The coronavirus scenario has redefined the dynamics of E-commerce and the shop and pay portals as more and more people are switching to online platforms in the past few months.
Checkout.com, which provides API based platforms to merchants. helps companies accept more payments around the world through one integration. London, England, United Kingdom. Industries Billing, Financial Services, Mobile Payments, Payments, Retail Technology, Transaction Processing., etc has raised another $150 million in funding, a Series B that pushes up this London-based startup’s valuation to $5.5 billion post-money.
Checkout.com has been profitable since 2012 when it was founded. The primary purpose of the funding seems to be to strengthen its balance sheet, as its available cash is now more than $300 million. With a focus on more R&D investment and building technology to further simplify and speed up settlements which are an ongoing, large issue for online retailers, the company’s growth seems to be fast-tracked in future times.
“The way money moves into and out of businesses is changing rapidly,” said its CEO and founder Guillaume Pousaz. “I believe that by solving financial complexity, you can radically unlock innovation — starting with digital payments. At Checkout.com, we’ve built a technical architecture that enables pioneers to reinvent industries and redefine their relationship with consumers. Now more than ever, we are confident of our mission to build the connected payments that businesses deserve.”
There may be some transactions on the upfront as in Feb, the company took over a French-based payment optimization startup called ProcessOut, and considering how many startups have emerged to address the various complexities of E-commerce, there may well be further consolidation down the road, and checkout.com seems to be an outright winner.
The funding is being led by Coatue, with other prominent players in this round include Insight Partners, DST Global, Blossom Capital, and Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, GIC. Most of these are repeat investors, backing Checkout.com in its $ 230 million Series A in May 2019, which made a record of being the largest -ever A-round for any European startup.
The competition is intense as there are quite a few of other payments startups (and bigger plus more mature businesses) such as Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, GoCardless and Square competing against Checkout.com in the area of payments and its many aspects — which involve not just taking payments themselves, but incorporating different payment methods, building easy and simple transaction interfaces, providing fraud protection, providing insights into what is working (and what is not), and offering accounting tools around that.
As with these, Checkout.com’s solution to helping with some of the complexity is to build the processes behind the scenes and make the solutions available by way of APIs in order to incorporate various functions by way of a quick simplified and short lines of code.
Checkout.com has kept a humble profile till now— even its name sounds a bit generic and plain when one thinks about it — but it has held its own on the business front. The company has added more than 500 entrepreneurial customers in the last year. Big new names include Grab, Revolut, Remitly, Klara Careem, Glovo, Robinhood, and Farfetch, alongside older customers like Samsung, Adidas, Getty images, and a host of others.
The best part is that in addition to being profitable — not a detail that has been transparent among some of its competitors, such as Stripe — Checkout.com is growing at a fast trajectory, with number of transaction growing by 250% between May 2019 and 2020, and the rate seems to gallop way up in recent months
The lead investor Coatue in this round is not only a prolific investor that has backed other e-commerce players that have seen an uptick in activity in recent months, but also some of the biggest startups of the last several years, including Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash.
“We have followed the business’ explosive growth and are inspired by Guillaume’s vision for the future of payments,” remarked Kris Fredrickson, managing partner at Coatue, in a statement. “We’re incredibly excited to partner for the next phase of the Checkout.com journey.” he further added.
