Sector:
Fintech
Country:
United Kingdom
Year
2023
Short Description
Yonder offers a modern lifestyle credit card packed with rewards, no foreign exchange fees, and loads more.
Founders
Tim Chong
,
Co-founder & CEO
Theso Jivajirajah
,
Co-founder & CRO
Harry Jell
,
Co-founder & CTO
Why we invested
Yonder aligns with our view that consumer fintech wins when it feels human. By pairing credit with rewards that genuinely fit everyday life, Yonder turns payments into an experience people actually care about. Strong momentum, clear brand, and disciplined expansion make this a consumer-first platform with real staying power. It reflects the kind of modern, pan-European fintech brand we’re excited to help scale.
Founder Story
Tim Chong
,
Co-founder & CEO
Tim’s path to Yonder runs through a dusty road in rural Kenya. In 2016, he watched buyers and sellers in a village market pay each other not with cash, but with basic mobile phones and M-Pesa. Seeing more than half of Kenya’s GDP flow through a simple mobile money system showed him how financial tools, when well-designed, could quietly change the trajectory of a country and give millions safe, practical control over their money.
Back in the UK at ClearScore, Tim and his future co-founders sat inside the consumer credit industry and saw a different story. Credit cards, born in the 1960s and barely changed since, had become a game of tricks: teaser rates, hidden fees, minimum repayments optimised for bank profit rather than customer wellbeing.
For Tim, that tension between what he’d seen in Kenya and what he saw in modern credit cards made the status quo feel fundamentally off. Powerful rails, misused.
Yonder is Tim’s way of rebuilding that product from first principles. The company treats a card as a “key to the city,” using a fuller view of someone’s financial life and rewarding them with real experiences in the places they live and travel. Its purpose today is to create a fair, intuitive financial membership that turns everyday spending, borrowing, saving, and investing into something that works cleanly for consumers, wherever they are.
Tim’s path to Yonder runs through a dusty road in rural Kenya. In 2016, he watched buyers and sellers in a village market pay each other not with cash, but with basic mobile phones and M-Pesa. Seeing more than half of Kenya’s GDP flow through a simple mobile money system showed him how financial tools, when well-designed, could quietly change the trajectory of a country and give millions safe, practical control over their money.
Back in the UK at ClearScore, Tim and his future co-founders sat inside the consumer credit industry and saw a different story. Credit cards, born in the 1960s and barely changed since, had become a game of tricks: teaser rates, hidden fees, minimum repayments optimised for bank profit rather than customer wellbeing.
For Tim, that tension between what he’d seen in Kenya and what he saw in modern credit cards made the status quo feel fundamentally off. Powerful rails, misused.
Yonder is Tim’s way of rebuilding that product from first principles. The company treats a card as a “key to the city,” using a fuller view of someone’s financial life and rewarding them with real experiences in the places they live and travel. Its purpose today is to create a fair, intuitive financial membership that turns everyday spending, borrowing, saving, and investing into something that works cleanly for consumers, wherever they are.
Sector:
Fintech
Country:
United Kingdom
Year
2023
Short Description
Yonder offers a modern lifestyle credit card packed with rewards, no foreign exchange fees, and loads more.
Founders
Tim Chong
,
Co-founder & CEO
Theso Jivajirajah
,
Co-founder & CRO
Harry Jell
,
Co-founder & CTO
Why we invested
Yonder aligns with our view that consumer fintech wins when it feels human. By pairing credit with rewards that genuinely fit everyday life, Yonder turns payments into an experience people actually care about. Strong momentum, clear brand, and disciplined expansion make this a consumer-first platform with real staying power. It reflects the kind of modern, pan-European fintech brand we’re excited to help scale.
Founder Story
Tim Chong
,
Co-founder & CEO
Tim’s path to Yonder runs through a dusty road in rural Kenya. In 2016, he watched buyers and sellers in a village market pay each other not with cash, but with basic mobile phones and M-Pesa. Seeing more than half of Kenya’s GDP flow through a simple mobile money system showed him how financial tools, when well-designed, could quietly change the trajectory of a country and give millions safe, practical control over their money.
Back in the UK at ClearScore, Tim and his future co-founders sat inside the consumer credit industry and saw a different story. Credit cards, born in the 1960s and barely changed since, had become a game of tricks: teaser rates, hidden fees, minimum repayments optimised for bank profit rather than customer wellbeing.
For Tim, that tension between what he’d seen in Kenya and what he saw in modern credit cards made the status quo feel fundamentally off. Powerful rails, misused.
Yonder is Tim’s way of rebuilding that product from first principles. The company treats a card as a “key to the city,” using a fuller view of someone’s financial life and rewarding them with real experiences in the places they live and travel. Its purpose today is to create a fair, intuitive financial membership that turns everyday spending, borrowing, saving, and investing into something that works cleanly for consumers, wherever they are.
Tim’s path to Yonder runs through a dusty road in rural Kenya. In 2016, he watched buyers and sellers in a village market pay each other not with cash, but with basic mobile phones and M-Pesa. Seeing more than half of Kenya’s GDP flow through a simple mobile money system showed him how financial tools, when well-designed, could quietly change the trajectory of a country and give millions safe, practical control over their money.
Back in the UK at ClearScore, Tim and his future co-founders sat inside the consumer credit industry and saw a different story. Credit cards, born in the 1960s and barely changed since, had become a game of tricks: teaser rates, hidden fees, minimum repayments optimised for bank profit rather than customer wellbeing.
For Tim, that tension between what he’d seen in Kenya and what he saw in modern credit cards made the status quo feel fundamentally off. Powerful rails, misused.
Yonder is Tim’s way of rebuilding that product from first principles. The company treats a card as a “key to the city,” using a fuller view of someone’s financial life and rewarding them with real experiences in the places they live and travel. Its purpose today is to create a fair, intuitive financial membership that turns everyday spending, borrowing, saving, and investing into something that works cleanly for consumers, wherever they are.