Another player in the packed p2p payments space is announcing an $8.3 million Series A funding round today. SF and Barcelona based Verse is gunning to be the Venmo of Europe — given Venmo hasn’t yet shown an inclination to expand its mobile social payments app outside the US . The Series A is led by Greycroft , with participation from Spark Capital and eVentures . Verse had previously raised a $1.8M seed round from angel investors in Europe and the US. DFJ Dragon also invested in that round. The new funding will be used to expand its team, including new hires focused on product development, aimed at accelerating its growth, says co-founder Alex Lopera. “We’re trying to be like the WhatsApp of payments,” he tells TechCrunch. “It’s really frustrating today when you want to do a transaction, when you want to pay back your friends, money that you owe them, and you don’t want to do online banking. It’s not something that’s cool or really works. “Verse is super slick and easy — you just type the amount that you want to transfer, select one of your phone contacts from your address book, click send and the money’s already there.” It’s a mobile social payments story that’s amply familiar from multiple apps these day. And not just in the US: in Europe other players here include the likes of France’s Lydia , Germany’s Cookies , US-based Circle , and N26 with its MoneyBeam offering , to name just a few. But as my TC colleague Romain Dillet succinctly puts it: “Social payments is not a product; it’s just a feature” — which is another way of saying there’s a race on to see which of these startups can scale fast enough to be the winner-takes-all network for Europe. […]
