The world of connected finance - our Series B

A little over a year ago I announced that we had raised $230 million in our Series A. Today I am excited to announce the completion of our $150 million Series B which values the company at over $5.5 billion. Whilst the world is truly a different place than many of us expected it to be, our announcement is testament to the hard work of the Checkout.com team and marks a big step forward towards the future of connected finance.

Starting with payments

I started Checkout.com in 2012 because I recognised that the world was changing. The cost of computing will continue to fall and the speed of internet bandwidth increases. There was already a visible trend towards e-commerce and the rise of global platform businesses and I saw that existing financial services for businesses would be inadequate. The most pressing issue was payments. Otherwise innovative global companies were finding it hard to provide their customers with a payments experience that matched the rest of their product.

We spent the first few years building an enterprise-grade payment solution for international merchants. Our close relationships with them allowed us to understand and anticipate their needs, making sure we were ready to support them, every way that their business evolved. As we demonstrated the power of our technology, we began to enable businesses to unlock new services and markets - partnering with these pioneers to transform the way money flows into a business.

A connected world of finance

More recently we have heard from our merchants that their needs are changing. We know that payments are no longer just a business necessity. Instead, better data and deeper insight into their payment flows allows them to truly optimize the experience for their customers. This is why in February 2020 we made our very first acquisition, buying French start-up ProcessOut to give our merchants better processing data and more actionable insights.

We also heard from our merchants about their need for better payout solutions which is why we’re excited for the upcoming launch of Payouts which will combine both card and bank payout options to our merchants around the world. This will enable us to serve a greater variety of enterprise customers across more of their needs and take us a step closer to a more connected world of payments. Combined with our strengthened balance sheet this will enable us to expand our offering of advanced settlement of funds to our merchants.

Maintaining the bootstrapped spirit

In my Series A blog post, I talked extensively about our bootstrap spirit and I want to highlight that this remains to me more important than ever. Unlike many of our peers, we are a profitable company. We achieved this by being disciplined with our spending, hiring well, and maximising the use of all our resources. Whilst this Series B raise will take our balance sheet cash well over $300 million, we will always maintain this disciplined approach. We see this as an opportunity to accelerate our growth but are determined to do so whilst remaining profitable.

The macroeconomic environment over the last several months has generated significant challenges across the global economy and we know that many of our merchants, particularly in the travel, ticketing and mobility industries have been severely impacted. It has, however, confirmed our belief in the trend to online purchasing and accelerated a growing business demand for transformative online payment solutions that perform across all geographies and channels. Our online transaction numbers increased by 250% comparing May ‘19 and May ‘20 which underscores the resilience and strength of the business.

Offering more for our merchants

It is our mission to empower our merchants to change the world by reimagining the world of connected finance. The announcement today of our Series B enables us to take a step further towards a world where entrepreneurs and businesses are hampered only by their imagination and not the current financial systems. The raise will enable us to offer more payment options, more products and more insights to our merchants so that they can do more for their customers.

None of this would be possible without the Checkout.com team to whom I would like to extend my thanks. I am sincerely grateful for your commitment to the business and our mission. As I have said many times, I’m a firm believer that a business is only as good as its people and we now number over 750! We have added almost 500 new employees since May 2019 and grown our global presence to 13 offices around the world, including most recently Perth and Melbourne through our acquisition of Pin Payments. I am truly honoured to work with you all and incredibly proud of what we have built so far.

I’d like to end by welcoming Coatue Management to the Checkout.com team. They join Insight Partners, DST Global, GIC, Blossom Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst in our journey and I am excited to learn from their extensive experience in scaling operationally excellent global businesses.

Finally, thank you again to the Checkout.com team, all our merchants, our investors, our partners and our advocates. Building a business like ours is an incredible privilege and I am grateful to all those of you who have shown your support over the last decade. After years of saying that we were in Chapter Zero, I did say that our Series A marked Chapter 1. It still feels like we’re just at the very beginning of our story and I am eager to see what is next.

Peace & Power,

Guillaume