GoCardless was founded by Tom Blomfield, Matt Robinson and Hiroki Takeuchi after they had met at Oxford University. Hiroki and Matt had previously worked together at McKinsey. The project started out as an attempt to facilitate group payments and GoCardless was founded in January 2011 as an online Direct Debit provider. The three were accepted into Y Combinator's summer batch in 2011, and shortly thereafter secured $1.5m investment from Accel Partners and Passion Capital. This was followed by a further $3.3m in April 2013 from their existing investors, and in January 2014 they secured a further $7m funding round from Balderton Capital. After Y Combinator they moved back to London due to its strength in the FinTech sector and their desire to focus on the European market where direct debit payments are much more common. As of July 2015, GoCardless was handling $1bn worth of transactions per year and now employs 100 people in London. Hiroki, who holds a Master’s in Mathematics from the University of Oxford, became CEO of the company in December 2013.