- Card issuing platform Marqeta announced it raised $150 million at a valuation of $4.3 billion
Card issuing platform Marqeta announced it raised $150 million at a valuation of $4.3 billion. This round of funding comes about a year after Marqeta raised $260 million in equity financing led by Coatue and included participation from Vitruvian Partners and several others. Plus Marqeta is also backed by Visa, Goldman Sachs, 83North, Granite Ventures, and ICONIQ Capital.
“Marqeta continues to move forward from strength to strength in 2020 as our global modern card issuing platform provides essential infrastructure and support to our customers across industries and oceans,” said Marqeta founder and CEO Jason Gardner. “We’re building a single global platform to define and power the future of money for the world’s leading innovators. This new capital helps us accelerate our mission to empower builders to bring the most innovative products to market, wherever they are in the world.”
The global modern card issuing market is known for being a multi-trillion dollar industry and it is growing steadily. Digital banks, tech companies, and new commerce players have been relying on physical, virtual, and tokenized card products for a wide range of use cases. And with innovations like Just-in-Time Funding and Instant Issuance, Marqeta’s platform has helped to re-architect what is possible for enterprises issuing cards at scale.
“83North has a decade long history with Marqeta, and we’ve had the pleasure of watching the company target and disrupt a massive global card issuing market that has been starved of innovation for years. Jason and the team have done an exceptional job scaling their business and platform in the U.S. and expanding its international footprint across Europe and Asia-Pacific. The company has grown into a true force,” added Arnon Dinur, Partner at 83North — which is one of Marqeta’s early backers.
Launched in 2010, Marqeta is the first global modern card issuing platform and it supports some of the fastest-growing innovators at scale, including Square, Uber, Affirm, Instacart, and DoorDash by providing the most advanced infrastructure and tools for building highly configurable payment solutions.
With its open API, the Marqeta platform is designed for businesses that want a simple way of managing payment programs so that they can create world-class experiences and power new modes of commerce. Currently, it operates in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia and is certified to process payments in 10 countries in APAC. By the end of 2019, over 140 million cards had been issued through the Marqeta platform.
“The transformative possibilities of modern card issuing are more commonplace than ever for the everyday consumer in 2020. Marqeta has a deep commitment to powering the innovators driving these shifts in the market and is well-positioned to support the current surge in demand for digital payments following COVID-19 lockdowns,” Gardner added. “We see Marqeta becoming an indispensable part of the global payments infrastructure, and we’re in a solid position to realize that vision for our company.”
