Checkout.com has raised £730 million in its Series D funding round at a valuation of $40 billion.
The investment comes amid a major US market push following a year when the London-headquartered firm processed hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for some of the world’s largest merchants.
These include Netflix, Farfetch, Grab, NetEase, Pizza Hut, Shein, Siemens and Sony; FinTech unicorns such as Klarna, Qonto, Revolut and WorldRemit; and many of the the world’s largest cryptocurrency players, including Coinbase, Crypto.com, FTX and MoonPay.
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 of the company’s other existing investors also participated in this round.
As well as driving growth plans for the US market, the investment will see the firm strengthen its leadership on Web 3.0 technologies such as NFTs and crypto.
The company’s payment rails already power the world’s leading crypto exchanges, claiming to represent almost 80% of the global trading volume. Its modular products 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 a solution to settle transactions for merchants using digital currencies.
Over the past year Checkout.com opened new offices in six countries across four continents, expanded its executive leadership team in the US and Europe and grew its overall employee base to more than 1,700 people in 19 countries.
“At our core, we help enterprise merchants to navigate the complexity of moving money around the world, whether in fiat currency or bridging the gap to Web3,” said Checkout.com founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz.
“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.”
It expects its North American employee base to grow by 200% this year alone while it also intends to launch its solution to service online marketplaces and payment facilitators.
The new solutions will comprise identity verification technologies and split payments.
“The expansion of our product roadmap is the result of years of dedicated work by our global platform and engineering teams,” said 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.”