Berlin’s Open Banking PayTech Ivy, renowned for its innovative API, has announced its successful raise of $20 million in Series A funding at a $80-$90 million valuation. The funding was helmed by Peter Thiel‘s Valar Ventures round on LinkedIn. This new funding round came just five weeks after Ivy closed its seed financing round of $7.7 million, which saw investments from venture firm Creandum and prominent investors, including N26‘s founder, Maximilian Tayenthal.
Ivy And The Open Banking Vision
Ivy‘s CEO, Ferdinand Dabitz, co-founder alongside Peter Mosebjane Lieck (CRO), Joshua Becker (CPO), and Simon Wimmer (CTO), expressed the brisk pace between the seed round’s conclusion and the Series A initiation. Ivy‘s primary focus orbits around open banking-based payments, which, while gaining momentum in distinct markets (with over 400 tech providers in Europe alone), is predominantly domestic and single-currency bound.
With a vision to proliferate its “network of networks” for worldwide open banking payments, Ivy plans to channel these funds to widen its banking collaborations geographically and amplify its merchant customer base in those regions. Key offerings from Ivy comprise merchant tools for assimilating open banking payment alternatives at checkout, “smart routing” capabilities, risk management, instantaneous payouts, and payment links.
The Open Banking Business Model
On the operational front, Ivy boasts integrations with roughly 5,000 banks spanning 50 regions, encompassing an impressive 500 million bank accounts. Geographical outreach includes EMEA, Southeast Asia, and the U.S., with Latin America in the pipeline. Ivy‘s clientele comprises digital merchants across marketplaces, e-commerce, travel, and fintech, with Apple reseller Mactrade among its prominent customers.
Ivy‘s revenue model doesn’t count banks as customers. Instead, merchants integrating Ivy’s API bear that title, contributing fees to Ivy based on transaction volumes. The Ivy team believes that crafting more than a mere functional API, intertwined with other fiscal tools, will propel their business forward. The lynchpin for investor interest is the overarching potential to revolutionize the current financial paradigm.
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