TrueLayer raises $27M led by CDP Venture Capital for its Italy push

TrueLayer has raised a $27M investment led by CDP Venture Capital, Italy’s state-backed venture arm, to deepen its presence in Italy, where the London open banking company already runs a core engineering hub in Milan.

We talk a lot about payment sovereignty in Europe – and most of our money still moves on rails owned elsewhere. So when Italy’s national venture investor writes its first cheque into a London fintech founded by two Italians, it is worth reading as more than a funding line. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, and what a sovereign fund picking a pay-by-bank champion signals.

A first cheque from Rome, aimed at Milan

TrueLayer announced on 8 October 2026 a $27M investment led by CDP Venture Capital, joined by a consortium of new and existing investors the company did not name. No stage label was attached to the round. CDP Venture Capital – owned 70% by CDP Equity and 30% by Invitalia, with more than €4.9bn under management – is a first-time investor in the company.

The money has a postcode. TrueLayer says the funds will go to building out its Italian presence: around 70 of its people, roughly a quarter of the workforce, already sit in Italy, and the Milan engineering hub is set to keep hiring through 2027. The round takes total funding to roughly $350M since the company’s founding in 2016.

“Europe deserves payment infrastructure built in Europe,” said co-founder and CEO Francesco Simoneschi in the announcement. Mario Branciforti, who heads CDP Venture Capital’s Large Ventures fund, matched him: “Europe needs payment infrastructure it owns and controls, and we are investing across the continent to help build it.”

Two Italian founders, one London licence, 22 markets

Founded in London in 2016 by Francesco Simoneschi and Luca Martinetti, TrueLayer started as a bank data API and grew into one of Europe’s largest pay-by-bank networks: more than 30 million consumers now use it across 22 countries, per the company. It is licensed in the UK and the EU and positions account-to-account payments as the alternative to card rails – checkout money that moves bank to bank, with no interchange in the middle.

The company has been consolidating too: it completed the acquisition of Swedish paytech Zimpler in March 2026 and announced the purchase of Dutch buy-now-pay-later provider in3 in May. Its latest published UK accounts show revenue of £20.3M in 2024, up from £12.4M in 2023. The last price on the business was the $50M Series E extension led by Northzone, which Bloomberg reported valued TrueLayer at around $700M in October 2024 – a long way below its 2021 unicorn mark, and a reminder that payment networks are volume games that reward patience over hype.

Account-to-account payments compound at roughly 25% a year

The segment TrueLayer sells into is still small next to cards, and growing much faster. Juniper Research counted 60 billion consumer account-to-account transactions globally in 2024 and forecasts 186 billion by 2029 – a 209% rise over five years, roughly 25% a year (Juniper Research, September 2024). In the UK, TrueLayer’s home market, open banking payment volumes were growing about 45% year on year as of mid 2026 (Open Banking Limited).

For scale against our own records: Noah raised a $38M seed days ago to move cross-border payments onto stablecoins, and finmid pulled in €17M to take embedded lending into vehicles. A $27M cheque into a ten-year-old network with 30 million users is a different animal: not blitzscaling capital, but infrastructure capital.

Sovereign money is starting to pick payment champions

What does it mean when a state-backed fund leads a round in a scale-up headquartered abroad? The reality is that European checkout traffic still runs overwhelmingly on two American card networks, and no single member state can change that alone. The good news is that the capital able to change it is waking up: CDP’s cheque reads as a bet on pan-European payment infrastructure, placed where the engineering already happens to be – a quarter of TrueLayer’s team is in Milan, built by two founders who left Italy to start the company and are now hiring back home.

Call it return migration, with a term sheet. What we are seeing is national investors moving beyond subsidising local seed funds and into backing the rails themselves, wherever the headquarters sits. Two things are worth watching from here: whether other national vehicles – Bpifrance comes to mind – follow with similar infrastructure cheques into pay-by-bank, and whether TrueLayer converts an engineering hub into an anchor market, with Italian merchants and banks adopting the rails its Milan team builds. Our fundraising data will show soon enough whether this round was an outlier or the start of a pattern.

Pay-by-bank is compounding at 25% a year, and for once some of the rails being laid are ours. Let’s keep building them in Europe!