Saving is usually one of the New Year's resolutions, and even more so after an economically complicated year like the last one. In a world where there are more and more subscriptions (to electricity, water, and phone bills are now added, for example, television and music streaming services), the Barcelona fintech Polaroo wants to contribute to bringing some order, in addition to helping citizens save. Through its mobile application, it shows users the recurring expenses they have each month or semester so they can have a global picture and anticipate their expenses, as well as proposing cheaper alternatives and managing the change of provider.
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Its founder and CEO, Marc Rovira, defines Polaroo as a platform for managing subscriptions from beginning to end, taking into account that they facilitate both the contracting of new services and their monthly payment. Founded in 2017, this startup has managed to add a total of 35,000 users to its application. But it also works with companies such as Mahou San Miguel, banks, and SMEs, offering them the same service, the control and optimization of business expenses.
However, the star functionality proposed by Polaroo consists of unifying all subscriptions into a single monthly payment, that is, they calculate how much all the bills users have to pay annually (electricity, gas, Internet, phone, Netflix, Spotify...) cost and divide it by months, making them pay a single amount each month and always the same. According to Rovira, this functionality ---the only one that is paid in the application--- allows for greater awareness of how much each person spends and better organization to face payments.
After closing three rounds, one of 120,000 euros in 2018, 500,000 euros in 2019, and one million in 2020, they are currently working on the fourth. Their main investors have been Dídac Lee, Carlos Pierre, Chris Bouwer, and Reus Venture Capital. The last turnover figure they want to make public is that of 2019, when sales stood at 30,000 euros and they managed 1.2 million euros in user bills. Polaroo monetizes through the service it offers of unifying payments and thanks to the clients it manages to bring to new providers.
Through their application, they allow contracting a total of 350 services and for this year they expect to continue growing in users in the application, reach more agreements like the one they have achieved with Mahou and specialize in the optimization of more services. Based in Barcelona, Polaroo's staff now totals 15 employees, but they expect to reach 20 in these first months of the year, hiring new programmers, designers, and sales representatives.