Since 2021
It started as a spreadsheet
called ‘pretend salary’.
Four years of it, before any of this was a company.
In 2017 I left a job where I was paid on the 25th and started freelancing, which meant I was paid whenever a finance department got round to it. The first year I earned more than I ever had. It was also the first year I couldn't sleep in February.
The money wasn't the problem. The shape of it was. A good March made me reckless and a slow June made me take work I didn't want. I was making decisions about my business based on how a number looked on a Tuesday.
So I built a spreadsheet. Every payment that came in got split three ways: a fixed amount to my personal account on the 1st, a percentage to a savings account I called TAX and refused to touch, and the remainder to a third account that absorbed the difference between good months and bad ones. I called the first column ‘pretend salary’ because it felt like playing at being employed. I ran it for four years.
What surprised me wasn't the financial outcome — that was predictable, and modest. It was that I stopped thinking about money constantly. The question “can I afford this” had an answer that didn't require opening a banking app and doing arithmetic against three imagined futures.
The goal was never to earn more. It was to stop the number moving so I could think about something else. Marta Vieira, co-founder
Larkspur is that spreadsheet, made reliable enough to trust with a mortgage payment. We started it in 2021 with Jonah, who had spent six years building payment rails and had strong opinions about never holding customer money. That constraint shaped everything: Larkspur moves money between accounts you own, and holds none of it. It makes us a smaller business than we could be. It also means the worst-case failure of our company is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
We are eleven people. We have taken one round of funding, from people who understood that we would not be adding a lending product. We are profitable as of Q3 2025, which we mention only because it is the honest answer to “will you still exist in five years”.
Eleven people, one product, no lending.
How we decide
Four rules we've turned down money over.
We never hold your balance
Every account is in your name at your bank. This costs us the float, which for a company our size is a meaningful amount of revenue we have chosen not to earn. It also means we can never be the reason you can't access your own money.
We don't lend, and we won't
The obvious next product is an advance against future income. It would work, it would sell, and it would quietly turn a tool that protects you into a tool that profits from your worst month. We said no in 2023 and we'll keep saying it.
The fee is flat
A percentage fee means we earn more from your best year, which sounds fair and is actually a conflict. A flat fee means the only way we grow is by being worth keeping.
We tell you when to leave
If your income has been steady for eight months, Larkspur emails you to say you may not need it any more. Roughly 3% of customers leave because of that email each year. We think it's the reason the other 97% stay.
Where the time went
Five years, briefly.
- 2021 · March
Two people and a mandate problem
Marta and Jonah start building. Six months are spent almost entirely on the question of how to move money between someone's accounts without ever holding it. This turns out to be the whole company.
- 2022 · February
First 40 customers, all UK
Open Banking makes the UK the easier market. The first paycheck goes out on 1 February 2022 to a photographer in Bristol, four days late, for the wrong amount, which we refunded and then wrote a very long post-mortem about.
- 2023 · September
We turn down the lending product
An investor offers a term sheet contingent on building income advances. We decline, take a smaller round from Kestrel Fund instead, and publish the reasoning.
- 2024 · June
United States, and the tax account
ACH support ships alongside the automatic tax set-aside — which US customers had been asking for far more loudly than UK ones, for obvious reasons. It becomes the most-used feature within a quarter.
- 2025 · Q3
Profitable, eleven people
No growth team, no outbound sales. 11,400 people take a Larkspur paycheck. We publish the incident log and the uptime numbers because a company that pays people's salaries should have to.
Who you'd be emailing
The whole company, roughly.
Kept the original spreadsheet. Answers support email on Fridays, badly, but insists.
Six years on payment rails before this. Responsible for the rule that we never hold your balance.
Runs the reconciliation process that catches the 0.02% of transfers that go strange.
Has personally talked eleven people out of signing up because they didn't need it.
The other seven are engineers and a compliance lead. We put four here because a wall of faces on a website has never told anyone anything useful.
Find out what your steady number is.
Connect an account read-only, or just type six months of figures in by hand. Larkspur tells you the paycheck it could hold, before you commit to anything.
No card. Cancel by email or in two clicks. We delete your data within 30 days.