Announcing our $75m funding round to open up access to our global bank debit network

We’re incredibly excited to announce a new investment round of $75 million, led by new investors Adams Street Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors: Accel, Balderton Capital, Notion Capital and Passion Capital.

This Series E investment takes the total amount we’ve raised to $123 million and enables us to take the next steps on our mission to take the pain out of getting paid, so businesses can focus on what they do best.

A broken payments landscape

Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen the rise of the subscription economy and the boom of the business services sector.

We’ve seen more and more businesses develop long term relationships with customers, through subscription and instalment plans and through professional services agreements and retainers.

We estimate that around 18% of global payments are now recurring.

But while business models have moved on: payments haven’t.

Even global enterprises are still stuck with old-world payment options like cheques and bank transfers, or options designed for e-commerce, like cards.

At best, a bad-fit payment method is a major distraction and a blocker on growth. At worst it causes needless customer churn, and starves businesses of the cash flow they need to keep the lights on.

In the US, more than two thirds of B2B payments are paid by cheque, and nearly half of all global business transactions are still done on paper.

Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of businesses fail every year because of cash flow problems caused by late payments.

Building a global recurring payments platform

We’re on a mission to transform cash collection for these businesses.

Over the last few years, we’ve built a new global network for bank debit, which will soon cover more than 70% of the world’s recurring payment volume (with the addition of the USA this Spring).

By the end of 2019, our network will cover 35 countries and nine bank debit schemes, across the UK, North America, Australia and Europe.

On top of that network, we’ve built a platform designed and optimised for taking invoice, subscription, membership and instalment payments.

We now process $10bn in transactions a year and we’re proud to count 45,000 businesses around the world as our merchants.

We’ve also invested in building a platform that integrates with the applications that businesses use every day, giving users more visibility over their payments and saving huge amounts of time on tasks like payment reconciliation.

In 2018, we joined forces with 50 new billing and subscription software partners and strengthened our partnership with Xero, becoming its global best-in-class solution for Direct Debit.

Taking the pain out of payments

In the months to come, we’ll be building our team in new offices around the world, giving more recurring revenue businesses across EMEA, APAC and North America, access to our network.

We are also developing our payments platform to solve more problems for customers, including making it easier to collect cross border payments, boosting cash flow with instant settlement and reducing failure rates by leveraging our data.

For us, success means that our customers don’t have to worry about payments.

Instead, they can focus on what they do best: whether that’s building the world’s largest travel site like TripAdvisor, delivering award-winning journalism like the Guardian or creating the fastest-growing restaurant reservation platform globally, like Quandoo.

Whatever it is they do, we’re excited about helping our customers all over the world spend less time and energy on payments, and more time building their business.