Nium Raises US$200+ Million Series D to fuel global expansion

It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago Nium launched with a humble mission of simplifying cross-border payments. 

Fast forward 7 years and we’re at another pivotal point in our company. Today we’re announcing  that we’ve raised over US$200 million in Series D funding, making Nium the first B2B payments unicorn from Southeast Asia.

Today recognises years of hard work from a team of dedicated colleagues, investors, advisors, but also signals the start of a new, exciting path forward for the company. With this new round of funding, we welcome Riverwood Capital as a strategic investor. They join a world-class lineup of investment partners, including Visa, Vertex Ventures, Atinum Group of Funds, Beacon Venture Capital, and Rocket Capital Investment, and other notable angel investors, including DoorDash executive, Gokul Rajaram; Chief Product Officer at FIS, Vicky Bindra; and, Co-Founder of Tribe Capital, Arjun Sethi, also contributed to the round.

Alex Porto, a Principal with Riverwood, summed it up nicely, “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.”

So, what’s next?

Investing to expand our global payments infrastructure

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.

As we look ahead, we plan to continue building out our payments infrastructure, strategically adding to our current capabilities which include the ability to send funds to more than 100 countries (most in real-time), pay out in more than 60 currencies, accept funds in 7 currencies, and issue cards in more than 40 countries. 

We also own the most complete set of money transfer, card issuance and banking licenses in fintech. Period. Our services are available in 11 jurisdictions. Our new investment allows us to continue expanding our license portfolio in most of the emerging regions around the world. 

Accelerated geographic and vertical growth 

Our business has significantly scaled over the past year, processing US$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. 

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 Limited, which gives us greater reach into India’s booming payments market. 

Strategic acquisitions of new technologies and companies

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.

We’re just getting started …

At Nium, we envision a future where companies of any size, business model, and location, will have seamless access to the world’s payments infrastructure. With close to 700 team members in 17 countries around the world, we are working hard and fast-tracking our mission of simplifying the world of payments through a single API. By removing some of the friction that exists in global payments, we believe we will catalyse global commerce for businesses across the globe.

To all our customers, partners, employees, investors and supporters, thank you for joining us on this journey. We can’t wait to work with you as we build the future of payments together.