Kublax, effectively a UK version of Mint in the US, launches its financial aggregation engine officially in the UK on Wednesday (tomorrow). Meantime it has appointed a new CEO and I understand that it has received yet another additional financing round of “just under” 1 million euro – clearly its backers are convinced of the model as Kublax has been in development for two years now. The Kublax launch is well timed for the recession as the imperative for consumers needing to keep on top of finances looms large. Some 55% of the UK population is already banking online, so there is a ready-made market.
The new CEO is Tom Symonds, a former BSkyB Director of Internet products. Kublax is the brainchild of Sridhar Sethuraman, a former IT and management consultant.
The new funds raised this year have come from Ambient Sound Investments and individuals such as Stefan Glänzer, former executive chairman of Last.fm and Jonty Kelt, Vice President of Search, International with DoubleClick. Previous investors which have also participated in this latest round are The Accelerator Group (TAG) (a Seedcamp backer), Omnis Mundi Invest AG and Digitalents Capital. In February 2008 Kublax won a further round of undisclosed angel investment from those latter three, together with Five Ventures.
Here’s how it works: Using Bank-level security, Kublax pulls together all your bank, building society accounts and credit card accounts and puts each line of income and expenditure into flexible categories. This is then displayed visually to make it easier to see how your money is working – or not. You can thus monitor cash flow at a glance. Calendar and Alert features can be used to trigger events. But the killer feature is showing you where you are paying over the odds relative to other users like you. In fact it uses the same security systems currently used by the US Federal Reserve.
Kublax was a winner of Seedcamp way back in 2007 and its nice to see it’s got this far. Although technically a competitor to Mint, Kublax’s business is relatively safe since banking is so regional across the planet. It’s been in working beta since September last year.