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Another player in the packed p2p\u00a0payments space is announcing an $8.3 million Series A funding round today. SF and Barcelona based Verse<\/a> is gunning to be the Venmo<\/a> of Europe \u2014 given Venmo hasn\u2019t yet shown an\u00a0inclination to expand its mobile social payments app outside the US<\/a>.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Series A is led by\u00a0Greycroft<\/a>, with participation from Spark Capital<\/a> and eVentures<\/a>.\u00a0Verse had previously raised a $1.8M seed round from angel investors in Europe and the US. DFJ Dragon<\/a> also invested in that round.<\/p>\n The new funding will be used to expand its team, including new hires focused on product development, aimed at accelerating its growth,\u00a0says co-founder Alex Lopera.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to be like the WhatsApp of payments,\u201d he tells TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019s really frustrating today when you want to do a transaction, when you want to pay back your friends, money that you owe them, and you don\u2019t want to do online banking. It\u2019s not something that\u2019s cool or really works.<\/p>\n \u201cVerse is super slick and easy \u2014 you just type the amount that you want to transfer, select one of your phone contacts from your address book, click send and the money\u2019s already there.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a mobile social\u00a0payments story\u00a0that\u2019s amply familiar from multiple apps these day. And not just in the US:\u00a0in Europe other players here include the likes of France\u2019s Lydia<\/a>, Germany\u2019s Cookies<\/a>, US-based Circle<\/a>, and\u00a0N26 with its MoneyBeam offering<\/a>, to name just a few.<\/p>\n But as my TC colleague Romain Dillet succinctly puts it: \u201cSocial payments is not a product; it\u2019s just a feature\u201d \u2014 which is another way of saying\u00a0there\u2019s a race on to see which of these startups\u00a0can scale fast enough to be the winner-takes-all network for Europe. After which they\u2019ll be in a position to\u00a0monetize p2p usage\u00a0via\u00a0other banking features \u2014 and even by becoming fully fledged banks (N26 got its banking license this summer<\/a>, for instance).<\/p>\n Lopera touts Verse\u2019s market footprint as an advantage vs competitors, noting it\u2019s now in 16 European markets \u2014 which does give\u00a0it greater reach than some rivals at this point, even as most of the competitive field here is\u00a0also thinking\u00a0outside one\u00a0local European market.<\/p>\n Verse was actually incorporated in San Francisco, and went through a local accelerator there, before relocating most of its team to Barcelona\u00a0and soft launching the app this\u00a0February. It now has around 550,000 users across its Android and iOS footprint, according to Lopera, relying on viral spread rather than any substantial marketing spend at this point.<\/p>\n He says the typical size of payment Verse users are pinging to each other via the app is between\u00a0\u20ac25 and \u20ac30.<\/p>\n Verse\u00a0does not have banking partners in the various markets it covers\u00a0but rather holds customer funds in local bank accounts, settling euro transactions in markets where it does not have a local bank account via SEPA<\/a> payments. (So, unsurprisingly, Lopera is hoping Brexit<\/a> does not happen.)<\/p>\n \u201cWe think that there\u2019s really no company today that has cracked the entire European market,\u201d he adds. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen other companies launching products that are fairly local. We haven\u2019t actually seen a player that\u2019s operating in every major European country and actually has a sleek mobile app that works across countries.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a crowded space, a lot of people are interested in this space but we feel it\u2019s a really big opportunity since there\u2019s a lot that can be innovated in the payments industry\u2026 There\u2019s not really a winner yet, that is taking over Europe, in terms of social payments for Millennials. And that\u2019s really what we\u2019re going after.\u201d<\/p>\n