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A fintech company used by Google, Amazon, and Airbnb raised $180 million
Payoneer
Scott Galit, Payoneer CEO.
Payoneer, a US fintech company that helps businesses send and receive money across borders online, has raised $180 million (£141 million) in a Series E funding round.
The cash comes from Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), a Silicon Valley-headquartered VC fund that focuses on growth funding for established tech businesses. TCV has backed giants such as Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify.
The funding round is double Payoneer’s funding to date and takes its total raised to $270 million (£211 million). CEO Scott Galit wouldn’t comment on the company’s valuation but it’s likely in the billions given the amount of equity doled out.
Founded in 2005, Payoneer has two main parts to its business: helping small and medium-sized businesses make overseas payments online; and helping global tech giants like Amazon, Airbnb, and Google, to pay suppliers around the world.
“We approach the world with a basic thesis underlying what we do,” CEO Scott Galit told Business Insider.
“The first part of the thesis is that businesses of all sizes, all over the world are increasingly technology-enabled, connected, and global. Any business of any size anywhere in the world is able to access technology and access the rest of the world in a way that wasn’t possible before.
“The second part of the thesis is there’s a last mile for money. It’s local, it’s regulated, it’s controlled by financial institutions and the regulators that regulate them and we don’t actually believe that’s going to change. But what we see is this increasing gap between what businesses need and what the incumbent banking infrastructure is able to provide.
“We really see ourselves as building a bridge between these increasingly divergent worlds. We built a global platform that allows businesses to transact and trade with other businesses all around the world.”
Google uses Payoneer’s mass payout service.
Payoneer is processing “many billions of dollars” a year, Galit says, and is getting 250,000 applications from SMEs each month. It has customers across 200 countries and can do localised payments in 130 countries.
Galit, a former senior vice president at MasterCard, says: “What’s hard about our business is how many layers of things we have to get right. We have to have the regulatory side, we have to have the compliance infrastructure, language, banking and payment infrastructure. We have to have people who understand the needs of customers around the world.”
New York-headquartered Payoneer employs 800 people from Silicon Valley to Tokyo and opened new offices in India, Japan and the Philippines this year.
Galit says the fundraising will go towards further expansion, saying: “We think we’re really just scratching the surface of the opportunity here. There are an estimated 350 million small and medium enterprises in emerging markets. As much as technology is changing our lives, it is having an absolutely transformation effect on small businesses in developing markets.”
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