Our Journey continues...

Today NIUM announced our latest funding round that was raised primarily to welcome prestigious strategic partners into our cap table. Visa, the world’s leader in digital payments, participated in the round along with BRI Ventures and existing investors.

It’s been an amazing journey and for the last 5 years we have been fighting a David and Goliath battle with peers who have been building the business for longer with larger chunks of money. Our journey is super vivid in my memories, I still remember it was in March 2015 few days after we opened the platform when a customer sent A$5,000 as their first transaction. This was a pretty surreal moment for me as it was validation that there was a gap in the market and that our product works. To be honest till then I wasn’t really sure whether this will work as so many early stage investors had rejected us for $500,000 seed round.

That validation meant that we worked our ass off and InstaReM as it stands today is a top 5 digital global remittance start-up. The other surreal moment for me was back in 2016 when one of the largest global payment processors approached us to process last mile payments for some of the largest brands in the world. We didn’t have the corridor and didn’t have the platform but somehow convinced them to trust us and built both of them. Our first full month of volume from them was 100k transactions which was 10x of what we were doing then. Post the re-brand NIUM now processes billions of dollars a year for banks, payments institutions, e-commerce players and OTAs and serve over a million retail users across the world.

Today our platform enables anyone to become a fintech and send payment to Mexico, issue card in Australia and collect money from India through a single API. Our customers are now present in 6 continents. All of the above makes us feel pretty amazing today but it’s been a rough and tough journey. People always tend to see the big news and headlines but the enormous amount of pain and sacrifices which goes in building a company always goes unreported.

So friends and well-wishers, why am I sharing all this with you, it’s because today is a monumental day for us. Visa’s investment in us is a great endorsement for a global payment company built ground up in Asia and scaling to all parts of this world. Does this mean we will bask in the glory and chill for a bit, NO. It just adds rocket fuel to our journey so that this small company built in Singapore, Engineered in Mumbai and Vilnius and supported in Seattle, SF, Miami, London, KL, HK, Melbourne and JKT will continue to create ripples in the world of payment.