London-based global payments processor Checkout.com has enjoyed a highly successful year wherein it has processed hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for some of the largest merchants in the world. It has raised a massive $1 billion in a Series D funding round.
With this round, the company has attained a valuation of $40 billion, which is over double its valuation attained in the Series C round of $450 million in January last year. Furthermore, surpassing the valuation of Revolut, Checkout.com becomes the most valuable private tech company in the UK.
The round involves participation from 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. Also, many of its existing investors also participated in this round.
Checkout.com will use the investment to strengthen its already solid balance sheet. Also, it will drive three key initiatives including its growth plans in the US, continued evolution of its proprietary technology platform and remain on the cutting edge of Web3.
Checkout.com founder and CEO, Guillaume Pousaz said “By combining an elegant technology stack with industry expertise and an ‘extra-mile’ approach to service over the past decade, we’ve built deep partnerships with some of the world’s most innovative companies. Our Series D is validation of that work—but given we’re still in ‘chapter zero’ of our journey, it will also fuel our efforts to unlock the enormous untapped opportunity ahead.”
“Checkout.com is a leader in the massive market for next-gen payment solutions and the key digital payments partner for many of the world’s leading companies. As a long-term investor, we are impressed by the company’s product innovation and customer-centric approach,” said Choo Yong Cheen, Chief Investment Officer of Private Equity at GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.
Ambitious US growth plans
As the US is one of the largest e-commerce markets in the world, Checkout.com has invested heavily in the domestic technology infrastructure and offers a complete proprietary end-to-end payment processing platform in the US. It is touted to deliver the same unrivalled performance, feature parity, and improved authorisation rates as the market-leading platform the company offers to merchants in other regions.
With this, Checkout.com will become one of the only providers in the US to provide a fully cloud-based platform, which is directly connected to local networks in all key geographies and all major alternative payment methods. Last year, with the Series C funding round, the company intended to get listed publicly in the US.
Launch new solution for marketplaces
Furthermore, the payments processor is in plans to launch its solution to service marketplaces and payment facilitates later this year. It will expand its capability to service payments within online marketplaces, which is a sector that has witnessed a dramatic increase in transaction volumes given the shift to digital during the pandemic.
These new solutions will include ID verification technologies, treasury-as-a-service, and split payments and existing Payouts capabilities that were launched last year.
“The expansion of our product roadmap is the result of years of dedicated work by our global platform and engineering teams,” said Checkout.com CTO, Ott Kaukver. “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.”
Strengthen its position in Web3
As global e-commerce is expected to surpass traditional commerce with the adoption of technologies such as NFTs and cryptocurrencies, Checkout.com is all set to strengthen its position in Web3. Its payment rails power the leading crypto exchanges in the world, thereby accounting for 80% of the global trading volume.
Eyes to add more clients
Founded by Guillaume Pousaz, a Swiss entrepreneur (richest tech billionaire in Europe with this round) and university dropout in 2012, Checkout.com has grown rapidly in its home market of EMEA, tripling the volume of transactions processed for the third year in a row. Currently, it serves large-scale e-commerce and services merchants including Netflix, Farfetch, Grab, NetEase, Pizza Hut, Shein, Siemens and Sony, fintech unicorns including Klarna, Qonto, Revolut and WorldRemit; and several world’s largest crypto players including Coinbase, Crypto.com, FTX, and MoonPay. Its modular products are also used by the fan token provider Socios.com and the blockchain-based wallet Novi from Meta.
The company claims to be beta-testing a proprietary solution for merchants to settle transactions in digital currencies. Also, it eyes to hire more people and sign new clients. Also, Checkout.com competes against rivals including Thryv, Square Payments, Stripe Payments, Adyen and others.
