B2B Payment Platform Nium Valued Above $1B In $200M Funding 

Nium, a global payments processor headquartered in Singapore, has raised a $200 million Series D round led by Riverwood Capital that values the company at more than $1 billion.

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Nium has now raised a total of $300 million to date.

Existing investors Temasek, Visa, Vertex Ventures, Atinum Capital, Beacon Venture Capital and Rocket Capital Investment all participated in the round. Angel investors include DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram;, Vicky Bindra, chief product officer at FIS; and Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi.

We spoke with Nium’s San Francisco-based Chief Revenue Officer Frederick Crosby, who joined the company in 2020. Crosby described the company as “the global payments infrastructure provided for one API solution.”

“All businesses now think globally. All customer bases are global, supply chains are global.  Everyone needs to access more things and more places, so our ability to work across silos and across countries and payments puts us into a special class,” he said, adding that Nium has created a “robust set of APIs so people can use embedded financial services.”

Nium started in Asia, which forced it to think through how to “make these payments seamless between not only different countries, with different laws and rules, but a lot of regulated currency countries,” he said.

“We started Nium with the humble goal of taking out regional complexity in cross-border payments,” said Prajit Nanu, Nium’s co-founder and CEO in the company’s funding announcement. “Today, our sights are set higher. We believe we can be a global catalyst to increase global commerce, removing some of the payments friction which has traditionally held businesses back.”

Nium has 11 bank licenses in seven countries across Asia Pacific, as well as licenses in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Europe. It can process payments to more than 100 countries, with 61 of them in real-time. It is now in the process of expanding from Asia and Europe to the U.S., and is next setting its sights on Latin America.

“We’re the ones who built this bridge to the infrastructure, not relying on other people’s components to do that,” said Crosby.

The company claims $8 billion in payments processed annually, and its revenue has grown 280 percent year over year. Nium has five core customer segments: banking, fintech companies, distributed workforces around the gig economy and supply chain contractors, travel, and finally corporate customers.

Its income includes money made through interchange, as well as program management and setup fees. And it also handles card issuance, having issued 30 million virtual cards to date.

Some key customers are telecommunications company Singtel in Singapore, one of its first; Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, with fleets around the world, to facilitate payments to staff; and foreign exchange services Travelex to build out a platform to use travel cards and mobile apps to exchange currencies in the countries they travel to.

Nium also is on an acquisitive spree, having acquired B2B travel payments service Ixaris based in London, and digital payment processor Wirecard Forex India, a travel-related foreign exchange service, “which opened up a whole new different type of market for us inside India with new licenses,” Crosby said.

“We will be very actively acquiring things that we think helps complete a more full solution for global payments around the world,” he said.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias