The startup has raised €70 million ($77 million at today’s rates), at what I understand from a person close to the company to be a $2 billion post-money valuation; and along with that news, it’s launching a crypto trading platform and B2B payments for its small and medium business customers.The new services join a swelling list of offerings for its users. The crypto trading product underscores how the company is going about its expansion strategy more widely: Villum Klausen points out that when Lunar launched in the Nordics, it was already an uphill battle to position it as a “challenger” bank because basic banking in the Nordics was already so ahead of the game globally, with some 95% of consumers already using digital banking services provided by incumbents when it launched. Lunar has a full banking license (setting it apart from a number of other neo-banks, which operate on other banks’ rails), and it offers checking and deposit accounts; loans and other credit services like buy now, pay later; stock, fund and ETF investing for consumers; plus business accounts, loans and financial management for SMBs. He said the comedian is massive in the Nordics, not just because of his star turn in the Eurovision movie, or the fact that he’s married to a Swedish woman, but also because it seems that his comedic and life ethos seems to marry up well with Nordic popular culture and the wide demographic swathe that Lunar is targeting. But while that seems to foreshadow that Lunar definitely has ambitions to move beyond its Nordic shores (with a name and stratospheric association to match that), the startup is actually still focused on building out services that ferret out what the incumbents are still not providing, to build those services into the Lunar platform, not least because he points out that Nordic consumers and businesses are some of the most lucrative not just in Europe but the world in terms of the value-added services they take, the money they transact with and so on. Case in point: he told me that currently Lunar has some €1.3 billion in deposits on its books, and it is using that to run its loan product rather than taking out debt. I should also note: Lunar is still very much in the middle of a rolling funding process.