Digital payments are becoming more common by the day. Add to that the efforts from financial institutions, startups, venture capitalists, and regulators, and you have a successful and growing fintech market. Payments company Checkout.com is a name that has been operating in the payments space for quite some time, but it wasn’t until 2019 that it raised funds in the form of its Series A funding round ($230 million).
Fast forward three years, and now, the company closed a $1 billion Series D funding round.
The funding round included participation from new and existing investors, including Altimeter, Dragoneer, Franklin Templeton, Singapore’s GIC, the Qatar Investment Authority, Tiger Global, the Oxford Endowment Fund, and a “large West Coast mutual fund management firm.” This comes a year after it was valued at $15 billion after raising $450 million in its Series C funding round.
With the investment, Checkout.com is now valued at a ginormous $40 billion, becoming the second-most valuable fintech startup in Europe and the third-most valuable private fintech startup in the world. Sweden’s Klarna is still the most valuable startup in Europe at nearly $46 billion.
The proceeds from the current funding round will be utilized to drive expansion in the US and launch a new platform to ease payments within online marketplaces. Additionally, the funds will be used to deepen its footprint in the Web3 space. With Checkout.com’s new solution to service marketplaces & payment facilitators, the company’s capability to service payments within online marketplaces will expand.
The company already powers payments features of cryptocurrency companies, such as Coinbase.
The company has come a long way from its initial days as a cloud-based payments platform in 2012. Today, it employs over 1700 people across 19 offices across five continents, with its headquarters in London.
It offers electronic payment solutions that simplify payment processes for businesses – many high-profile names such as Netflix, Pizza Hut, Shein, Siemens, and Sony use its services. It works with a mission to enable businesses and communities to thrive in the digital economy, and issue payouts. Today, it is a full-stack payments company – its offerings include a unified payments platform, reporting and data solutions, and fraud protection.
Like many others, Checkout.com had a fantastic 2021 – it processed hundreds of billions of dollars in payments and recorded that its transaction volume had tripled last year. Even with such fantastic numbers, however, an IPO is not on the cards for the company shortly, according to Checkout.com founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz.
