Challenger bank MONZO has joined the group of "unicorns" in October 2018. Currently, the MONZO's value is about 2,5 mld USD.
It's a bank. Maybe it's better to say that it's just a banking mobile application. Monzo was, and still is, one of the newsests bank applications in United Kingdom.
It was opened in 2015 and at the beginning its name was MONDO. In February 2016, MONDO collected 1 mln GBP in crowd-funding campaign. That was the record campaign, as collection of that amount of money took them only 96 seconds with Crowdcube platform.
MONZO is registered in Companies House as "Monzo Bank Ltd". As I've written before, at the beginning their name was Mondo. On 13th June, 2016 they published on their blog that the name "Mondo" was disputed by some unknown company, and they announced the competition to get a new name. On 25th August 2016, they've officially turned their name into "Mondo".
In 2018, MONZO announced cooperation with TransferWise to make international transfer by Monzo application possible. On 30th October 2018, Monzo became an "unicorn" and the fundraising round with the amount of 85 mln GBP appraised it for 1 mld USD. That was also the time that Monzo gained the number of 1 mln users and was announced as the best tech startup in Great Britain.
