UK Payments FinTech SumUp Raises $307 Million

Payments FinTech SumUp has raised $307 million to expand its footprint and develop new services.

The British company, whose products include point-of-sale card readers, announced the funding Monday (Dec. 11), noting that it follows a year in which it has operated on a positive EBITDA basis while maintaining more than 30% top-line growth.

“This funding gives us additional firepower to pursue growth opportunities and accelerate products that empower small businesses,” Hermione McKee, the company’s chief financial officer, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

The company’s products and services also include a cash advance offering through a partnership with VPC in the U.K., as well as Tap to Pay on iPhone for customers in the U.K., France and the Netherlands.

SumUp also raised a $100 million credit facility in August of this year. The company was valued at $8.5 billion following another round in 2022.

“With this extension of the previous funding, SumUp continues to build further on the valuation achieved in summer 2022, reflecting the ongoing growth achieved across all our markets in the last year,” a spokesperson told PYMNTS Monday.

The company’s new round is happening at the end of a year in which European startups — and tech startups in general — struggled to find funding, according to the latest edition of the State of European Tech report by British venture capital firm Atomico.

That report, issued last month, forecast that funds raised by Europe’s tech startups will come to around $45 billion for the year, compared to $82 billion in 2022.

“The decline is not surprising given the dual effect of many later-stage companies delaying fundraising, as well as materially slower deployment pacing by investors, which have both served to drive the large decline in the prevalence of outsized, late-stage investment rounds — the biggest factor in the lower amounts of capital invested,” the report said.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS’ Karen Webster spoke with SumUp co-founder Marc-Alexander Christ earlier this year about the success the firm has found in providing services to the micro-and-nano merchant segment, which in many cases are run by a sole proprietor.

SumUp, Christ said, has been adding point-of-sale hardware and issuing to go with its core card reading business to provide customers with a broader spectrum of services.

“Merchants are realizing that there is much more technology out there that they can embrace to help them run their businesses,” he told Webster.