- Finix — a company that makes it easier for businesses to manage the payments experience — announced it raised $17.5 million
Payments infrastructure company Finix recently announced it raised $17.5 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Insight Venture Partners, Aspect Ventures and Visa also participated in this round. And they were joined by existing investors Homebrew, Precursor Ventures, and Act One Ventures.
Including this round, Finix has raised more than $20 million in total funding. And the company will accelerate the company’s product development and sales efforts worldwide. In conjunction with the funding round, Bain Capital Ventures partner Matt Harris is joining the Finix board of directors.
For businesses, it can be complicated to bring payments in-house and it could take multiple years and cost millions of dollars on average. And payments have been emerging as a new strategic imperative for businesses looking to generate more revenue and deliver better customer experiences.
The alternative to building your own payments stack until now has been to outsource payments to a third-party payment facilitator. However, this approach does not scale well for businesses processing more than $50-100 million in annual transaction volume as it forces them to relinquish control over user experience and it takes considerable revenue potential off the table. Since Finix is a payments infrastructure platform, it gives businesses a better way to own, manage, and monetize the whole payments experience without the headaches or expenses associated with building an in-house system from scratch.
“Payments technology has reached an exciting tipping point,” said Finix CEO and co-founder Richie Serna. “What companies like Lyft, Airbnb and MindBody all have in common beyond their high valuations is payments: they have each built their own payments stack. Our mission is to provide the foundation for the next generation of multi-billion dollar payments businesses by empowering them to become payment facilitators in months, not years.”
Using Finix, businesses are able to become a payment facilitator in as little as two months and at a fraction of the $3 million to $5 million average cost of building a system in-house. And since Finix is available on a fixed pricing model, customers don’t have to forfeit any basis points. Plus Finix gives payments teams the flexibility to configure the perfect payments stack for their unique business needs with easy-to-use APIs and dashboards.
“Payments is a $2 trillion industry that remains stubbornly fragmented across consumers, merchants, and processors,” added Bain Capital Ventures managing director Matt Harris. “This is starting to change, as more and more traditional software companies are bringing payments in house. The billion-dollar payments company of the future won’t look like Stripe or Square. It will be a vertically-focused software company with payments integrated deeply into its core. Finix has built a compelling solution that makes this process easier and more cost-effective than any other option on the market.”
With Finix, growing businesses can also deliver a seamless payments experience to customers and conveniently manage their entire provider ecosystem through a single platform of record. The Finix platform is SOC I and SOC II, PCI-Level 1 and GDPR compliant.
“As we move into the next wave of payments innovation, we’re excited to continue our collaboration with Finix to enable seamless, real-time disbursements,” explained Visa VP and head of the Visa Direct Global Platform Vikram Modi. “Through this collaboration, we continue to provide simpler and faster payout solutions that can be made available for consumers and small businesses around the world.”
Serna founded Finix with co-founder Sean Donovan in 2015. Serna previously worked as an intern at JPMorgan, a consultant at Booz & Company, and co-campaign manager of Emanuel Pleitez for Los Angeles Mayor. And Donovan was the COO of North America at Klarna and was a founding team member of Beanstalk Payment Technologies. Some of Finix’s customers include Clubessential and Lightspeed POS Inc.
