Mike Saraswat has a pitch that sounds almost too simple: Stop waiting for your savings to compound slowly, and get your Netflix subscription today instead.
His company, Stoa, is betting that enough Britons will find that trade appealing. The London-based fintech recently closed a $2.4 million pre-seed round—co-led by Bespokeist Partners and Ingenii Capital, with Force Over Mass Capital and Fuel Ventures joining in—to prove the concept works at scale. It's an unconventional premise in a market crowded with apps promising better returns, cashback rewards, or budgeting breakthroughs. Stoa's angle? Forget the interest. Take the perks now.
The funding round, which closed earlier this year, also attracted a handful of angel investors who bring credibility from traditional finance. Among them: Suneel Hargunani, formerly of Citi's EMEA equity capital markets division and more recently with JPMorgan's syndicate team, and Rachel Sestini, a partner at Shaw Gibbs who co-founded Canopy Capital. Their involvement suggests at least some institutional observers see potential in what amounts to a fairly radical reimagining of how savings accounts might work.
Idle Cash, Instant Gratification
Stoa's model is straightforward, almost aggressively so. Users deposit money—typically for 12 months—and instead of accruing interest, they receive upfront perks tied to that deposit. Lock up £4,500, for example, and you get a year of Netflix Premium delivered immediately, valued at roughly £228. Other "Pots," as Stoa calls them, offer Waitrose vouchers, NordVPN subscriptions, or similar lifestyle add-ons. There are currently over 150 options, each calibrated to a specific deposit amount and perk combination.
The deposits themselves sit at Griffin Bank, a UK-regulated institution that provides FSCS protection up to £120,000. So the money isn't at risk—at least not in the traditional sense. But it is locked away, earning nothing, while Stoa captures the spread between what merchants pay them for customer acquisition and what users might have earned in a high-yield savings account elsewhere.
It's a gamble on behavioral economics, really. The company even offers a free "Saving Score" using open banking data, inspired by the work of Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, though Stoa is careful to note it has no bearing on credit scores. The message seems to be: we understand how people think about money, and most of them prefer something tangible right now over an abstract number that grows slowly in the background.
The Idle Billions
Stoa's founders—CEO Mike Saraswat and CTO Sam Goodenough, who incorporated the company in March 2022 and launched in November 2025—are targeting a market that's larger than it sounds. Barclays research cited by the Financial Times last fall estimated some £614 billion sitting in UK accounts earning minimal or no return. Much of that is money people simply haven't bothered to move, or don't know where to move it.
For merchants, Stoa's pitch is different but equally direct: treat deposits as a marketing channel. Rather than paying Google or Meta for customer acquisition, brands can effectively subsidize perks through Stoa and reach savers who might not have discovered them otherwise. It's user acquisition by way of fintech arbitrage.
The team remains small—around seven people, based on recent LinkedIn tallies—but the company did bring on John Mountain as an advisor in February. Mountain was part of Starling Bank's founding team and served as its interim CEO from mid-2023 through early 2024, a stint that coincided with one of Starling's most turbulent periods. His involvement suggests Stoa is serious about navigating the regulatory and operational complexities that tend to blindside early-stage fintechs.
Crossing the Atlantic
The immediate plan, according to the company, is to use the fresh capital to expand its roster of merchant partnerships, scale the platform's infrastructure, and prepare for a US launch. Stoa has been quietly building relationships with American banks and merchants, viewing the US as a vastly larger market for idle business cash—and perhaps more receptive to the instant-gratification framing.
Whether that thesis holds is another question. The US market is littered with fintechs that tried to reinvent savings, from high-yield challengers to rounding-up micro-investing apps. Stoa's model is novel enough to stand out, but it also requires convincing two distinct audiences—savers and merchants—that the trade-off makes sense.
For now, it's a small operation with an audacious promise: compound interest is overrated, and your streaming subscription is undervalued. Time will tell if enough people agree to make the math work.
