Highnote Raises $90 Million to Grow Unified Payments Platform

Highnote has raised $90 million in a Series B funding round to continue to grow its unified payments platform.

The company also expanded into U.S. merchant acquiring with the launch of its acquiring solution, it said a Tuesday (Jan. 21) press release.

“The acquiring landscape has evolved over time and represents an opportunity for next generation customers to accelerate growth through embedded acquiring in addition to embedded issuing,” Highnote CEO John MacIlwaine said in the release.

With the addition of the acquiring solution, the company’s unified payments platform now supports full pay-in and pay-out functionality on the same platform as issuing, with a unified, core general ledger, according to the release.

This combination allows enterprise customers and B2B platforms to manage all internal, vendor and customer-facing financial transaction activity on one platform, per the release.

With the new funding and the completion of its platform, Highnote now aims to serve vertical solution providers, enterprise brands, marketplaces, financial institutions and other “demanding and innovative use cases in embedded finance,” the release said.

“Highnote’s transformational platform and impressive growth trajectory motivated us to lead this round,” Robin Murray, partner at Adams Street Partners, said in the release. “We are excited to support the company’s vision to lead innovation in embedded finance.”

Highnote raised a combined $54 million from a Seed and Series A round announced in September 2021.

The company was then one year old and said it would use the funding to expand its product and engineering teams and broaden its platform.

The firm was founded by MacIlwaine, former general manager at Braintree, and CTO Kin Kee, former director of architecture at Braintree, to provide embedded payment experiences that allowed companies to launch a card within weeks instead of months.

Simplifying the connection to banking services and embedded payments is critical, MacIlwaine told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in October 2021.

“I’ve been shocked at the amount of innovation occurring on the ‘front end’ of FinTech” MacIlwaine said in that interview. “There are digital banks and banking as a service, but ultimately, there’s so much legacy infrastructure that’s supporting it all.”

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