Xendit raises $150 million in Series C as its valuation crosses a billion
Xendit, a payments infrastructure platform that seeks to focus on other financial services as well, has announced that it has raised $150 million in its Series C round of funding that was led by Tiger Global Management.
This helps it to cross a valuation of $1 billion and brings the total amount raised so far to $238 million after it had raised $64.6 million in its Series B which was led by Accel. The company is expected to use these new funds for expansion into other countries and is also likely to use this chest for acquisitions in the future. Over the years, it has grown to lead the payments space in Indonesia which was further helped by the investment into the legacy payments platform called DragonPay.
The company currently focuses on SMEs who have been signing up with the platform over the last few months. It had initially focused on companies in the travel industry but when the pandemic came in, it was hit hard and since then it has diversified into other industries which have helped it to achieve 200% growth in payments volume year on year.
COO Tessa Wijaya said, “One big segment are SMEs. By August, there were 10,000 SME sign-ups on our platform alone. The other one is expanding out to fintech companies — for example, there’s been a big uptick in Indonesia, especially accounting platforms. We’ve also expanded to traditional enterprises, like telecom companies, who focused on having retail outlets in shopping malls. Suddenly the malls are closed, so we’ve been able to sign some of the bigger retail outlet groups in the market as well.”
The investments do not come as a surprise as the payments space has grown tremendously over the last year and investors have been loosening their purse strings to fund payment processing companies that have a proven business model and userbase. By focussing their services on businesses and giving them a variety of online and offline options to help them receive payments from their users, Xendit has been able to sign up some major players in a variety of industries which has helped to fuel its growth.
The company next plans to expand into countries like Malaysia and Vietnam and each of these markets are likely to present its unique challenges and with competition in the payments space increase, the success of the company and its growth would depend on how it manages to solve the payments issues in each of the new markets that it plans to enter.
