5 November 2024, Tue |
5:40 PM
Checkout.com raised $1 billion in Series D fundraising round at a valuation of $40 billion, following a tremendously successful year processing hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for some of the world’s top retailers.
“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.”
“We have long-faced substantial demand to serve the US market, and with our Series D we’re doubling down on our commitment to scaling our platform, partnerships and products for customers here,” said Checkout.com’s New York-based CFO, Céline Dufétel.
“Much like our approach in EMEA, we will maintain our focus on the enterprise—especially fintech, software, food delivery, travel, e-commerce and crypto merchants. We’re looking to help our US customers grow domestically and internationally, and to help our non-US customers expand into the market here. We’re excited about the potential, and expect our North American employee base to grow by 200% this year alone.”
“The expansion of our product roadmap is the result of years of dedicated work by our global platform and engineering teams,” said Checkout.com CTO, Ott Kaukver.
He added, “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.”
“Checkout.com is a leader in the massive market for next-gen payment solutions and the key digital payments partner for many of the world’s leading companies. As a long-term investor, we are impressed by the company’s product innovation and customer-centric approach,” said Choo Yong Cheen, Chief Investment Officer of Private Equity at GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.
He added, “That’s why we’ve been committed to its long-term future since Series A and why we’re part of Series D. We believe Checkout.com is still just getting started. And we look forward to leveraging GIC’s global network and our Bridge Forum platform to support Guillaume and his exceptional team for many years to come.”
Altimeter, Dragoneer, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Insight Partners, the Qatar Investment Authority, Tiger Global, the Oxford Endowment Fund, and another prominent west coast mutual fund management business are among the primary investors. This round was also attended by a number of the company’s other existing investors.
Checkout.com is a full-stack web platform that helps major worldwide enterprise merchants streamline their payment procedures. This contributes to the company’s aim of enabling businesses and communities to succeed in the digital economy.
The Series D funding will reinforce an already strong balance sheet and support three important initiatives: the company’s ambitious expansion plans for the US market, the continuous evolution of its unique technology platform and products, and its goal to be on the cutting edge of Web3.
Checkout.com’s valuation has more than doubled since its Series C a year ago as a result of the news. In that time, it has tripled the amount of transactions processed in its home market of EMEA for the third year in a straight. Large-scale ecommerce and services merchants such as Netflix, Farfetch, Grab, NetEase, Pizza Hut, Shein, Siemens, and Sony; fintech unicorns such as Klarna, Qonto, Revolut, and WorldRemit; and many of the world’s largest crypto players, including Coinbase, Crypto.com, FTX, and MoonPay are among the company’s current clients.
To meet rising merchant demand, Checkout.com has built additional offices in six countries across four continents in the last year. It also added a new CFO, CHRO, CMO, CPO, CRO, and CTO to its executive leadership team in the US and Europe all while growing its overall employee base to more than 1700 people in 19 countries.
Checkout.com has invested extensively in its domestic technical infrastructure, and now offers a complete proprietary end-to-end payment processing platform in the United States, which is one of the world’s largest ecommerce markets.
This provides merchants in other countries with the same unrivalled performance, increased authorization rates, and feature parity as the company’s market-leading platform. Checkout.com is now one of the few companies in the United States to offer a fully cloud-based platform that is directly connected to local networks in all major geographies and accepts all major alternative payment methods.
Checkout.com expects to deliver its solution to service marketplaces and payment facilitators (payfacs) later this year, following extensive testing with several worldwide merchants over the past several months. This would boost the company’s ability to process payments in online marketplaces, a sector that has seen a substantial increase in transaction volumes as a result of the move to digital during the pandemic and the growth of the gig economy for several years.
These new solutions will include identity verification technologies, split payments, and treasury-as-a-service, in addition to the existing Payouts capabilities, which Checkout.com launched last year to help merchants send funds to cards and bank accounts around the world through a single integration. Since then, the company has processed billions of dollars in payout transactions for companies like TikTok and Moneygram.
With global ecommerce projected to continue surpassing traditional commerce growth—especially with the adoption of emerging technologies like crypto currencies and NFTs—Checkout.com is bolstering its Web3 presence.
The company’s payment rails already power the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, accounting for about 80% of worldwide trading volume. Fan token providers like Socios.com and blockchain-based wallets like Meta’s Novi employ its modular products and resilient platform. In addition, the company is discreetly beta-testing a unique solution for merchants employing digital currencies to settle transactions.
