Stripe leads $40m funding round in paytech Rapyd
UK-based Fintech-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform Rapyd has closed $40 million in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst and Stripe.
“AWS of fintech”
The round includes participation from Target Global, Ignia and other unnamed payments and fintech companies.
Arik Shtilman, co-founder and CEO of Rapyd, says the funding marks a “critical inflection point in our evolution as a company and at a time when market demand for our AWS of fintech platform approach is accelerating”.
With this investment, Rapyd will seek to expand its technology platform for in-country or cross-border commerce requiring local payments, such as bank transfers, e-wallets, or cash for local acceptance and payouts.
Rapyd reckons there is a market opportunity as more than half of all transactions worldwide are facilitated via bank transfer, but merchants find it “increasingly difficult to digitally enable local payment methods and process cross-border sales”.
In addition to local payments Rapyd says it provides single point of reconciliation and settlement of all funds across 65 currencies and the ability to payout in over 170 countries.
It also offers real-time foreign exchange services, and know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML)/counter financing terrorism (CFT) services.
General Catalyst has invested in a lot of companies. Names include Airbnb, Datalogix, Deliveroo, Gusto, HubSpot, Kayak, Snap, and Stripe. It has offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York City and Boston.
US-based payments infrastructure firm Stripe is well-known in fintech circles.
Last month, it caught the eye of the Tiger with its latest funding round of $100 million. The investment from Tiger Global Management took Stripe’s valuation to a mighty $22.5 billion.
It follows on from September 2018 when the paytech raised $245 million in funding. That investment was led by Tiger and included DST Global and Sequoia.
