Stripe-backed Rapyd raises $300 million, valuing company at $2.5 billion

U.K. fintech Rapyd, backed by Stripe, has raised $300 million in a Series D round to fuel its growth through acquisitions in payment processing, card issuing and disbursements.

The Series D round was led by VC firm Coatue and included new investments from several companies including Spark Capital, Avid Ventures, FJ Labs and Latitude. It also included investments from existing shareholders General Catalyst, Oak HC/FT, Tiger Global, Target Global, Durable Capital, Tal Capital and Entrée Capital. The funds will be used to fuel acquisitions in Rapyd’s three primary regions (EMEA, the Americas and Asia Pacific), as well as to expand product and engineering staffing.

“We are looking to buy market share in a number of geographic markets,” said Arik Shtilman, co-founder and CEO of Rapyd. “We are looking to further accelerate our growth, which has been very strong during the pandemic, through M&A in 2021. In Latin America we are seeking to expand in Brazil as a market share play. In Asia Pacific it’s about buying firms with the regulatory licenses to expand and grow — in that region our focus is on Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.”

Rapyd had last raised funds during the Fall of 2019, at which point Shtilman expected that the company would not need to raise additional funds for at least two to three years. However, he noted that the COVID-19 crisis changed everything.

“The pandemic accelerated our business with more companies coming online and businesses seeking to digitize payments,” added Shtilman. “We now have more than 5,000 clients on our platform, actively processing payments and we are at a $100 miliion sales run rate.”

Rapyd has evolved to build out four distinct products and services, one of which it now finds itself competing with one of its early investors – Stripe – which participated in Rapyd’s Series B round, according to Shtilman. In addition to payments processing and collections, where it competes with Stripe, Rapyd offers an issuing platform, disbursement and a white label wallet service.

In offering a private label wallet service and an issuing platform it finds itself competing with other financial powerhouses such as PayPal and Maqeta, respectively.

Shtilman noted that with the current $300 million Rapyd has raised, it now has $470 million in total funding since its founding and gives the company a $2.5 billion valuation.

During the pandemic, Rapyd made several big moves to expand its business. In September, Rapyd added Visa and Mastercard acceptance to its European payments platform to help merchants take advantage of retail’s shift to online. In June Rapyd offered a full stack API for global payments acceptance. In March, Rapyd announced it was embedding its open development tools with Brazilian processors to support payments in any local method.

“We’ve had a lot of offers to go public,” said Shtilman. “But we didn’t want the regulatory burden and wanted to keep focused on driving growth. By raising private investments it will allow us to grow at a faster pace. We would like to do a direct listing in perhaps 18 to 24 months. The real opportunity right now is to grow through M&A to add volume. We have the technology, we just want to expand our customer base.”