Cino cracks bill-splitting at the moment of payment, raises seed round

While Venmo or Splitwise are effectively ‘debt collector’ tools, which require one person to pay a full bill and then request funds from others, neither have cracked bill-splitting at the moment of payment. European startup Cino, which has come up with just such a product, has now raised €3.5m in a Seed funding round led by London’s Balderton Capital.

The real-time shared payment app allows a group to split the bill and pay their share directly from whatever bank account or wallet they choose.

After emerging from Tallinn, Estonia, and operating in continental Europe since 2023, Cino will now use the funding to expand to the U.K.

Led by CEO Elena Churilova (formerly of Bumble and Booking.com) and COO Lina Saleh (ex-Cornell University), Cino appears to be making waves among Gen Z, who dislike “financial awkwardness” and among whom joint bank accounts — for payment of things like shared household bills — are going the way of the dinosaur.

To use Cino, users connect their card to the mobile app where they get a virtual card. They can then join shared payment groups where they set adjustable custom split ratios, like those for a restaurant bill. Any group member can pay for anything and everyone’s share is automatically deducted at checkout, said the company.

Image Credits:Cino

All payments appear transparently in the group feed, and users can join or leave payment groups at any time. 

Currently, all users ned to be a Cino user for the app to work, but the company is also building a new feature where you can directly join through Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Cino claims to have 100% month-over-month growth in markets like Finland and Italy, and says its customers use the app 17 times a month, on average, spending up to €3,000. 

“The way to set it up is similar to how WhatsApp works,” explained Elena Churilova, Cina’s co-founder and CEO of Cino, over a call with TechCrunch. “You just create groups, and then we issue virtual cards. You can add people, remove people from that virtual card, and also change the split ratio.”

Cino’s journey began when Churilova was working at Bumble, and started splitting expenses with colleagues: “I tried every single tool out there possible to figure out how to make my weekends not into accounting exercises,” she said. “Then I just had this like moment of thinking, like, ‘Why is no one building a way to pay together?’”

The app also leverages the network effect to scale, as every new Cino user can invite 2-4 others for free within their first six months of joining.

“For too long, people have accepted standard bill-splitting, debt tracking, and repayment requests as the only way to manage shared expenses – simply because there was no alternative,” Cino investor Greta Anderson at Balderton Capital said in a statement. “Cino’s viral growth demonstrates that there is an alternative which users love.”

Connect Ventures and Tera Ventures also participated in this round, alongside angels, including Barney Hussey-Yeo (founder of Cleo).