London's Stoa raises $2.4 million to reimagine how idle savings earn their keep

Stoa, a London fintech founded in 2022, has raised $2.4 million (approximately €2.2 million, roughly £1.8 million) in a pre-Seed round co-led by Bespokeist Partners and Ingenii Capital, with participation from Force Over Mass Capital and Fuel Ventures. The company was founded by Mike Saraswat (co-founder and CEO) and Sam Goodenough (co-founder and CTO) and is building a cash management platform built on a different premise from conventional savings products: rather than offering savers a percentage yield, it delivers upfront tangible value — subscriptions, goods, or spending credits — funded from the interest earned on their underlying deposits.

The idle cash problem

Most people keep more money than they need in current accounts. The Bank of England's base rate has moved substantially over the past four years, but the spread between what retail banks pay on current accounts (effectively zero in most cases) and what they earn deploying those deposits is a persistent embarrassment that most customers have accepted as unavoidable. The behavioural barrier is not information — savings accounts exist; rates are visible — but friction and psychological salience. A percentage yield that arrives as a marginal improvement in an annual statement is not a compelling reason to act.

Stoa's model reframes the savings proposition from "an annual percentage yield you barely notice" to "a benefit you receive now." The underlying deposits remain intact and retain standard banking protections; the interest they generate funds goods or service credits that savers receive upfront. The mechanics are a repackaging of the economic relationship, but the design bet is that the repackaging changes behaviour.

Saraswat is direct: "The future of cash management is not just about interest rates. People want choice, tangible value, and a clearer sense of how their money is working for them."

The US expansion thesis

The pre-Seed capital goes to two priorities: accelerating the UK platform and beginning the US expansion. The American market is the larger commercial bet. US consumers hold an even larger pool of idle current-account cash than their UK counterparts, with an historically weaker habit of moving it to interest-bearing vehicles — and a less settled competitive landscape in digital savings products. Early partnership discussions with US financial institutions are reportedly underway.

The angel network reinforces the financial-services domain depth: Suneel Hargunani (formerly Citi) and Rachel Sestini (partner at Shaw Gibbs Group, co-founder of Canopy Capital) sit alongside the institutional co-leads.

Whether the product-design bet is sticky — changing savings habits rather than just attracting switchers — is what the pre-Seed is designed to discover. The US regulatory pathway for Stoa's specific mechanics is the shorter-term operational question before the commercial thesis can be properly tested.