12 January 2021, New York – Checkout.com, the leading Connected Payments™ solutions provider, today announced that it closed a $450 million Series C fundraising round. This gives the business a post-money valuation of $15 billion, making it the fourth largest fintech globally and EMEA’s most valuable venture-backed business[1], as the business continues to expand across the globe.
The Series C was led by Tiger Global Management, LLC, a New York-based technology investor that partners with dynamic entrepreneurs operating market-leading growth companies, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, ByteDance, and JD.com. Greenoaks Capital also joined the round along with participation from existing investors Insight Partners, DST Global, Coatue Management, Blossom Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, and Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth Fund GIC.
Guillaume Pousaz, CEO and Founder of Checkout.com said: “Payments affect everything from the customer journey to a business’s ability to enter new markets or launch new products. This latest fundraise reflects our market-leading position and the size of our aspirations as we accelerate in our mission to empower merchants to build better products, drive more revenue and create innovative business models by reimagining interactions with financial services. Our new investors bring a wealth of experience across payments, technology and scaling companies – crucial knowledge for the next stage of our growth, as we continue to build our vision for the future of Connected Finance™.”
Research from McKinsey & Company highlights the scale of the payments opportunity, with total global payments revenue reaching just under $2 trillion in 2019[2]. Meanwhile a recent report from Checkout.com in partnership with Oxford Economics[3] revealed the scale of the challenge that many merchants face, with $20.3 billion lost to false declines in payments in 2019 alone and more than $12.7 billion handed from first choice merchants to their competitors. Additionally, customers who gave up on their intended online purchase completely resulted in more than $7.6 billion of missed opportunity for merchants. Checkout.com addresses these issues by giving enterprise businesses the most proactive tools to drive best-in-class performance and more control through advanced data features, fraud management tools, and comprehensive reporting.
The fundraise comes as the global economy looks beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. While many organizations have historically relied on one-size-fits all payment systems, the need to drive improved performance, gain transparency across payments and extract valuable information from data is increasingly becoming a competitive differentiator. Checkout.com’s cloud-based unified platform enables merchants to manage payins and payouts at scale, while achieving better performance and improved acceptance rates globally. Leading ecommerce businesses such as Farfetch, Mango, Victoria’s Secret, L'Occitane and The Hut Group depend on Checkout.com for a fast, reliable, adaptable and safe platform that gives granular access to the data and pricing behind every transaction.
While Checkout.com’s profits from current operations will continue to be reinvested to power future growth, the new funding will be used to further grow its balance sheet and drive new innovative opportunities. With a total of $830 million raised within the last two years, Checkout.com’s readily available cash represents one of the strongest balance sheets across all global fintechs. This further strengthens the company's resilience as a regulated entity in numerous markets and as the financial partner to its merchants. It also allows for continued strategic investments and product developments, like the Checkout.com Payouts solution which saw exponential growth over the last year.
In addition to today’s Series C funding announcement, Checkout.com is announcing the opening of its New York City office. The company first launched in the U.S. in 2017 and has operations in San Francisco. Together, the bicoastal offices will power the organization’s ability to meet the growing demand in the U.S. for Connected Payments™ solutions, as Checkout.com increases its focus on serving U.S.-based enterprises in domestic, global and cross-border payments. The company is also announcing an office in Denver. Globally, Checkout.com will hire an additional 700 people across all its locations in 2021
Checkout.com’s transformative approach to payments and payouts has garnered its reputation as the most trusted technology provider behind many of the most valuable fintechs and cutting-edge businesses, including Klarna, Revolut, Transferwise, Coinbase, and eToro. With a platform that can support both best-performing global payments and payouts, Checkout.com has become the backbone of the world-beating progressive business models, among the leading fintechs, streaming services, and marketplaces.
Scott Shleifer, Partner at Tiger Global Management said: “We are excited to partner with Guillaume and Checkout.com as they continue to build an innovative global payments and financial services platform trusted by leading internet companies. We believe the shift to digital commerce is still in the early stages, and Checkout.com’s focus on developing a best-in-class technology platform has positioned them to be a leader in the industry for years to come.”
In June 2020, Checkout.com announced its Series B which valued the business at $5.5bn and was led by technology fund Coatue Management. In 2020, it also announced the acquisitions of ProcessOut and PinPayments, as well as a strategic investment in Thunes.
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Checkout.com Press contact: Lewis Jones, Communications Manager pr@checkout.com
Checkout.com empowers businesses to adapt, innovate, and thrive with the Connected Payments™they deserve. The company’s technology makes payments seamless. Flexible solutions, granular data, and instant insights help global enterprises launch new products in new markets and create outstanding customer experiences. They provide the fastest, most reliable payments in more than 150 currencies, with in-country acquiring, world-class fraud filters and reporting, through one API. And they can accept all major international credit and debit cards, as well as popular alternative and local payment methods. Checkout.com launched in 2012 and now has a team of 1000 people across 17 offices worldwide, offering local expertise where it’s needed. Find out more at www.checkout.com
Tiger Global Management, LLC is an investment firm focused on public and private companies in the global Internet, software, consumer and financial technology sectors. Since 2003, its private equity business has invested in hundreds of companies across more than 30 countries, including investments ranging from Series A to pre-IPO. Such investments have included Spotify, Harry's, Warby Parker, Peloton, JD.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yandex, Mail.ru Group, Despegar, Ola and Flipkart. Tiger Global Management, LLC, was founded in 2001 and is based in New York with affiliate offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangalore and Melbourne.
[1] PitchBook, January 2021
[2] The 2020 McKinsey Global Payments Report, McKinsey & Company, October 2020
[3] Black Boxes and Paradoxes: The Real Cost of Disconnected Payments, Checkout.com, July 2020