UK fintech GoCardless raises $95m funding
GoCardless, a UK-based the fintech which helps companies process recurring payments, has raised $95 million in a Series F funding round.
This latest fundraise, led by Bain Capital Ventures, follows 46% year-on-year growth for GoCardless despite the challenging economic environment and supports its ambitious growth plans.
It brings the total raised to-date to $240 million.
GoCardless will use the funding to accelerate its open banking strategy, combining the latest technology with its global bank debit network.
It will also expand its offering into the adjacent e-commerce market to launch “a simple and secure way of making bank-to-bank payments as a lower-cost alternative to cards”.
The company claims to process $18 billion+ of payments annually across more than 30 countries. In addition, GoCardless expanded its technology offering with Success+, “a payments intelligence tool powered by machine learning”, to help businesses optimise their retry strategy when payments fail.
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Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO and co-founder of GoCardless, says: “This funding round demonstrates the strength of the business and the confidence both our customers and investors have in GoCardless.
“We’re incredibly proud to have seen continued business growth in such challenging times, and to have been able to continue supporting our customers – helping them stay in control of their payments and cash flow.”
“We’re excited by GoCardless’ enormous growth potential in a massive and largely untapped market,” says Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures.
He highlights GoCardless’ move beyond small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to mid-market and enterprise customers. “We have enormous confidence in Hiroki and the entire GoCardless team to build a multi-billion dollar company that will redefine the payments industry.”
GoCardless’ investment in its open banking strategy aims to provide an end-to-end recurring payment solution for its merchants.
It also wishes to solve first-time payments via bank debit which can take an average of two-to-three days to process, prompting merchants to use alternative methods such as cards for the first payment.
The firm notes that its instant first payments will offer a lower-cost alternative to cards, before the recurring collection continues via bank debit.
It also wishes to expand into the e-commerce market and develop a unique bank-to-bank payment method for e-commerce payments made to merchants that customers use on a regular basis.
The firm also wants to provide businesses with a complete open banking payment processing service, including features such as refunds, payment reconciliation and error handling.