Investing in Finix, a company modernizing payment processing for merchants, SaaS providers, digital marketplaces and more

The payment processing ecosystem is massive, complex and dominated by incumbents.

In the U.S. alone, merchant acquirers process approximately $12 trillion in payments volume per year. This is no small feat, as facilitating even a single transaction requires several layers of financial services providers to interact seamlessly with each other — often resulting in multiple fees being charged along the way (e.g., interchange fees, processing fees, transaction fees and network assessment fees). Many of these fees flow to incumbent acquirers such as Fiserv and WorldPay, which continue to be among the largest providers in the payment processing ecosystem. While several innovative competitors have emerged and scaled over the years including Stripe, Adyen, Braintree/PayPal, Block/Square and Checkout.com, they still collectively represent under 10% of global payment volumes, according to industry estimates.

That leaves significant room for next-gen payment processors to compete in the market — room that our new portfolio company Finix is quickly filling. Founded in 2016 as an enabler of payment facilitators (payfacs), Finix has spent the last few years building out a full-stack payment processing solution that businesses across the U.S. and Canada can use to accept payments online and in-store. Offering no-code, low-code and API-driven solutions tailored to the unique needs of companies in industries like retail and e-commerce, financial services, healthcare, entertainment and more, Finix helps companies of all sizes deliver a world-class payments experience.

Finix’s universal payments API enables payments from a wide range of payment methods including credit and debit cards, ACH transfers and digital wallets. Its platform manages transaction authorization, settlement and dispute management — including the complex regulatory requirements associated with payment processing — and holds the highest level of security certification in the payments industry. The company also offers real-time analytics and reporting, enabling its customers to track key metrics, optimize performance and make data-driven business decisions.

Thus far, Finix has found especially strong product-market fit serving two key segments:

1. Digital marketplaces and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers (e.g., AgVend and Beyond)
2. Merchants or other businesses that lack in-house developers (e.g., retail establishments such as restaurants).

This is largely thanks to Finix’s robust product suite, which offers companies in these segments the features they most demand from a payment processing solution. For digital marketplaces and SaaS providers, those include: efficient sub-merchant onboarding processes; easy-to-enable recurring payments, subscription plans and embedded payments; low infrastructure costs; transparent and detailed fees per sub-merchant; many-to-many transactions; and omni-channel support. For the 22 million businesses in the U.S. and Canada with limited internal developer resources, Finix delivers a brandable, highly configurable no-code/low-code solution that is easy to integrate and use, with the opportunity to add more sophisticated offerings on top should the business need them. As such, Finix is designed to scale with its customers — positioning itself well to expand alongside the burgeoning segments it serves.

For all these reasons and more, we are delighted to share our investment in Finix’s Series C funding round. We are joined by lead investors Acrew Capital, Leap and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as Tribeca Venture Partners, Homebrew, Insight Partners, Inspired Capital, Cap Table Coalition and others.

Our congratulations to Finix co-founder/CEO Richie Serna and the rest of the Finix team. We look forward to working with you for years to come.