When an immigrant arrives in London, Toronto, or New York, the bank account is usually the easy part. The credit file is the hard part. No score, no card, no mortgage, no car loan. The financial system treats a 35-year-old engineer from Mumbai or Lagos like a teenager with no history.
Pillar, a London fintech founded in 2021 by Ashutosh Bhatt and Adam Lewis, was built to fix exactly that. The pitch: port a newcomer's existing credit history across borders, then issue them credit products on day one in the new country [TechCrunch, April 2022]. In April 2022, the company raised one of the larger pre-seed rounds in European fintech that year, $16.9 million (£13 million) led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC [TechCrunch, April 2022]. Three years later, in June 2025, the company was acquired by LemFi, the cross-border payments platform serving immigrant communities [LemFi, June 2025].
The bet
Pillar's wedge was narrow and specific. Migrants are a high-intent, underserved credit segment. They have income, often above-median income, and they have repayment discipline shaped by the cost of getting a visa renewed. What they lack is a local FICO or Experian file. Pillar's product was designed to underwrite them using data the incumbents ignore: credit history from the country they left, plus open-banking signals from the account they just opened [EU-Startups, April 2022]. The first market was the UK, with a roadmap pointed at other large migrant-receiving economies.
The company operates as Affinitech Ltd, trading as Pillar [UK Tech News, April 2022]. The pre-seed was unusually large for a 2022 European fintech at that stage, a sign that Global Founders Capital and Backed VC were willing to fund a long regulatory build before revenue.
Pillar pre-seed (2022) | 16.9 | $M
Why it could be big
The market shape is genuinely interesting. The UK alone receives hundreds of thousands of work-visa migrants a year, and the US, Canada, and Australia together absorb millions more. Each one is a customer who walks into a bank, gets refused a credit card, and then either pays cash for years or piggybacks on a friend's account. The lifetime value of capturing that customer in week one, before a high-street bank ever underwrites them, is the entire thesis.
Global Founders Capital, the Rocket Internet-affiliated fund, has a long track record in cross-border consumer finance. Backed VC, based in London, has made a string of European fintech bets. Both wrote into Pillar at pre-seed, which is a signal that the credit-file portability problem was seen as a category, not a feature [TechCrunch, April 2022]. The acquirer, LemFi, has built one of the larger immigrant-focused remittance businesses out of London and Lagos, and explicitly framed the Pillar deal as the foundation for launching credit cards to its existing immigrant customer base [LemFi, June 2025].
That is the upside case in plain terms: Pillar's underwriting stack plus LemFi's distribution equals a credit card in the wallet of an immigrant who already trusts the LemFi app for sending money home.
The team and traction
Ashutosh Bhatt, Pillar's founder and CEO, came out of Revolut, where he worked on credit and lending products [LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026]. Co-founder Adam Lewis brought a complementary fintech background. The Revolut pedigree mattered to investors in 2022 because Revolut had spent years learning, expensively, how to build consumer credit infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions. Bhatt has spoken publicly about the build, including a long-form interview on the How to Lend Money to Strangers podcast where he laid out the all-in-one credit platform thesis [How to Lend Money to Strangers, Retrieved 2026].
The company's traction was sufficient to attract a strategic acquirer within roughly three years of the pre-seed. Ashurst advised on the sale of Pillar Labs to LemFi, which closed in mid-2025 [Ashurst, June 2025]. Financial terms were not disclosed in the captured coverage. LemFi framed the deal as an expansion of credit services for immigrants and confirmed plans to roll out credit cards to its user base [Fintech Global, June 2025].
The honest counterfactual
What bears say: cross-border credit underwriting is a regulatory thicket, and the incumbents, including Revolut itself, can build a comparable product once they decide the migrant segment is worth the compliance cost. Pillar raised a large pre-seed but did not, on the public record, take a priced Series A before the LemFi deal, which suggests the standalone path to scale was harder than the 2022 round implied. What bulls answer: an acquisition by a distribution-rich acquirer is, for an infrastructure-heavy fintech, often the cleaner outcome than a slow Series A grind. LemFi's existing immigrant customer base solves the cold-start problem that any standalone migrant-credit brand would spend years and tens of millions trying to solve [Startups Magazine, June 2025]. The product gets shipped to real wallets faster.
What to watch
The next twelve months will be about whether the LemFi-Pillar combination actually ships a credit card to immigrant customers in the UK and one or more African corridors, and whether the underwriting model holds up against real default data. Watch for a public launch announcement from LemFi tied to a specific country and card network, watch for hiring on the combined credit and risk team out of the London office, and watch whether competitors in the migrant-banking space, including Monzo, Revolut, and the US-based Nova Credit, respond with their own portable-credit features. Nova Credit has been working the same problem from the US side for years, and the question of whether the winning model is a standalone credit bureau or an embedded feature inside a remittance app is now, post-acquisition, a live one.
Which model captures the next hundred million migrant customers first: the standalone credit-file company, or the remittance app that bolts credit on top?