PPRO, a leading global provider of payments infrastructure announced that it has raised an additional US$90 million from Eldrige and JPMorgan through a secondary transaction.
This will bring its total fundraising this quarter to US$270 million and the startup will also gain an edge with Eldrige and JPMorgan as their backers.
Eldrige is a private equity firm that has strong networks, having investments in multiple sectors including real estate, entertainment, insurance, and most notably in the Los Angeles Dodgers. In the fintech sector, the VC firm has made investments in startups including PayActiv, Truebill, Stash, and crypto wallet Blockchain.com.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan will help to promote PPRO’s services to the merchants that sign up with the bank, especially in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.
PPRO currently has offices in Singapore and China, but with the funding, the company plans to expand its operations in the Asia Pacific, starting with Japan and India as both are big markets and countries where internal companies will need help navigating.
PPRO’s chief executive officer Simon Black when asked by DealStreetAsia did not reveal what is the share of the Asia Pacific revenue of its entire business.
Instead, he commented that PPRO will likely hire around 100 in the region in the next two years to fill the positions in product management, engineering, and technical operations. In total, the company currently has 350 employees globally.
Previously, the platform has raised US$180 million in January from investors including Sprints Capital Eurazeo Growth, and Wellington Management, which has bolstered its position as the latest fintech-as-a-service startup to unicorn status.
In the latest round, JPMorgan and Eldrige have acquired shares from existing shareholders.
“Alternative payments adoption is increasing rapidly across the globe. We are proud to become a strategic investor in PPRO as they work on their next phase of growth,” said Sanjay Saraf, JPMorgan’s integrated payments group’s global head.
PPRO’s core product is a set of APIs that supports cross-border payment processing and currency conversions. Online merchants and e-commerce companies can integrate it into their check-outs to accept payments in whatever local methods and currencies consumers prefer.
This helps companies remove the messy and complex integration themselves and directly facilitate transactions that allow consumers to pay in their preferred method.
The service would be helpful to let’s say UK-based businesses which may only be familiar with payments through credit cards or their local apps to enter a different market that accepts a separate set of payments.
For its business model, the startup makes money by both taking a cut of each transaction and charging a subscription fee for users.
To date, the startup claims to have processed more than US$11 billion for its customers in 2020, which includes companies such as Mollie, Paypal, and Worldpay.
This latest round of financing points out how active e-commerce has become, a trend fueled not in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also through how global financial services companies are looking for ways to remain relevant in every market, tapping into more innovations to help consumers make payments.
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