Colombian Payment Service Provider Bold Raises $50 Million to Expand Products for SMBs

Colombian FinTech Bold raised $50 million to expand its payments terminal offering.

The company announced the General Atlantic-led Series C round Wednesday (Feb. 14), saying it would use the capital to deepen its position within Colombia’s merchant acquirer space.

“Our work continues to empower small businesses by breaking payment barriers in Colombia,” Bold Co-founder and CEO José Vélez said in a news release. “Now, thousands of merchants have access to digital financial services and can focus on the growth and success of their businesses.”

Vélez added that the company will be adding more product offerings following its recent regulatory approval as a financial institution in Colombia.

Founded in 2019, Bold works with small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), offering payment terminals that let businesses accept card-present and card-not-present payments. It also supports other local payment methods.

Bold has scaled from 380 to more than 800 employees since its $55 million Series B round in 2022 and serves 150,000 monthly active merchants, according to the release.

“In Colombia, where cash still represents more than 80% of transaction volume, versus 35% in Brazil and 30% in the United States, Bold is laying critical groundwork for small businesses to begin expanding their customer bases and entering the next generation of payments,” the company said at the time of its 2022 fundraise.

PYMNTS looked at Colombia’s place in the real-time payments space in a report earlier this year. The country’s central bank, Banco de la República, debuted a regulatory foundation for its first Single Payment Interface, allowing payment companies to interface with each other rather than use proprietary protocols.

“This step is the first toward a nationwide real-time ecosystem, which will likely follow in the footsteps of Brazil’s highly successful Pix network,” the report said.

Elsewhere in the FinTech funding space, digital banking business Finom raised $53.6 million this week to expand its solution in the European Union.

“This new funding will drive Finom’s continued growth to reach and empower millions of European [SMBs],” Co-founder Kos Stiskin said on LinkedIn. “We’re also enhancing the Finom web and mobile experiences to be faster and more powerful.”