- Finix is a startup that works with merchants so they can accept and manage payments.
- On Thursday, it raised a $75 million Series C that included Lightspeed Ventures and Acrew Capital.
- Here is the pitch deck Finix used to raise its Series C.
Some of the industry’s biggest fintech investors just backed an up-and-coming payments startup challenging Stripe and Square.
Finix, founded in 2016, lets other businesses accept, disburse, and manage payments. The San Francisco-based startup raised $75 million in a Series C funding round, the company announced Thursday. The round included Acrew Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, which have invested in some of the biggest fintechs, like Chime and Coinbase, and Affirm, respectively.
Finix, which has raised $208 million to date, was named one of Business Insider’s most promising fintechs of 2024. Its main selling point is helping companies, with little-to-no technical resources, facilitate payments — whether that’s a coffee shop accepting a payment from a customer, an artist selling their painting on a digital marketplace like Etsy, or an airline refunding a customer for lost luggage.
Historically, if a business wanted to handle different kinds of payments, it’d need to use different providers and manage the multiple integrations that would come with that, according to Finix CEO and cofounder, Richie Serna. Finix is trying to change that by facilitating in-store and online payments, accepting payments and disbursing payouts, handling payments between different countries, and serving subscription software companies that need to enable payments between multiple merchants and multiple customers, like Airbnb or Uber.
Finix processes billions of dollars every month for tens of thousands of merchants, Serna said. In the last year, the startup quadrupled its revenue, he added. He declined to disclose Finix’s valuation.
Finix leans into low code, no code tools
Finix mostly targets companies that lack the software-developer resources to set up and customize their payments offerings. At the heart of its value proposition is the idea of “low code, no code,” or tools that help non-programmers build apps and automate simple tasks without needing to know how to code.
“If Adyen’s for the enterprise, Square’s for the micro-merchant, Stripe is for the developer-centric startup, Finix is for the 22 million businesses that don’t have developers or don’t have enough developers,” Serna told Business Insider.
Carving out that slice of market share hasn’t stopped Finix from competing with those larger payments players, though. Sales call data with prospective customers show that Finix is up against Stripe the majority of the time, Serna said.
“We win 60% of the deals that we see,” he said, referring to deals in Finix’s pipeline.
Serna previously was an engineer at Balanced, a now-defunct payments company that, when forced to shutter its operations in 2015, struck a deal with its longtime rival, Stripe, to transition existing customers.
‘Six to 10 companies that are smashed together’
One of the reasons Finix comes up against Stripe and other payment processors could be because the company is trying to offer a one-stop shop for various payments needs.
Finix is “basically six to 10 companies that are smashed together and have to work extremely seamlessly together,” Serna said.
Under the hood, Finix underwrites all new merchants, which involves a dozen or two different compliance checks; runs a risk system that uses machine learning to determine the identity of the person paying; stores credit-card info in a compliant and secure way; and facilitates the connection between the card networks, payment rails, and accounting systems, Serna said. At the same time, Finix layers APIs, front-end dashboards for managing payments, and check-out forms that intake credit-card numbers and billing information, Serna said.
“So there’s a lot of pieces,” Serna said. “Most people only see the tip of the iceberg, everything that we do behind the scenes is below the water, and our job is to make it as simple as possible.”