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Wirecard, a German fintech that raised hundreds of millions of dollars only to collapse in 2020 in a sea of scandal and insolvency, still makes headlines today as lawsuits continue against different entities and people once connected to the business. Meanwhile, a Dublin-based startup called Nomupay that was formed in 2023 out of some of Wirecard’s regional payment licenses has been on a quiet growth trajectory solving payment problems in scenarios that bigger companies like Adyen and Stripe have yet to tackle.
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 on the heels of Nomupay growing 100% annually for the last two years and a projection that it will turn profitable this year on ARR of about $20 million.
We understand that Nomupay’s valuation has grown too, to around $200 million. (It’s now raised around $90 million in total, including a $53.6 million investment in 2023, from investors that included Finch Capital, the VC that had bought up the licenses and established Nomupay to turn those licenses into a business.)
Nomupay’s unique selling point is that it’s building cross-border payment rails and enabling payments for users between countries that Peter Burridge, Nomupay’s founder and CEO, claims larger players like Stripe and Adyen have overlooked for being too complex or too small compared to their primary regions of the U.S. and Europe. Nomupay is striking while the iron is hot: not only are businesses in its target regions underserved, but thanks to the boom of e-commerce, they are demanding more.
Burridge refers to larger payment providers as “monos” — monoliths that require buy-in to wider suites of services that the customers who use Nomupay typically do not need, while not providing them with the facilities that they do.
At Nomupay’s advantage is that the payment landscape has always been very fragmented, even within single countries, and compounding that across multiple geographies becomes even harder to parse.
“There are more than 5,000 ISOs for Visa alone,” he said. “They all use some kind of gateway or point of sale technology, to access card schemes and payment methods they they all compete with Adyen and the rest. I look at us as enabling everybody else to compete with these bigger businesses.” [ISOs are Independent Sales Organizations, merchant services companies registered with card brands, which a partner to payment processors, allowing them to sell and service merchant services accounts.] Within specific countries, Malaysia alone has some 20 different payment methods and 20 different wallets that potentially need to be supported at a point of payment; those numbers become even more complex when you add in more countries.
“We are solving problems that haven’t been solved before,” he said. Burridge did not say how many customers in total the company has working across its network today but they include the likes of Ikea, which runs payments for its stores in Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand on Nomupay.
One aim of the equity injection will be to continue with its M&A strategy. In Asia, the company said that it has a presence in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong and Thailand, and he said it’s in talks currently with a fintech in Singapore, primarily to secure a money license for the country. The company’s other targets for expansion include Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam. Outside of Asia, it also has operations in Ireland (Dublin); the U.K. (London and Manchester, where it acquired a startup called Total Processing to bring more functionality and customer service into the fold); Vilnius, Estonia; Turkey (Istanbul); Dubai and New Zealand.
One vote of confidence around its newest investors: Burridge mentioned that Uneti, which was founded by Adyen earliest employees, only became an investor after Endeit Capital in the Netherlands brought Uneti in as an advisor to run due diligence. “They liked it so much they wanted to invest themselves,” he said proudly. “For us, that was a validation of the platform.”
