EMQ Closes Funding Round With $20M For Cross-Border Tech

Asia-based financial settlements network EMQ, which works in cross-border payments, has announced the close of a $20 million Series B funding round led by WI Harper Group, according to a press release.

In addition, new and existing participating investors included Abu Dhabi Capital, AppWorks, DG Ventures, Hard Yaka, Intudo Ventures, January Capital, Quest Venture Partners, SparkLabs Taipei, Vectr Fintech Partners, and VS Partners, the release stated.

The investment will go toward more international growth, the company said in the release, and product development and licensing activity across Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Max Liu, co-founder and CEO of EMQ, said he wants to continue the company’s path toward becoming one in which businesses could “send money anywhere in the world and to any end point with a simple one-stop integration,” according to the release.

He said the company wants to “deliver a network infrastructure that complies with regulatory requirements and streamlines the complexities in processing real-time international payments across the whole payment ecosystem” and help to “make infrastructure a competitive advantage for next-generation enterprises.”

Edward Liu, a partner at WI Harper Group, said the modern digital world would require more innovative payment practices as time goes on.

“As digital transformation intensifies globally, enterprises today are increasingly international in scale, and they will require a network infrastructure like EMQ with greater speed, more certainty, increased flexibility and transparency to expand their business in Asia and beyond,” he said, according to the release.

EMQ promises to eliminate “unnecessary intermediaries” between end points for payments and help with seamless, easy cross-border settlements, the release stated.

The company recently unveiled a new program to help eliminate unnecessary wait times and cumbersome, confusing regulations, PYMNTS reported. The solution connects bank application programming interfaces (APIs) with payment service providers. The company targeted countries with particularly high cross-border transaction volumes in rolling out the tool.