Payments

Investor of Abu Dhabi state Mubadala and Arbor Ventures have a led a $23 million funding round for buy-now-pay-later startup tabby to support its growth, the fintech company said on Tuesday.

The Series “A” funding round, which is generally backed by venture capital funds, also noticed investments from Saudi-based venture fund STV, Raed Ventures and Global Founders Capital.

Founded in 2019, Dubai-based tabby partners with retailers to offer their customers, both online and in-store, the ability to defer paying for their purchases for up to 30 days or to pay in four equal monthly instalments at zero cost to the consumer.

Its customers can make use of its service through more than 500 merchants, including brands like IKEA, Toys R Us and Ace Hardware, and regional retail giants such as Al Futtaim Group.

“This funding will fuel the company’s next stage of growth, helping tabby materially scale its product and engineering capabilities in addition to its lending capacity,” tabby said in a statement.

The funding comes after tabby declared a partnership with Visa Inc and joined the Saudi Arabian Central Bank’s regulatory sandbox for fintech firms, the statement said.

U.S. fintech Payrix declared it is set to grow its services in Australia and New Zealand, as well as completed its acquisition of Brisbane-based payment service provider, IntegraPay. The expansion efforts come just days after Payrix announced it secured $50 million through its Series A funding round, which was led by Blue Star Innovation Partners and Providence Strategic Growth.

“Payrix offers the ability to seamlessly grow with the user’s business. From those just getting started to those who are truly ready to become a payment facilitator, Payrix provides white-label solutions that afford the flexibility to customize precisely and strategically. It enables users to leverage solutions that maintain the brand integrity of their merchant customers.”

“We’ve listened to our clients and many have exciting plans to expand globally – it became clear we needed to eliminate obstacles that were holding them back. We believe IntegraPay’s market-leading technology, customer-centricity and local presence will deliver the seamless user experience and growth results our clients need to scale smart.”

Limepay, the Payments Fintech, has raised $21 million in a pre-IPO funding round. Ord Minnett acted as lead manager, supported by Prime Financial as corporate and financial adviser to Limepay. The company is anticipating additional institutional funding in early 2021. Since its seed round in December 2019, Limepay has raised almost $30 million to scale the platform.

Limepay is an Australian enterprise payments Fintech that join in online payments and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) functionality to offer a native customer experience.

Limepay recently launched with a series of major retail partners, including EB Games and PUMA.

This funding round is one of the largest Fintech pre-IPO’s completed in the Australian market.

Primer, the U.K. fintech consolidate the payments stack and easily support new payment methods in the future of merchants has raised £14 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Accel, who were quite proactive in persuading Primer to take the VC firm’s money.

The company wasn’t actively fund-raising, having quietly raised £3.8 million in funding announced in May.

Also participating in the Series A are existing investors: Balderton, SpeedInvest and Seedcamp, who were joined in the round by new backer RTP Global. Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel, will join Primer’s board.

The thinking is that larger merchants, especially those that operate in more than one geography, have to support an array of payment methods, which brings with it substantial technical overhead, a poor user experience, and lack of transparency.

Primer declares the additional funding will be used for international business development and scaling its team. Billed as a remote-first company, Primer has 23 employees across six countries, and says it has already picked up traction across mid-market and large enterprise e-commerce merchants across Europe.

FinTech Stripe is thinking a funding round to value it higher than the $36 billion it got on its previous round, reported by Bloomberg. According to the discussions with familiar people, the expectation is that the new valuation could hit as much as $70 billion or maybe as much as $100 billion, Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg also reported that If it got as high as $100 billion, it would make Stripe one of the most valuable venture-backed startups in the country.

Stripe’s software is utilized by businesses to accept payments. The company competes with giants like Square and PayPal, and has gained from the pandemic due to the growing reliance on eCommerce as the pandemic forced people to stay away from physical spaces, and consequently resulted in more digital payments.

Bloomberg reported that the company is starting its own card-issuing service for U.S. clients and making plans to acquire a startup from Nigeria to further African expansion.

The company has also been fundraising this year, including a $600 million round from April, from investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which afforded the company’s current $36 billion value. General Catalyst, Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures also participated, Bloomberg wrote.

Stripe was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison, who sold their first company when they were teenagers for $5 million, according to Bloomberg.

Purple Dot, a payment platform for fashion merchandisers that allows consumers to offer to purchase a product at below the retail recommended price, has raised a £1.3 million seed round. The funding was led by Connect Ventures. Other investors partaking in the round include AI Seed, Moxxie Ventures, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring from AngelList, Vijay Pandurangan (ex-Twitter), Alex Roetter former SVP of Engineering at Twitter and the family office of Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed.com.

Purple Dot is an app that is said to allow retailers to move unsold inventory instead of shipping off the apparel to deep discount locations. The company was founded in August 2019 by Skyscanner employees Madeline Parra (CEO) and John Talbott (CTO). Two founders previosly launched Twizoo, a big data platform for finding and displaying relevant social content, which was sold to Skyscanner in November 2017.

Purple Dot has consumers pay up front and then the retailer can decide to accept the offer – or not. The payment method is designed to sit alongside “buy now, pay later” finance options. Merchants can keep selling at full-price, but know they have a list of shoppers in their book ready to buy at a small discount.

Purple Dot is working with a number of smaller boutiques around the UK and is currently in discussion with some “major UK and US high street brands”.

A Chinese startup named XTransfer, which offers cross-border services for SMEs. A review of the website indicates payments and collections services for Chinese companies in various foreign currencies.

The latest round was led by Telstra Ventures, together with MindWorks Ventures and existing investors. Bill Deng, founder and chief executive of XTransfer said the funds will be used to further increase its global financial network, support its data capabilities, improve its anti-money laundering (AML) and risk control capacity and deliver improved services to customers. This funding round will also fuel their organizational upgrade to attract more high-caliber talents globally.