The London-based international mobile point-of-sale company SumUp that has its R&D team located in Sofia has just raised €750M from its previous investors Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Credit, which were joined by the new investors Crestline, Temasek, and some of Oaktree Capital Management’s funds. The round will be used to accelerate the growth, expand its current international team of over two thousand employees and repay its existing debts as well as to allow SumUp to acquire new clients organically and through M&As. The payments provider also plans to invest in product development and expand its services in Asia, which will be the fourth continent where SumUp is operational. The investment, which is in the form of debt instead of equity, will not change the current valuation of the startup, but still, it marks one of the biggest investments in European privately-backed tech startups.
The Bulgarian R&D team, managed by the technical engineer Julian Ivanov, consists of around 300 people and is responsible for the development of the features of SumUp’s card processing device as well as for taking care of the financial and anti-fraud operations.
Making mPOS the preferred choice for merchants
SumUp currently enables over two million merchants and SMEs to accept card payments from anywhere in the world by providing them with easy-to-use card terminal devices, which can connect to any mobile device via Bluetooth as well as a payments app and a platform. The POS startup provides solutions for the entire payment process and is the first completely-certified end-to-end payment system in the world that is compatible with Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV). For its almost 10 years on the market, the startup has offices in 12 countries and serves merchants from 33 countries across Europe, North and South America. Since last year, SumUp has focused on introducing solutions to address the problems that the pandemic and the restrictions brought to SMEs such as the SumUp Online Store as well as the launch of payment links and invoicing options as the gift cards partnership with Google, Facebook, and Instagram.
What stays behind SumUp’s rapid growth?
According to the co-founder Marc Alexander Christ, to a large extent, they owe their success to the merchant acquisitions and this enables them to expand both their portfolio and customer base. A fresh example of this is SumUp’s recent market entry in the gastronomy vertical through the acquisition of the POS software providers Goodtill and Tiller, as well as the acquisition of the Lithuanian fintech startup Paysolut, which improved its banking offerings for merchants.
Beyond having a strategic and accurate market expansion plan, at the core of SumUp’s strategy is the goal of introducing products that fit into tangible market demand and solve the problems of current and potential merchants.
