French fintech Lydia raises $100 million in funding

Lydia, France's answer to the fintech super-app, has raised $100 million in a Series C round, according to a report from TechCrunch.

Existing investors Tencent and Accel alongside with new investors such as Dragoneer took part in the round. The company is now valued at more than $1 billion, hitting unicorn status. 

Lydia began as a P2P payments app but has since branched out into loans and savings products, netting more than 5.5 million users in the process. It recently partnered with Bitpanda, taking advantage of the Austrian trading startup's white-label offering in order to add fractional shares and cryptocurrency trading as a feature. 

The company plans to use the fresh funding to expand to other European countries and to hire over 800 people in the next three years. Lydia co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told TechCrunch that he hoped that by 2025, 10 million European customers will use Lydia as their primary account. 

The startup most recently raised money in December last year, when it secured an $86 million Series B extension.