A former Google exec just won funding from Silicon Valley giant Greycroft for a digital payments startup to rival Venmo

The Spanish peer-to-peer app Verse has secured $8 million in seed funding from Venmo’s investors as the company looks to break into the lucrative social payments market.

Verse is run by a former head of consumer marketing for Google in San Francisco, Bernardo Hernández, and it operates as a payments wallet through which customers can send and receive money from other users.

The commission-free peer-to-peer company’s new funding round was led by the Silicon Valley private-equity firm Greycroft — a series A investor in Venmo — to help grow its expansion plans. Expon Capital, Alan Patricof — Greycroft’s founder — and the former NBA commissioner David Stern also invested in the seed round.

Verse already has 500,000 users, predominantly in Spain and Italy, and it recently obtained a new license from the Bank of Lithuania that allows the company to operate throughout the European Economic Area.

Peer to peer is a huge space, with banks and corporate giants like PayPal leading the way but upstarts like Venmo in the US becoming a big hit with millennials looking to swap funds quickly and cheaply. Hernández became familiar with Google Wallet in California and decided the product could be a game changer in the payments space.

“In addition to their strong growth, Verse has now opened all of Europe as a new frontier for mobile-enabled financial freedom,” said Ian Sigalow, a cofounder and partner at Greycroft, in comments distributed to Business Insider. “The team has created a product that adapts to the habits of young generations and is redefining consumer’s financial behavior.”

The company’s growth will be guided by the former Venmo chief operating officer Michael Vaughan, who also works as an investor for the healthcare and fintech venture-capital fund Oak HC/FT, as a member of the board of directors.

“Our cost of customer acquisition is very low, and we’re growing organically,” Hernández, who is Verse’s CEO, told Business Insider in an interview. “We will use this funding to build out our product and get the best talent we can to focus on growth.”

Verse existed before Hernández took over 18 months ago, with the company raising some $28.8 million in series A and B investment before management changed hands. Greycroft invested in the previous funding rounds for the company, which counts millennials as the bulk of its user base.