Partner Article

Currencycloud closes £20m Series D with backing from Google

London-headquartered payments platform, Currencycloud, has raised £20m in its Series D funding round with Google’s GV investment arm backing the firm for the first time.

Total funding in the FinTech business now stands at £44m with existing investors Notion Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Rakuten FinTech Fund and Anthemis also getting involved again in this latest round.

Working with the likes of Klarna, Travelex, Revolut and Azimo, Currencycloud’s API underpins the payment platforms and cross-border payments of a raft of challenger banks, digital payment firms and other FinTech business.

It now boasts over 200 clients across 35 countries and claims that its service supports millions of end-users across various providers and companies.

Mike Laven, Chief Executive Officer explained that Currencycloud’s offering is part of a wider trend towards new tech businesses combining off-the-shelf services to create new services.

He said: “In recent years we have seen the rise of the building block economy. Companies can combine services such as AWS, Google Maps, Stripe and Twilio to build innovative new businesses fast and without the overhead of expensive proprietary systems.

“Currencycloud provides a set of multi-currency payment and conversion tools that are helping hundreds of companies globalize fast. We are seeing massive and increasing demand for these services, with volumes growing over 150% last year.”

Of course, we saw the downside to this approach earlier this week, when London challenger bank Monzo had its payment services taken offline when the Israeli firm, GPS, which handles its card processing suffered prolonged outages over the weekend.

With high-profile backers increasing their investment in the company, and the eye-catching seal of approval from Google themselves, Currencycloud are presumably suitably equipped to avoid such headline grabbing outages.

Following GV’s investment, General Partner Tom Hulme commented: “We believe in empowering developers by making it easier for them to add scalable services to their products, ideally with simple APIs. Currencycloud is the leader in providing cross-border payment services in this manner, a real need as companies globalize.”

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