We need a word for a fintech company that is worth close to $1 billion but is not quite there yet: a nearicorn, perhaps.
GoCardless, the UK-headquartered global payments company that enables recurring customer payments for 55,000 large and small companies in 30 countries, has just become one.
On Thursday, it announced it has raised $95 million in a series F funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. That brings to $240 million the amount the company has raised since Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson founded it in 2011 – and it establishes a valuation for GoCardless of $970 million.
The company has built a network connecting domestic bank-to-bank payments systems – such as Bacs in the UK and ACH in the US – that now covers more than 30 countries.
It has layered on top of this a developer technology platform that allows merchants to integrate their billing systems through its APIs and accounting software providers to integrate invoice management.
The result is that businesses can pull regular payments directly from customers’ bank accounts when due, without requiring those customers to repeatedly fill in credit card details or do anything else to send them.
We will be talking about this move in 50 years from now
Amidst a bewildering proliferation of payments methods, it reduces the cost for merchants of handling recurring receivables, improves certainty of cashflow and minimizes churn.
Customers
