Italian unicorn and Klarna-rival Scalapay raises €25.67M from Poste Italiane: Know more here

Milan-based Scalapay, a payment solution provider that allows customers to buy and pay in three installments without any additional interest, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $27M (approximately €25.67M) in its Series B extension round of funding.

In February, the BNPL platform had raised $497M (then, approximately €441.68M) led by Tencent and Willoughby Capital. Scalapay had also earned its ‘unicorn’ status that month. 

With the additional funding, the company has now raised a total of $727M to date.

The investor

The extension round came from Poste Italiane, Italy’s largest service infrastructure network and one of the largest payment card issuers in Europe.

Poste Italiane provides postal, financial, insurance, payments, telco, and digital services to households, businesses, and public administrations. For 160 years, with 12,800 Post Offices, 122,000 employees, €582B in total financial assets, and about 35 million customers, the firm claims to have been an integral part of Italy’s social and productive fabric in terms of size, brand awareness, reach and trust. 

Through its fully owned subsidiary PostePay, Poste Italiane is the digital services ecosystem of choice in Italy with 29 million payment cards, 28 million financial apps, and 9 million digital wallets.

Capital utilisation

Scalapay says that the funding will go towards the continued expansion and development of its team, product development, and brand building. The company is also planning to expand its executive team and company board.

In the last funding round, the company announced the addition of Amit Jhawar, former CEO of Venmo and former COO and CFO at Braintree, as its newest board member.

“buy now and pay later”

Scalapay offers a platform that lets customers choose its “buy now pay later” (BNPL) option when they checkout by setting up an account in just two to three minutes. Customers can pay using a Visa, Mastercard, Amex, or any other bank account. Once they choose this, the payment gets debited automatically from their accounts on the due dates.

Scalapay’s BNPL offers three options for customers – Pay in 3, Pay in 4, and Pay Later. Customers are not required to make any payments upfront and can instead opt to pay in three instalments, four instalments, or entirely after 14 days. The company says that this helps merchants grow their sales, attract new customers, and provide a better customer experience.

Scalapay was founded in 2019 by Simone Mancini and Johnny Mitrevski, who were later joined by Raffaele Terrone, Daniele Tessari and Mirco Mattevi as part of the founding team.

Since its inception, the company has offered its services in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Belgium, Netherlands, and Austria. Scalapay claims that its payment solution has provided 3,000+ merchant partners with an immense impact, marking the platform as one of the most used payment methods in Southern Europe and the highest-ranking payment solution on Trustpilot as it relates to customer satisfaction.