GoCardless receives $75m funding for company growth

GoCardless, specialist in digital recurring/subscription payment provisions, has secured a $75 million in its latest venture funding round, backed by US technology giants Alphabet (Google) and Salesforce.

In its funding prospectus, GoCardless points towards rapid international expansion as the key objective for funding, helping the UK enterprise develop a  “global bank debit network” making it easier for businesses to accept subscription, instalment and invoice payments.

Moving forward, the London-based company declared that it would hire staff across Europe, Asia and North America, securing  its corporate target of facilitating 70% of global recurring payment transactions

“Using systems that are unfit for purpose is killing businesses. A global network for bank debit is an absolute necessity in allowing businesses to easily collect recurring payments anywhere, in any currency,” said Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO of GoCardless.

The new investment was led by Adams Street Partners, GV the capital investment arm of Alphabet and Salesforce Ventures alongside existing investors: Accel, Balderton Capital, Notion Capital and Passion Capital – taking the total amount raised to $123 million.

Takeuchi continued: “Thanks to the support of our investors, we can now open up our global network and payments platform to more businesses across the world and deliver on our mission to take the pain out of getting paid so that businesses can focus on what they do best.”

GoCardless details that around 18% of the world’s payments are recurring transactions, underlining Takeuchi’s enterprise mandate to fix a broken business model.

He said the company’s platform processes direct debit payments on behalf of businesses. These are recurring transactions are withdrawn directly from a customer’s bank account.

Beforehand, companies would be forced to use alternative procedures to set up payments in different areas of the world, or even between different banks in the same country.

GoCardless says it now processes payments for more than 40,000 merchants worldwide, handling more than $10 billion in transactions every year, for clients including Nutmeg, Sage, the UK government and The Guardian.

Tom Hulme, General Partner, GV commended GoCardless and its development since it was founded in 2011.

He said: “GoCardless has assembled a world-class team with deep financial and technical experience, and solves a real customer need to process recurring payments simply at low cost. This has driven great growth across a wide variety of customers.”

“The company’s seamless integrations with direct debit networks globally takes the pain out of getting paid for recurring revenue businesses, making GoCardless well-positioned to have a meaningful impact on the payments market.”