Wirecard, the German fintech that generated hundreds of millions of dollars only collapsed in 2020 in a sea of scandals and insolvency, is still in the headlines today as lawsuits continue against different entities and people who have been associated with the business. Meanwhile, a Dublin-based startup called Nomupay that was formed in 2023 from several Wirecard regional payment licenses, has been on a quiet growth trajectory, solving payment problems in areas that big companies like Adyen and Stripe have not yet addressed. Focusing primarily on cross-border payments for merchants in Asia and the Middle East, Nomupay has now raised $37 million in funding to expand its business. The Series B funding – from Endeit Capital, Uneti Ventures and previous backers – comes on the heels of Nomupay’s revenue which has grown 100% annually for the last two years, and projections that will turn annual profits in ARR around $20 million. We understand that Nomupay’s valuation has also increased to about $200 million. The company has now raised a total of $90 million, including an investment of $53.6 million in 2023, from investors that include Finch Capital, the VC firm that bought the Wirecard license and created Nomupay to turn the license into a business. Nomupay’s unique selling point is building a cross-border payment rail and enabling payments for users between countries that Peter Burridge, founder and CEO of Nomupay, claims bigger players like Stripe and Adyen are ignoring because they are too complicated or too small. Nomupay strikes when the iron is hot: Not only businesses in the target area are underserved, but thanks to the boom of e-commerce, they demand more. Burridge refers to the larger payment providers as “monos” – monoliths that require buying into a wider suite of services that customers using Nomupay typically don’t need, but don’t offer the convenience they do. The advantage of Nomupay is that the payment landscape is always fragmented, even in one country, and compounding that between several geographies becomes even harder to parse. “There are over 5,000 ISOs for Visa alone,” he said. “They all use some kind of gateway or point of sale technology to access card schemes and payment methods. I think we can allow others to compete with this bigger business. ISO is an Independent Sales Organization, a merchant service company registered with a card brand, which partners with payment processors, allowing them to sell and service merchant accounts. In a given country, Malaysia only has about 20 different payment methods and potentially 20 different wallets to support at the payment point; the number gets more complicated when you add in the country “We are solving problems that have not been solved before,” said Burridge. He did not say how many customers have used the network one day, but they have opened payments for stores in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand a new investment objective is to continue Nomupay’s M&A strategy. The company said it already has operations in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Thailand, and is currently in talks with fintechs in Singapore, mainly to secure licenses for the country. The company’s other targets for expansion include Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam. Outside of Asia, Nomupay also has operations in Ireland (Dublin), England (London and Manchester, where it acquired a startup called Total Processing), Estonia (Vilnius), Turkey (Istanbul), Dubai and New Zealand. One vote of confidence about the latest investor: Burridge mentioned that Uneti, which was founded by Adyen’s earliest employees, only became an investor after Endeit Capital in the Netherlands brought Uneti on board as an adviser to conduct due diligence. “They were so happy they wanted to invest themselves,” he said proudly. “For us, this is a validation of the platform.”
