FinTech Startup PromisePay Raises $10M

One emerging player in the Australian FinTech market has just secured another round of capital.

PromisePay, a fully managed payments platform for online marketplaces, has raised $10 million in order to fuel its continued growth. While the company raised $2 million about a year ago, this recent fundraising round gained some major attention. According to TechCrunch, this round had participation from Australian VC funds Rampersand and Reinventure, along with existing investors Cultivation Capital, along with Mark Harbottle, cofounder of logo marketplace 99Designs.

PromisePay is a FinTech startup that was founded in 2014 with the mission of delivering new digital commerce platforms to online marketplaces — a specific area of commerce that has higher risk than traditional online commerce. In an interview with TechCrunch, PromisePay Cofounder and CEO Simon Lee said the company’s niche is, beyond acting as a payment platform, to manage fraud from both ends of the deal (buyer and seller). What this does, he said, is enable business to focus on their own business and not have to worry about the payments side of the equation.

“There are thousands of platforms looking to create fast, simple and trusted payments between buyers and sellers that don’t know each other. It’s a great deal more complex than just a payment; it’s an entire experience, and our technology delivers that experience seamlessly for platforms all over the world and with full protection to all parties,” Lee said in a statement.

“There’s a fundamental shift in payments. Everything is moving online. Uber is a good example of that. These types of platforms are a little more complicated than just taking a credit card for payment,” added Cofounder and Chief Experience Officer Darren McMurtrie.

PromisePay’s team noted that it has seen revenues grow 25 percent every month during the past year but hasn’t released sales data. It’s also been hiring a lot of new team members and now has a team of 75 across Australia, the U.S. and Philippines. That figure is expected to rise to 140 next year. The company is also in the process of determining if it should build out its business in more countries.

“The great thing about Australian startups is that we bootstrap,” Lee said in the interview. “U.S. companies can burn through $40 million in two years, but we can make $10 million last four years.”