Pillar
Fintech providing credit products for immigrants and migrants in new countries.
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Pillar (legal entity: Affinitech Ltd, t/a Pillar) |
| Tagline | Credit products for immigrants and migrants in new countries |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Stage | Pre-Seed (acquired June 2025 by LemFi) |
| Business Model | B2C |
| Industry | Fintech (consumer credit) |
| Technology Type | Software (Non-AI) |
| Geography | Western Europe |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2): Ashutosh Bhatt, Adam Lewis |
| Funding Label | Pre-seed |
| Total Disclosed | ~$16.9M (£13M) [TechCrunch, April 2022] |
Links
PUBLIC
- LinkedIn (founder profile): https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ashutoshbhatt
- Careers (Ashby): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pillar
- Acquirer announcement: https://blog.lemfi.com/product-update/lemfi-acquires-pillar-to-launch-credit-cards-for-immigrants
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
Pillar is a London-based consumer fintech that built credit underwriting infrastructure for immigrants who arrive in a new country with no domestic credit file. In June 2025, it was acquired by cross-border payments company LemFi to power that company's push into immigrant credit cards [LemFi, June 2025] [Fintech Global, June 2025]. The company was founded in 2021 by Ashutosh Bhatt and Adam Lewis, both alumni of Revolut. Their thesis was that an immigrant's foreign credit history and real-time financial behavior can be re-scored to extend credit products from day one in a new market [EU-Startups, April 2022]. Its single disclosed financing was a £13 million ($16.9 million) pre-seed in April 2022 led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC, an unusually large pre-seed that reflected investor appetite for category-defining fintech infrastructure at the time [TechCrunch, April 2022] [UK Tech News, April 2022]. The product was structured as an underwriting and credit-product platform rather than a single card, positioning Pillar as a B2B2C rail as well as a direct-to-consumer brand. The acquisition by LemFi, a remittance platform serving diaspora customers across the UK, EU, US, and Canada, gives Pillar a built-in distribution channel of millions of immigrant users it previously had to acquire one at a time [Startups Magazine, June 2025]. For investors tracking the immigrant financial-services category, the next 12 to 18 months will turn on whether the combined entity can convert remittance senders into credit-card holders at attractive unit economics, and whether UK and EU regulators continue to permit alternative-data underwriting for thin-file applicants [Ashurst, June 2025]. The Pillar story is now best read as a case study in how an early-stage credit-infrastructure bet can find a strategic exit when distribution proves harder than the underwriting itself.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by TechCrunch, EU-Startups, LemFi, Fintech Global, and Ashurst.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value | |---| | Stage | Pre-Seed (acquired June 2025) | | Business Model | B2C with B2B2C credit infrastructure | | Industry / Vertical | Fintech, consumer credit, migrant financial services | | Technology Type | Software (Non-AI) | | Geography | Western Europe (UK HQ) | | Growth Profile | Venture Scale | | Founding Team | Two co-founders, both ex-Revolut | | Funding | $16.9M total disclosed across one round |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
Pillar was incorporated in the United Kingdom in 2021 under the legal name Affinitech Ltd, trading as Pillar, and is headquartered in London [UK Tech News, April 2022]. The founding insight came from Ashutosh Bhatt and Adam Lewis, both of whom worked at Revolut and saw firsthand how millions of internationally mobile customers were unable to access mainstream credit in their new home country despite years of strong financial behavior elsewhere. The company's premise was that an applicant's home-country credit history, combined with open-banking transaction data in the new market, was sufficient to underwrite credit products such as credit cards and personal loans without requiring the customer to spend a year or more building a domestic file from scratch [EU-Startups, April 2022].
The company's first and only publicly disclosed round closed in April 2022: a £13 million ($16.9 million) pre-seed led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC [TechCrunch, April 2022]. The size of the round was notable for the stage and reflected the capital intensity of building a regulated credit product from scratch, including underwriting models, balance-sheet relationships, and compliance infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions. Pillar spent the subsequent three years building underwriting technology, hiring engineering and risk talent in London, and according to founder commentary on industry podcasts, working toward an "all-in-one credit platform" architecture [How to Lend Money to Strangers].
In June 2025, Pillar was acquired by LemFi, a global cross-border payments platform that serves immigrant communities sending money to and from emerging markets [LemFi, June 2025] [Fintech Global, June 2025]. The transaction was advised by law firm Ashurst, which described the deal as the sale of "UK based fintech Pillar Labs to the global payments platform LemFi" [Ashurst, June 2025]. Financial terms were not publicly disclosed. The acquirer indicated that Pillar's technology would be used to launch credit cards for LemFi's existing immigrant user base, beginning in the UK and expanding into LemFi's other markets [LemFi, June 2025].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by TechCrunch, UK Tech News, EU-Startups, LemFi, Fintech Global, and Ashurst.
Product and Technology
MIXED
Pillar's product was an underwriting and credit-product platform aimed at people who have recently moved countries and therefore present as "thin-file" or "no-file" applicants in domestic bureau systems [PUBLIC] [EU-Startups, April 2022]. The company described its technology as the rails for delivering "a variety of credit products" in the customer's new location, with credit cards as the lead use case post-acquisition [PUBLIC] [LemFi, June 2025]. Underwriting drew on a combination of home-country credit history (where retrievable through partner bureaus or applicant-supplied data), open-banking transaction data once the customer landed in the new market, and identity and KYC signals collected at onboarding [PUBLIC, inferred from EU-Startups and LemFi product descriptions].
The company's positioning is best understood as infrastructure rather than a single consumer brand. Founder commentary in industry interviews framed Pillar as building a platform that could ultimately power multiple credit products and be embedded inside other consumer fintech experiences [PUBLIC] [How to Lend Money to Strangers]. That framing is consistent with the LemFi rationale at acquisition, which contemplated embedding Pillar's underwriting inside LemFi's existing remittance app rather than maintaining Pillar as a standalone consumer brand [PUBLIC] [LemFi, June 2025] [Startups Magazine, June 2025].
On the technology stack itself, the company is categorized as Software (Non-AI) in the structured profile, indicating that the underwriting work appears to rely on conventional credit-risk modeling and rules-based decisioning rather than on large-language-model or generative-AI components. The careers page hosted on Ashby remains live as of retrieval [PRIVATE, AshbyHQ], though no open roles were captured at the time of research, which is consistent with a recently acquired company in integration mode.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product description corroborated by EU-Startups and LemFi acquisition materials; deeper architectural detail is not publicly documented.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
The market for immigrant credit access is structurally large because cross-border migration is rising and because incumbent credit infrastructure does not travel with the customer. The United Kingdom alone receives several hundred thousand long-term migrants per year, and the broader Western European and North American immigrant populations represent tens of millions of working-age adults who arrive without a usable domestic credit file [PUBLIC, contextual]. The pain is acute: without a credit score, a newly arrived professional often cannot rent an apartment without a large deposit, cannot finance a car, and cannot access a mainstream credit card, even when their income and home-country credit behavior would qualify them comfortably.
Demand drivers cited by investors and the founding team center on three trends. First, post-pandemic immigration into the UK, Canada, and the US has rebounded sharply, expanding the addressable population [PUBLIC, contextual]. Second, open-banking regulation in the UK and EU has made it technically and legally feasible to underwrite using real-time transaction data, reducing reliance on bureau scores [PUBLIC, contextual]. Third, the success of cross-border remittance platforms such as LemFi, Wise, and Remitly has demonstrated that immigrant cohorts are reachable through dedicated digital channels and willing to adopt category-specific products [PUBLIC] [Fintech Global, June 2025].
Adjacent and substitute markets shape the opportunity. The closest substitutes are secured credit cards and credit-builder loans offered by incumbent banks, which work but require months of seasoning before unlocking mainstream credit. Adjacent categories include remittance (LemFi, Wise, Remitly), neobanking for migrants (Majority in the US, Monese historically in the UK), and embedded-credit infrastructure providers serving fintechs more broadly. Pillar's positioning sat at the intersection of the underwriting-infrastructure adjacency and the migrant-vertical neobank adjacency, which is part of why a remittance-led acquirer found the asset strategically valuable [PUBLIC] [LemFi, June 2025].
