Finix — Recent Raise, Product Developments, and More
Early this August, Finix announced that it raised $30MM in venture capital, thanks to the growth that it has shown in the last 6 months; this brings Finix’s total raise to over $133 million. The company previously raised a $30MM extension to its $35MM Series B and then raised a $3MM SPV led by Latinx and Black investors. Existing investors include: the General Partnership (The GP), Franklin Templeton, Acrew Capital, American Express Ventures, Cap Table Coalition, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Precursor Ventures.
Chingona Ventures is proud to be an investor in Finix and is ecstatic to see them grow. Many people may know Finix for their white label API, which is used to manage payments operations for transaction processing, payouts, and merchant onboarding; recently, Finix announced that it is now a registered payment facilitator (payfac) and will have much more capabilities. Software platforms of all sizes (i.e., from $0 to $1B+ in total payments volume) that want to integrate payments quickly can easily use Finix to do so. Congratulations to Richie Serna, Sean Donovan, and the Finix team for closing their additional $30MM round!
What is a PayFac (Payment Facilitator)?
Let’s say a company wants to be able to set up a way to process credit card payments and also accept payments in person from their customers. To do this on their own means opening up a merchant account, understanding the underwriting process, fraud protection, chargeback management, and other compliances. Instead of the buisness doing it on their own and owning the process, many businesses end up working through a PayFac or payment facilitator. The most popular ones include Stripe, Square, and PayPal.
Think of payment facilitators as the ultimate handler, they effectively accept electronic payments on behalf of customers, handle most of the payments process, and provide added value, such as chargeback and fraud protection.
In summary, many smaller platforms, as well as companies that are new to payments, can benefit from looking into a PayFac that can manage the underwriting, fraud prevention, real time approvals and have an easy fee structure.
With Finix becoming their own PayFac, which is no easy feat, this opens up more opportunities not only for Finix, but for their thousands of customers. Read more about PayFac’s here on Finix’s blog for a deeper, technical understanding.
(Sources: Finix, Routable, Tipalti, CCBill)
Paving the Way for Fintech in the Payments Space
Chingona Ventures is excited to be an investor and supporter of Finix, especially given our strong alignment with investing in the fintech of the future. It’s reported that the Global Fintech-as-a-Service Market size is expected to reach $681.6 billion by 2028 and technology in the fintech payment space will only continue to become more innovative. Finix has seen great growth over the past few years as well; they have processed over a billion dollars of total payments each year and doubled their processing volume from 2019 from 2020. Finix has supported over 12k small active businesses each month and they will continue to expand their customer base as they now 1) are a PayFac 2) accept in person-payments 3) manage payment operations 4) help increase revenue and lower costs for customers.
Based on quotes from their customers, Finix is a no-brainer for those that want great service and flexibility with a PayFac.
- “After having poor experiences with Stripe and CardConnect, we wanted to own more of the customer experience. Long term, we are sold on the ability to easily transition to becoming a PayFac.”
- “The personalized service and attention to my needs by all the people I’ve interacted with at Finix have been superb. I’ve felt deeply valued since my first engagement with Finix.”
- “We’ve been using Stripe Connect, but Stripe’s ability to turn off sub-merchants without explanation has led to poor experiences. My technical team considered several other providers and thought Finix’s APIs were the best.”
With strong leadership from their CEO and co-founder, Richie Serna, and his team, and recent product developments, we are confident that Finix will continue to disrupt the payments space. Congratulations again to the team for raising and executing on their vision for Finix!
