Money messaging platform Plynk to appoint liquidator
Money messaging startup Plynk is to appoint a liquidator — just a year after it received €25m in one of the largest ever Series A investments in an Irish firm.
The company said it is to hold a creditors’ meeting in Dublin on June 27, and will ask for Jim Stafford of Friel Stafford to be appointed as liquidator.
It is a dramatic fall for the firm, which received €25m in its Series A raise from European investment trust fund Suisse Privee in May last year.
Series A is the name typically given to a company’s first significant round of venture capital financing.
Plynk announced 40 new jobs based in its Dublin headquarters last June — adding that it planned to hire across numerous departments over the next year.
Founded in 2015, the firm was Europe’s first money messaging app offering instant person-to-person payments.
Plynk was co-founded by Charles Dowd and Clive Foley to remove the complexities of money transfers amongst family and friends.
Linked to users’ social networks, Plynk users send money as a message to a single contact or in group chats instantly and with no fees — likened to a WhatsApp with money transferring involved.
Mr Dowd, who said he wanted Plynk to become a verb like Google or Facebook, has worked for some of the world’s largest and most impactful technology firms, including IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook, holding senior management roles in the US and Ireland over the past 25 years.
He left Facebook in 2015 to establish and develop Plynk with Mr Foley, who previously worked at Wonga and Ezetop.
Following its Series A success, KPMG referenced Plynk’s historic milestone in its ‘Pulse of Fintech’ 2017 report.
Since the €25m in funding was announced, it emerged that the sum was dependent on the company reaching certain user numbers, which it failed to do.
The firm is not believed to have accepted any new customers since December.
Staff have left in numbers this year.
Despite the difficulties in December, the firm said that month that growing the brand in Europe was the next phase of the business, with Portugal following Ireland in its rollout.
Mr Dowd told the Irish Examiner at the time that he was confident in the firm’s business model.
“The business plan you commit to with your investors should be meaningful and achievable. They want the business to be successful and are not here to say you must grow to five million people or anything like that,” he said.