Regulatory forces are the dominant variable. Consumer-credit licensing in the UK is overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority, and any cross-border use of foreign credit data must satisfy GDPR and bureau-licensing terms. The macro backdrop also matters: rising rates over 2022 to 2024 increased the cost of capital for any balance-sheet-intensive credit product, which is one plausible reason that an acquisition by a well-funded distribution partner became more attractive than an independent Series A path [PUBLIC, contextual].
| Sizing reference | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Pillar pre-seed round | $16.9M (£13M) | [TechCrunch, April 2022] |
| Pillar pre-seed (EUR) | €15.6M | [EU-Startups, April 2022] |
The only hard numbers in the public record relate to Pillar's own financing, not to third-party market sizing. The strategic logic of the LemFi acquisition is the clearest market signal available: a remittance platform with millions of immigrant customers chose to buy rather than build the underwriting layer, which is a meaningful read-through on the perceived value of the category.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Funding figures confirmed by two independent outlets; broader market sizing is not cited from a named third-party report and is presented as context only.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
Pillar operated in a category where the competitive set is best understood as three concentric rings rather than a single peer group, because no source in the captured research names a direct competitor [PUBLIC].
The innermost ring is dedicated immigrant-credit specialists. In the United States, Nova Credit has built a cross-border credit-bureau bridge that lets newcomers import their home-country credit file into US lender workflows, and Petal has offered cash-flow-underwritten credit cards aimed in part at thin-file customers [PUBLIC, contextual]. In the UK and EU, the dedicated-immigrant-credit specialist category has historically been thinner, which is one reason a £13M pre-seed for Pillar drew attention in 2022 [PUBLIC] [TechCrunch, April 2022]. The middle ring is migrant-focused neobanks and remittance platforms that could plausibly add credit, including LemFi (which solved the question by acquiring Pillar), Wise, Remitly, and Majority. The outermost ring is incumbent banks and mainstream challengers (Revolut, Monzo, Starling, Chase UK) that serve all customers including immigrants, often using secured products or longer seasoning periods rather than purpose-built immigrant underwriting.
Where Pillar had a defensible edge during its independent period was in two assets: the underwriting models and data partnerships built specifically around home-country-to-host-country credit translation, and a founding team with direct Revolut operating experience in regulated consumer fintech [PUBLIC] [EU-Startups, April 2022]. That edge was real but perishable, because none of the underlying data sources are exclusive and because incumbents with cheaper capital can replicate alternative-data underwriting once the regulatory path is clear. The most exposed flank during the standalone period was distribution: acquiring immigrant customers one by one through paid channels is expensive, and the unit economics of a credit card depend heavily on cost-per-funded-account.
The acquisition by LemFi resolves that exposure directly. LemFi already owns the customer relationship at the moment money is being moved across borders, which is the same moment a newcomer is most acutely aware of their lack of local credit access [PUBLIC] [LemFi, June 2025]. The plausible 18-month competitive scenario reads as follows: winner if LemFi-Pillar can ship a credit card to a meaningful fraction of LemFi's existing UK user base at acceptable loss rates, in which case the combined entity becomes the default immigrant credit brand in its corridors; loser if regulatory or balance-sheet constraints slow the credit-card launch and a better-capitalized challenger such as Revolut chooses to market a thin-file-friendly card directly to the same demographic.
Data Accuracy: ORANGE -- No competitors named in the captured sources for Pillar; competitive context above is analyst-assembled from category knowledge and is labeled accordingly.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
The size of the prize, if the LemFi-Pillar combination executes, is to become the default credit brand for the global immigrant customer in the corridors LemFi already serves.
The headline opportunity. The category-defining outcome is that LemFi-Pillar becomes the first profitable, multi-product financial brand built natively around the immigrant journey, starting with remittance, extending into credit cards using Pillar's underwriting, and plausibly broadening into auto, deposit, and small-business credit over time. That outcome is reachable rather than aspirational because the two halves of the problem (distribution and underwriting) are both already solved inside the combined entity: LemFi has the customer at the moment of cross-border financial activity, and Pillar has the technology to score that customer without a domestic bureau file [LemFi, June 2025] [EU-Startups, April 2022]. Most fintechs that target immigrants have to solve one of those two problems from a standing start; this one does not.
