Neo Financial becomes Calgary’s latest $1 billion tech ‘unicorn’

Calgary’s tech community can boast another “unicorn” with fintech company Neo Financial’s close of a funding round that values the startup at more than $1 billion.

Neo Financial — which was founded in 2019 by Andrew Chau and Jeff Adamson, co-founders of food delivery app Skip the Dishes, as well as Kris Read — announced Thursday it has raised $185 million in a series C fundraising round featuring New York-based Valar Ventures as Neo’s lead investor.

Paul Lee — a partner at San Franciscobased Tribe Capital, which participated in the funding round — confirmed in an interview that Neo Financial’s latest fundraise is based on a current valuation of more than $1 billion.

That makes the Calgary company one of only a handful of Alberta-based tech startups that can claim coveted “unicorn” status. (The term is used to emphasize the rarity of reaching that level of valuation in the tech startup world).

“We spend a lot of time working with a special subset of companies that hit the benchmarks right out of the rails, and Neo fits that picture,” Lee said. “The numbers speak for themselves, with Neo.”

The series C round brings the amount of total venture capital funding raised by Neo Financial in the past three years to almost $300 million. In addition to Valar Ventures and Tribe Capital, other participants in the series C round include Altos Ventures, Blank Ventures, Gaingels, Maple VC, and Knollwood Advisory.

Neo Financial’s aim is to build new user-friendly banking technology and products. The company says one million customers are already using its product line, which includes the Neo Credit Card, a cash-back credit card issued by ATB Financial and backed by the MasterCard network, as well as the Neo high-interest savings account by Concentra Bank.