YapStone Raises $71M To Fund Expansion, M&A

YapStone, the online and mobile payment company, has raised $71 million in venture capital funding.

According to news from Financial Technology Partners, which advised YapStone on the Series C round of funding, Premji Invest led the round. Other participants included Mastercard and previous investors Accel and Meritech Capital Partners, a press release stated.

YapStone powers electronic payments for sharing economy marketplaces such as HomeAway and VRBO, as well as thousands of apartment and vacation rental companies, homeowners’ associations, self-storage companies and other markets. The company processes more than $18 billion in payments each year. The latest round of funding will grant the company’s management team more flexibility in its efforts to expand globally and engage in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). To date, YapStone has raised more than $180 million from investors that include Accel, Meritech Capital Partners and Bregal Sagemount.

In an interview with PYMNTs Karen Webster in May 2017, YapStone Chief Executive and Chairman Tom Villante said the company is still focusing on the apartment rental business and is doubling down its efforts there.

“We’re going at it more from a marketplace perspective than from the hand-to-hand combat from the early days, because it’s a highly fragmented market,” said Villante at the time. “Seventy percent of the market are smaller landlords with less than 500 units, and 50 percent of people live in buildings of four units or less. Getting to those renters and landlords is really through some of these large apartment listing marketplaces.”

Villante noted in the interview that the vacation rental market is filled with more credit risk than in property management companies. “We now have 70 people in risk and the data scientists that we have — and take on 100 percent of the risk on that marketplace — which is why we are also selective and enter markets we know well.”