Launch in Sight as BankSimple Closes $3.1 Million Funding Round

BankSimple, the yet-to-launch banking services provider, has closed a funding round.

New York City startup BankSimple [yesterday] disclosed that it raised its first venture funding in a round led by First Round Capital, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, and Village Ventures, along with seed investors SV Angel (Ron Conway) and Nauiokas Park, and Jerry Neumann. But it did not disclose how much it raised. I’ve confirmed that the round was $2.9 million, with an additional $190,000 raised last year in convertible debt (which converted to shares with this round), for a total of $3.1 million raised.

Our next step is to get our first cards issued. The card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) don’t issue new cards during November and December so that they can manage the rush on holiday gift cards. Assuming we can get our cards issued before this blackout period, we’d like to do a “friends and family” test later this year. That test will help us iron out any technical issues with our partner integrations and provide us with essential feedback.

Once we’re satisfied that our initial service is stable and secure, we’ll begin bringing on customers who signed up for an invitation (in order of invite request date, of course). To encourage people to flex our systems early on, we’ll be rewarding active customers with additional invites.

We expect our service to remain invite-only for the immediate future. This invite system allows us to control quality and costs. Our goal is nothing less than stellar customer service, and to achieve this goal we need to regulate the number of customers as we train and staff our support team. Once we’re sure we can provide the best possible experience to everyone, we’ll drop the invitation requirement.