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This Asian payments fintech is coming for the US. Check out the pitch deck Nium used to raise $200 million at a $1 billion valuation.
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- The Singaporean payments startup Nium has become Southeast Asia’s first enterprise-payments unicorn.
- The company facilitates cross-border payments through a single API.
- Menlo Park’s Riverwood Capital led a recent $200 million funding round.
The Singaporean payments startup Nium has become Southeast Asia’s first business-to-business payments unicorn.
The company has raised $200 million in fresh funding in a round led by Menlo Park’s Riverwood Capital.
Nium is a payments platform that enables cross-border payments through a single API, or application-programming interface. The startup has hundreds of enterprise clients across the world that can send funds to more than 100 countries in real time in 60 currencies. It offers card-issuing services in more than 40 countries, plus license services on the back of its e-money and banking licenses in 11 jurisdictions.
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“The global payments infrastructure is broken,” Prajit Nanu, Nium’s cofounder and CEO, told Insider. “If you look under the hood of any large e-commerce provider, you’ll see they need lots of different partners. We can offer all of these different services through our infrastructure with a single integration.”
Nanu said Nium found fundraising easy as a result of its multiproduct suite. “We’ve spent five years in a very regulated space across 11 jurisdictions like Singapore, Canada, Europe, the UK, and are principal members of Visa and Mastercard,” Nanu added. “We set out to raise $150 million, but ended up with $200 million — we could have even gone to $300 million — the process was just one week from start to term sheet.”
Nium processes $8 billion in payments annually and has issued more than 30 million virtual cards to date, according to a statement. The company says revenue grew by more than 280% year-over-year. The company may raise another round later this year, Nanu added.
Much of Nium’s revenue come from Europe and Asia. Nanu said he expected to move to San Francisco in the coming months with the firm looking to build its presence in the US. “The US is a mess,” he said. “It can take one to two days for payments to process, so we see it as a very green market.”
The company previously acquired the Indian assets of the disgraced fintech Wirecard, as well as the travel-payments company Ixaris. Nanu said strategic acquisitions in the US were on the table.
The existing investors Atinum, Beacon Venture Capital, Rocket Capital Investment, Temasek, Visa, Vertex Ventures, and some noted angel investors, such as a DoorDash executive and Coinbase board member, Gokul Rajaram, also contributed to the round. If conditions are right, Nanu said, the business will look to go public in the US in the next 12 to 18 months.
Beyond bolstering new markets, funding will also go toward expanding Nium’s 700-strong global team.
“Internally becoming a unicorn is not a huge thing, but the main benefit of this milestone is in hiring,” Nanu added. “It’s now easier for us to poach top talent from large firms because we have that external validation.”
Check out the pitch deck that turned Nium into a unicorn: