London-based GoCardless has raised a $13 million funding round led by Notion Capital. Existing investors Balderton Capital, Accel Partners, and Passion Capital also participated in this round.
The Fintech startup, which was able to achieve strong demand from big brands such as Thomas Cook and the Financial Times, will use the fresh capital to build out its payment network across the world.
Over 16,000 merchants now make GoCardless the UK’s number one Direct Debit provider, processing £1 billion of payments each year. At the same time, the fastest-growing demand now comes from established enterprises in areas like travel, utilities and telecoms. Leading this trend, Thomas Cook recently revealed GoCardless as a new way for holidaymakers to pay in interest free, monthly installments.
The GoCardless platform was founded in 2011 and is now live in six markets, with Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden joining the UK, France and Germany. GoCardless has become key to offering Direct Debit payments across the Eurozone without having to tackle the huge range of payment systems, cultural differences and regulatory issues.
GoCardless co-founder Hiroki Takeuchi, sees this news as a milestone and says: “While our early years focused on helping UK SMEs get access to Direct Debit, our recent growth has been driven by increasing demand from larger corporates and new markets like France and Germany. This investment from Notion puts us in a great position to build on our traction across Europe to create an increasingly global footprint. We will use this scale to bring further benefits to our UK merchants and to continue to ramp up in continental Europe.”
Notion Capital Managing Partner, Stephen Chandler, describes their investment as part of the wider payments trend: “The reason we’ve invested is pretty straightforward: the world is moving toward subscription models and Direct Debit is the most efficient and cost effective way to process them. GoCardless brings this into the digital age, making it simple to integrate and removing the last barriers to broader adoption.”
Part of London’s thriving FinTech movement, the company has now raised a total of $25 million from world-leading Venture Capitalists including Notion Capital, Balderton Capital, Accel Partners, Passion Capital & Y Combinator.
Recent European partnerships of note include Mangopay, Habitat and Zenchef. The addition of Sweden and the Autogiro Direct Debit scheme adds another currency to their portfolio.
