Wirecard, a German fintech that raised hundreds of millions of dollars only to collapse in 2020 in a sea of scandal and bankruptcy, STILL makes headlines today as lawsuits continue against various entities and people once associated with the business. Meanwhile, a Dublin-based startup called Nomupay that was formed in 2023 from some of Wirecard’s regional payments licenses has been on a smooth growth trajectory by solving payment problems in scenarios that larger companies like Adyen and Stripe they don’t have to treat them yet.
Focused primarily on cross-border payments for merchants across Asia and the Middle East, Nomupay has now raised $37 million in funding to expand its business. The funding — from Endeit Capital, Uneti Ventures and previous backers — comes after Nomupay has grown 100% annually for the past two years and a projection to turn profitable this year with ARR of around $20 million.
We understand that Nomupay’s valuation has also increased, to around $200 million. (It has now raised about $90 million in total, including a $53.6 million investment in 2023, from investors that included Finch Capital, the VC that had bought the licenses and founded Nomupay to turn those licenses into a business.)
Nomupay’s unique selling point is that it is building cross-border payment rails and enabling payments for users between countries that Peter Burridge, Nomupay’s founder and CEO, claims bigger players like Stripe and Adyen have overlooked as being too complex or very small compared to their main regions. of the USA and Europe. Nomupay is striking while the iron is hot: not only are businesses in its target regions underserved, but thanks to the e-commerce boom, they are demanding more.
Burridge refers to the larger payment providers as “monos” – monoliths that require buying into broader bundles of services that customers using Nomupay typically don’t need, while not offering them the conveniences that they do.
To Nomupay’s advantage is that the payments landscape has always been highly fragmented, even within individual countries, and the complexity of this across multiple geographies makes it even harder to analyze.
“There are more than 5,000 ISOs for Visa alone,” he said. “They all use some sort of gateway or point of sale technology to access card schemes and payment methods, all of which compete with Adyen and others. I see us enabling everybody to compete with these bigger businesses.” (ISOs are Independent Sales Organizations, merchant service companies registered with card brands that partner with payment processors, allowing them to sell and service merchant service accounts.) Within specific countries, only Malaysia has about 20 different payment methods and 20 different wallets that potentially need to rely on a payment point; these numbers become even more complex when you add more countries.
“We’re solving problems that haven’t been solved before,” he said. Burridge did not say how many total customers the company has working on its network today, but they include Ikea, which processes payments for its stores in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand on Nomupay.
One of the goals of the capital injection will be to continue the M&A strategy. In Asia, the company said it has a presence in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Thailand, and it said it is currently in talks with a fintech in Singapore, mainly to secure a money license for the country. The company’s other targets for expansion include Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam. Outside Asia, it also has operations in Ireland (Dublin); UK (London and Manchester, where it bought a startup called Total Processing to bring more functionality and customer service to the group); Vilnius, Estonia; Turkey (Istanbul); Dubai and New Zealand.
A vote of confidence about its newest investors: Burridge mentioned that Uneti, which was founded by Adyen’s earliest employees, only became an investor after Endeit Capital in the Netherlands brought Uneti on board as an adviser to conduct due diligence. “They liked it so much they wanted to invest themselves,” he said proudly. “For us, this was a validation of the platform.”