Two or three growth scenarios.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK card scale-up | Combined entity launches a Pillar-underwritten credit card to LemFi's UK remittance base and reaches mass adoption in-country | Public launch of the LemFi credit card product announced at acquisition | Distribution and underwriting are both in-house; LemFi explicitly framed credit cards as the post-deal product priority [LemFi, June 2025] |
| Corridor-by-corridor expansion | Card and credit-builder products roll out into LemFi's other live markets (EU, US, Canada) using localized underwriting | Regulatory approvals in each market and bureau partnerships in destination countries | LemFi already operates across the UK, EU, US and Canada, removing the typical greenfield-market risk [Fintech Global, June 2025] |
| Embedded credit infrastructure | Pillar's underwriting platform is opened up to other migrant-serving fintechs and neobanks as a B2B credit rail | A second customer beyond LemFi adopts the underwriting stack | Pillar was originally architected as a platform rather than a single brand, per founder commentary [How to Lend Money to Strangers] |
What compounding looks like. The flywheel is data: every additional immigrant customer underwritten by Pillar generates real-world repayment data on a thin-file cohort that incumbents do not see, which sharpens the underwriting model, which lowers loss rates, which permits more aggressive credit-line offers, which deepens customer engagement and lifetime value. Layered on top, LemFi's remittance product creates a continuous behavioral signal (frequency, size, and counterparties of transfers) that is unusually predictive of credit risk for this cohort and that competitors without a remittance product cannot easily replicate. The early evidence that this flywheel is starting is the acquisition itself: a strategic acquirer paid for the technology rather than building it, which implies the underwriting work was non-trivial enough to be worth buying [Ashurst, June 2025].
The size of the win. A credible comparable for the upside is the broader migrant-financial-services category, where Wise reached a public-market capitalization in the multiple billions of pounds at IPO, and remittance peers Remitly and Western Union trade as multi-billion-dollar listed businesses. If LemFi-Pillar successfully layers credit on top of remittance and reaches a meaningful share of the immigrant population in its core corridors, the combined entity could plausibly justify a multi-billion-dollar enterprise value over a 5-to-7-year horizon (scenario, not a forecast). The condition for that outcome is execution on the credit-card launch and disciplined loss-rate management, which is precisely what the next 12 to 18 months will reveal.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Acquisition rationale and product direction confirmed by LemFi, Fintech Global, Startups Magazine, and Ashurst; scenario sizing is analyst-constructed and labeled as such.
Sources
PUBLIC
[TechCrunch, April 2022] Immigrant credit fintech Pillar raises $16.9M pre-seed led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC | https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/fintech-startup-pillar-raises-16-9m-pre-seed-led-by-global-founders-capital-and-backed-vc/
[EU-Startups, April 2022] UK-based Pillar picks up €15.6 million to tackle credit access problem for migrants | https://www.eu-startups.com/2022/04/uk-based-pillar-picks-up-e15-6-million-to-tackle-credit-access-problem-for-migrants/
[UK Tech News, April 2022] Affinitech (t/a Pillar) secures £13 million Pre-Seed investment led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC | https://www.uktechnews.info/2022/04/21/affinitech-t-a-pillar-secures-13-million-pre-seed-investment-led-by-global-founders-capital-and-backed-vc/
[LemFi, June 2025] We Have Acquired Credit Fintech, Pillar | https://blog.lemfi.com/product-update/lemfi-acquires-pillar-to-launch-credit-cards-for-immigrants
[Fintech Global, June 2025] LemFi acquires Pillar to expand immigrant credit access | https://fintech.global/2025/06/16/lemfi-acquires-pillar-to-expand-immigrant-credit-access/
[Startups Magazine, June 2025] LemFi acquires London fintech Pillar | https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-lemfi-acquires-london-fintech-pillar
[Ashurst, June 2025] Ashurst advises on sale of the UK based fintech Pillar Labs to the global payments platform LemFi | https://www.ashurst.com/en/who-we-are/our-news-work-market-recognition/ashurst-advises-on-sale-of-uk-based-fintech-pillar-labs-to-the-global-payments-platform-lemfi/
[Fintech.am] LemFi Acquires Pillar to Expand Credit Services for Immigrants | https://www.fintech.am/lemfi/?lang=en
[LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026] Ashutosh Bhatt - Founder, Pillar (Acquired by LemFi) | https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ashutoshbhatt
[The Org, Retrieved 2026] Ashutosh Bhatt - Founder / CEO at Pillar | https://theorg.com/org/hellopillar/org-chart/ashutosh-bhatt
[AshbyHQ, Retrieved 2026] Pillar Jobs | https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pillar
[CB Insights, Retrieved 2026] Backed VC Portfolio Investments, Funds, Exits | https://www.cbinsights.com/investor/backed
[How to Lend Money to Strangers] Building an all-in-one credit platform, with Ash Bhatt | https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-43
Articles about Pillar
- Pillar Is Building a Credit File for Every Immigrant Who Lands in London — The Revolut alumni-led startup raised $16.9M pre-seed in 2022 and sold to LemFi in 2025 to put credit cards in migrant wallets.