Singapore-based business payments firm Nium announced on Monday it has raised over $200 million in Series D funding, making it the first B2B payments unicorn from Southeast Asia.
With this new round of funding, Nium welcomed private equity firm US-based private equity firm Riverwood Capital as a strategic investor.
“They join a world-class lineup of investment partners, including Temasek, Visa, Vertex Ventures, Atinum Group of Funds, Beacon Venture Capital, and Rocket Capital Investment, and other notable angel investors, including DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram; FIS Chief Product Officer Vicky Bindra; and, Tribe Capital Co-Founder Arjun Sethi also contributed to the round,” Nium said in a statement.
“Our new funding will enable us to rapidly expand our technical platform and add new embedded fintech services, further providing our customers with seamless access to the world’s payment infrastructure, including technologies for pay-outs, pay-ins, card issuance, and banking-as-a-service,” it added.
Nium said it plans to continue building out its payments infrastructure, strategically adding to its current capabilities which include the ability to send funds to more than 100 countries, pay out in more than 60 currencies, accept funds in seven currencies, and issue cards in more than 40 countries.
“Our new investment allows us to continue expanding our license portfolio in most of the emerging regions around the world,” the company said.
Nium said its business has significantly scaled over the past year, processing $8 billion in payments and issuing more than 30 million virtual cards overall.
“We currently serve hundreds of enterprise clients and have big plans to onboard thousands more, in part through aggressive growth strategies focused in the United States and Latin America. With our revenues split almost equally across EMEA and APAC, we’ve set our sights on double-digit growth in revenue over the next year in Latin America and the United States,” the company said.
“Our Series D funding will provide us with greater flexibility to explore deeper vertical and regional opportunities, particularly when combined with our two recent strategic acquisitions. Those acquisitions include travel B2B payments leader, Ixaris, which added comprehensive virtual card issuance capabilities to our platform, and Wirecard Forex India Private Ltd, which gives us greater reach into India’s booming payments market,” it said.
“Our global market opportunities in embedded FinTech, cross-border transfers, and card payments are large and rapidly expanding. We estimate these global trends to have a total addressable market of nearly $50 trillion. To address these important market opportunities, we will continue to acquire new technologies and companies that will allow us to aggressively expand our product set, while building deeper inroads within our core verticals,” Nium said.
“Nium has built an extremely rare global footprint of licensed infrastructure that brings the world closer to global real-time gross settlement. We believe that Nium is on track to be a central component of the global fabric, providing faster and more democratic money movement, and we look forward to supporting their growth in this next phase,” said Alex Porto, a Principal with Riverwood.
The funding round also came at a time when cross-border payments are in demand due to travel bans to contain the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. FinTech and online banking services are also gaining momentum, a trend further accelerated by the pandemic.
Launched as Instarem in 2014, Nium is a global financial services platform that allows banks, payment providers, travel companies, and other businesses to collect and disburse funds in local currencies to over 100 countries, plus issue physical and virtual cards globally.
Featured image credit: Nium