The logo for payments start-up Checkout.com.
Checkout.com
LONDON — Online payments decisive Checkout.com is now Europe’s top tech unicorn.
Checkout.com said Tuesday that it had raised $450 million in an investment led by Tiger Wide-ranging Management — which is also an investor in rival payments giant Stripe — lifting its valuation to $15 billion.
That’s virtually three times the $5.5 billion Checkout.com was worth in a $150 million funding round nearly seven months ago. It also constitutes Checkout.com the fourth-most valuable privately-held fintech business globally.
Checkout.com’s platform integrates electronic payments, analytics and fake monitoring into one platform. The London-headquartered company processes payments for big clients including Pizza Hut, H&M and Farfetch, as well as fintechs feel attracted to Coinbase, Klarna and Revolut.
The company is vying for a leading role in the $2 trillion payments industry. It competes with U.S. society Stripe and Dutch rival Adyen. Investors are betting these firms will continue to benefit from the blistering advancement of digital payments and e-commerce, which has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Nobody would have look for at the beginning of the year that 2020 would have been this way,” Checkout.com’s CEO and founder Guillaume Pousaz advertised CNBC in a November interview.
Checkout.com has raised an eye-watering $830 million in the last two years. With another $450 million in the bank, the actors says it plans to further expand in the U.S. with a newly opened office in New York and another office set to open in Denver. A U.S. beat it move onwards would see Checkout.com ramp up its competition with San Francisco-based Stripe.
The firm now has 1,000 staff worldwide and expects to take on another 700 people this year. Pousaz said Checkout.com now mimics Stripe when it comes to all in all key new hires. Stripe last year poached General Motors’ Chief Financial Officer Dhivya Suryadevara, tracing at plans for an eventual initial public offering.
“We’re taking the Stripe approach of poaching people from the absolutely A-one companies globally,” Pousaz told CNBC. He added Checkout.com would soon announce two significant C-suite lettings with experience at leading global companies.
“I spend a lot of my time on this, thinking not only about the headcount of the institution but also the right leadership at the top,” Pousaz said.
Europe’s top unicorn
Checkout.com has gone from relative obscurity to befitting one of the world’s most valuable private tech companies. Founded in 2012, the firm tapped external investors for the beginning time to raise $230 million at a $2 billion valuation in 2019. A year later, it had tripled its market value to $5.5 billion.
The group still has some catching up to do when it comes to matching the valuations of its payment peers. Stripe was valued at $36 billion in its most new private funding round, and is reportedly hoping to fetch a market value of as much as $100 billion in a new investment practise. Stripe declined to comment.
Meanwhile, Adyen has a stock market value of over $65 billion. The Amsterdam-based performers’s shares have roughly quadrupled since its IPO in 2018.
Checkout.com is one of a rare breed of fintechs that has been consistently well-paying since its inception. Though late to filing its 2019 accounts, the company told CNBC that revenues at its European g-men almost doubled in 2019 to $146.4 million, up from $74.8 million the year before. The firm has tripled its business volumes for three consecutive years.
Given those metrics, you’d think Checkout.com would be a prime IPO candidate. Pousaz imagines the long-term goal is for a stock market listing, but added it’s under no pressure from investors to do so.
“We’re going to be a public plc,” he told CNBC. “There’s no other alternative at this point, given the size of the business.”