Gocardless nears $1bn valuation after latest funding round
London fintech Gocardless is nearing unicorn status after its latest funding round amid a digital payments boom.
The Alphabet-backed company announced it had raised $95m in its latest funding round led by the venture capital arm of Bain Capital, valuing the firm at over $970m.
“This funding round demonstrates the strength of the business and the confidence both our customers and investors have in GoCardless,” said chief executive and co-founder Hiroki Takeuchi.
The latest fundraise brings the total raised by the company to $240m to date and follows 46 per cent year-on-year revenue growth.
Gocardless, which launched in 2011, aims to fix the way businesses collect invoices and make recurring payments by building technology on top of the world’s existing banking systems.
The firm said it would use the funding to capitalise on open banking, which is gaining popularity as people look for more competition and transparency among financial service providers.
“We believe that open banking is set to disrupt the payment landscape by introducing new, simpler and more secure ways of making bank-to-bank payments that will compete with the traditional card networks,” said Takeuchi.
It is also looking to expand its offering to the adjacent ecommerce market.
“We’re excited by GoCardless’ enormous growth potential in a massive and largely untapped market,” Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures said. “In particular, we’re seeing strong early results as GoCardless moves beyond SMBs to serve mid-market and enterprise customers and expands its international footprint to address a growing need for bank debit processing.”