more. These tools are designed to help children and teens learn to earn, save and spend responsibly whilst giving parents peace of mind and an easy way to manage their children’s pocket money.

 Like any other e-commerce website and app, goHenry requires stability during their online sales cycle and periods where interest spikes and traffic volumes increase. goHenry’s recent crowdfunding success and other busy periods, like when young people are keen to spend money such as Saturday mornings (when the website receives five times more traffic than any other day of the week), school holidays and Christmas, are a case in point.

 Alex Zivoder, CEO at goHenry says: “It’s impossible to focus on achieving large scale growth if you are constantly being distracted by day-to-day tasks which only maintain the business’ current status. This is one of the main reasons we chose a managed cloud solution, because I can trust that our IT infrastructure will be run at a high standard by a team of Rackspace experts so I can concentrate on work that helps us progress towards our key growth goals. This is why we see Rackspace as more of a valued advisor that contributes towards our growth rather than a traditional cloud vendor.”

 Zivoder and his team opted for Rackspace after reviewing the market for a cloud provider that could not only meet their current needs, but also support the company through their international growth.

 Darren Norfolk, MD of Rackspace UK added: “It was great to see goHenry breaking the record for the largest round of crowdfunding investment in UK history. Not only have we helped the company towards this fantastic achievement, but the investment was raised through the Crowdcube platform, which is another Rackspace customer. We have also shared our vast experience of helping companies overcome IT challenges caused by rapid growth and I’m glad that goHenry has benefitted from this.”

 goHenry uses VMware® Managed Virtualisation from Rackspace for its front end presence and its backend operations which includes the mobile app, while using a Public Cloud Powered by OpenStack^® for its website. As well as providing valuable reliability and speed, the solution is set up in this way so that sign ups can be handled on one part of the infrastructure and transactions can be handled on the other. This solution can be considered very innovative for a company in the financial sector, but it was able to take this approach because it was ‘born in the cloud’ era and isn’t faced with the huge task of updating legacy systems like more traditional players in the financial sector.