Crezco

Who owns Crezco?

Crezco is currently owned by 13books Capital through 13books Capital Fund II (2024 vintage), since 2024. Across its history, Crezco has been through 2 private equity ownership periods, detailed in the timeline below.

Hand-verified · updated 2026-05-21

About Crezco

Crezco is a London-based fintech whose account-to-account payments platform lets businesses pay and collect invoices directly through open banking, bypassing the fees of conventional card and payment networks. Built around an embedded payments API, it enables partners and small businesses to move money without leaving their accounting or workflow software, and has broadened from bill payments into adjacent products including payroll and expenses. The company is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority as an Electronic Money Institution, and positions itself in the B2B open-banking payments segment for SMEs across the UK and Europe. Its distribution rests on integrations with cloud accounting platforms, notably Xero, which used Crezco's technology to become the first major UK small-business accounting software to offer on-platform bill payments using open banking, alongside partnerships with QuickBooks and other B2B tools.

Ownership journey

Crezco was founded in London in 2020 by Ralph Rogge and Igor Pikovsky, drawing on Rogge's background building embedded finance firm YouLend and the founders' shared roots at Rogge Global Partners and Columbia University. After an early seed round in 2021 backed by fintech angels and specialist investors, the company raised a Series A of roughly 9.6 million pounds, about 12 million dollars, in November 2023. That round was led by MMC Ventures, investing through its MMC Ventures EIS Fund, alongside 13books Capital, which backed the company from its second fund into 2024. Both remain active venture backers, and no exit or secondary transaction has been recorded.

Under PE ownership

The Series A capital was directed at scaling Crezco's open-banking payments infrastructure and deepening its accounting-platform partnerships across the UK and Europe. Since the investment the company has moved beyond standalone invoice bill payments toward a broader payables suite spanning domestic and international supplier payments, payroll and expenses, delivered through its embedded API. The Xero integration, which made on-platform bill payments available to a subscriber base numbering in the millions, anchored a distribution model built on cloud accounting software, extended alongside links to QuickBooks and other B2B platforms. The trajectory reflects a shift from a single-product open-banking payments tool toward embedded, multi-rail payments infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses.