General Catalyst and payments unicorn Stripe led a US$40m Series B in Rapyd, a global fintech-as-a-service platform based in London, with participation from Target Global, IGNIA and others.
(Press Release) Mexico City. – February 13, 2019 – Rapyd, a global fintech-as-a-service platform that enables businesses and consumers to pay or be paid however they choose, using any payment method or cash for local and cross-border e-commerce, today announced a $40 million series B financing round led by General Catalyst and Stripe, with participation from Target Global, IGNIA and other strategic payments and fintech companies.
With this investment, Rapyd will expand its technology platform that supports any local or cross-border commerce use case requiring local payments, such as bank transfers, e-wallets, and cash for local acceptance and payouts. Rapyd addresses a significant and growing 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 that are critical for international expansion.
“We’re excited to work with our new partners General Catalyst, Stripe, Target Global, IGNIA, and others, who today join our earlier investors including seed and series A lead TaL Capital. This marks a critical inflection point in our evolution as a company and at a time when market demand for our fintech-as-a-service platform approach is accelerating,” said Arik Shtilman, Co-founder and CEO of Rapyd.
“Rapyd’s product offering helps merchants, banks, telcos and fintech companies expand the scope of the products they offer, increase the number of customers they reach, and improve the overall customer experience, said Adam Valkin, Partner of General Catalyst. “Rapyd does this by helping drive the ubiquity of payment and payout options beyond debit and credit cards, towards cash, bank transfers, instant payments, e-wallets, and mobile money.”
“As global commerce continues to grow, the market opportunity for online merchants, the gig economy, online lenders and banks looking to provide access to funds instantly, is constrained due to the challenges of accepting and making local payment methods and cash transactions,” added Shtilman. “Rapyd helps businesses and their customers pay and be paid however they choose by seamlessly integrating any local payment method or cash to run any digital application from a single API.”
“Rapyd is a rare example of a unique solution allowing merchants and banks that work globally to be able to access hundreds of payment methods with one integration around the world. This ensures access to services for those who are most in need so that they can pay the way they are used to rather than being obliged to use the existing rails of card schemes,” noted Mike Lobanov, General Partner of Target Global. “We see the future in seamless payments with more and more transactions happening inside closed ecosystems through e-wallets. The global economy needs a modernized infrastructure which Rapyd is building.”
“Early on we saw and backed Rapyd’s vision to fundamentally re-think how financial management, money movement, and payment services could be delivered through a cloud computing model through a single technology stack. By removing the complexity and difficulty of managing geographic expansion, regulations, and new features businesses can focus on building the best fintech applications without worrying about backend systems that work on a global scale”, noted Eyal Dior, co-Managing Partner at TaL Capital. “We were pleased to lead Rapyd’s seed round and to co-lead their Series A funding. It is great to see market and investor acceptance of their Fintech-as-a-service vision.”
In addition to enabling local payments Rapyd also provides (1) Single Point of Reconciliation and Settlement of all funds across 65 currencies and the ability to payout in over 170 countries, (2) Advanced real-time foreign exchange services, that on average, provide a lower cost to clients and their consumers, and are more profitable, due to advanced FX hedging technology, and (3) Comprehensive global Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Counter Financing Terrorism (CFT) services.
