Checkout.com, a London-based unicorn that works with businesses to optimise their payments with real-time data, announced on Wednesday that it has raised a whopping $1B (approx €874.1M) in its Series D round of funding.
The company has raised a total of $1.8B to date and sits at a valuation of $40B (approx €34.96B).
The round’s primary investors include Altimeter, Dragoneer, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Insight Partners, the Qatar Investment Authority, Tiger Global, the Oxford Endowment Fund, and another large west coast mutual fund management firm. Several existing investors also participated in this round.
Capital utilisation
With this investment, Checkout.com looks to further strengthen its balance sheet and drive three key initiatives: growth plans for the US market, development of its proprietary technology platform and solutions, and goal to remain on the cutting edge of Web3.
With the US as one of the largest ecommerce markets in the world, Checkout.com has invested heavily in its domestic technology infrastructure and offers a complete proprietary end-to-end payment processing platform in the country.
The company claims that it is one of the only providers in the US offering a fully cloud-based platform directly connected to local networks in all key geographies and for all major alternative payment methods.
Checkout.com’s New York-based CFO, Céline Dufétel, says, “We have long-faced substantial demand to serve the US market, and with our Series D we’re doubling down on our commitment to scaling our platform, partnerships, and products for customers here.”
“We’re looking to help our US customers grow domestically and internationally and to help our non-US customers expand into the market here. We’re excited about the potential, and expect our North American employee base to grow by 200 per cent this year alone,” adds Dufétel.
“Flexible payment technology”
Founded in 2012 by Guillaume Pousaz, Checkout.com sells a software platform that makes it easier for businesses to process and take payments over the web. The company claims its flexible solutions, granular data, and instant insights help enterprises launch new products in new markets and create great customer experiences.
Checkout.com also provides fintech companies with a cross-border payment solution for digital commerce. The business offers direct access to domestic acquiring across payment methods and geographies, including all major credit and debit cards, online banking, PayPal, Apple Pay, and other eWallets. It provides payments in more than 150 currencies.
All this is achieved through a unified integrated platform that also provides fraud management tools, analytics, and comprehensive reporting features. Currently, the company has a team of 1700 people across 19 offices globally.
Checkout.com has more than doubled its valuation since its Series C round a year ago. In that time, it has grown rapidly in its home market of EMEA, with the volume of transactions processed increasing three-fold for the third year in a row.
Today, the company serves large-scale ecommerce and services merchants like Netflix, Farfetch, Grab, NetEase, Pizza Hut, Shein, Siemens, and Sony; fintech unicorns such as Klarna, Qonto, Revolut, and WorldRemit; and some of the world’s largest crypto players, including Coinbase, Crypto.com, FTX, and MoonPay.
Recent developments
Over the past year, Checkout.com has opened new offices in six countries across four continents to cater to surging merchant demand. It also expanded its executive leadership team in the US and Europe with a new CFO, CHRO, CMO, CPO, CRO, and CTO.
Later this year, Checkout.com plans to launch its solution to service marketplaces and payment facilitators (payfacs). This will help expand the company’s capability to service payments within online marketplaces.
These new solutions will comprise identity verification technologies, split payments, and treasury-as-a-service, as well as the existing capabilities of Payouts, which Checkout.com launched last year to help merchants send funds to cards and bank accounts globally via a single integration.
CTO of Checkout.com, Ott Kaukver, says, “The expansion of our product roadmap is the result of years of dedicated work by our global platform and engineering teams. As a product-first company with almost half our total headcount dedicated to technology roles, we’ll continue to drive this cadence of innovation. It unlocks additional opportunities across the entire payments value chain, which in turn helps us meet the needs of our merchants around the world.”
Opportunity in Web3
Checkout.com believes ecommerce will outpace traditional commerce due to emerging technologies like cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Therefore, the London-based company is continuing to strengthen its position in the Web3 space.
It already powers the world’s leading crypto exchanges, representing almost 80 per cent of the global trading volume. Its modular products and platform are also used by fan token providers like Socios.com and blockchain-based wallets like Novi from Meta. In addition, the company is privately beta-testing an innovative solution to settle transactions for merchants using digital currencies.
01
How Deeploy gives explainable AI (XAI) a central place in MLOps