GoCardless, A London-based online payment start-up, has raised $75 million in funding round led by U.S. tech giants Alphabet and Salesforce.
GV, a venture arm of Aphabet and Adam Street Psrtners, a private equity firm, have co-led the series E funding round, while GoCardless also succeeded to get more backing from existing investors including Notion Capital, Passion Capital, Balderton and Accel.
British start-up GoCardless helps businesses to collect subscriptions and other similar forms of recurring payments by processing direct debit payments from customer’s bank accounts on behalf of businesses.
The system of businesses to collect recurring payments is not sequential as these systems which are not meant to be fit for the business purposes are hurting businesses, noted GoCardless CEO Hiroki Takeuchi. Development of a global network system for banks to allow businesses to smoothly collect recurring payments anywhere and in any currency is an essential requirement for sure, he added.
Center point of focus of GoCardless is on the recurring payments market including invoicing, installments and subscriptions, and such payments account about 18 percent of total payment volume in that market globally, which is a large share of all the payments processing around the world, said Takeuchi.
Founded in 2011, by Takeuchi, Matt Robinson and Tom Blomfield, had processed about $4 billion of payments for 30,000 merchants in 2017, which is now processing payments involving $10 billion for more than 40,000 of the merchants every year.
The firm’s clients include tech firms like Sage and Box, as well as newspapers like the Financial Times and The Guardian.
Process of collecting recurring payments is relatively a smother task when transaction is being executed in a single country, but the issues arises when payments involves multiple banks across many countries, and GoCardless came to play its role at that stage by executing such labor-intensive transactions to serve customers.
And with fresh amount raised in funding, GoCradless is planning to physically expand in the United States and also aiming to gain access to 70 percent of global recurring payment business by first half of this year.
