North Carolina-based fintech startup Spreedly has announced a $75 million growth investment from growth equity firm Spectrum Equity to accelerate product development and support the company’s global expansion plans.
Spreedly CEO Justin Benson tells Hypepotamus that the funding will help fulfill three specific company goals designed to increase Spreedly’s value to its customers: fuel product and engineering innovation, invest globally in sales and marketing, and make acquisitions that will deepen Spreedly’s offerings.
“We continue to add powerful functionality that enables and optimizes payments — boosting customer revenue,” says Benson, explaining that the company’s global expansion plans focus on increasing traction in Latin America. “That means we can deliver additional support and benefits to more customers around the world.”
Historically, high-performance global and cross-border payment processing was only available to massive global e-commerce companies with the time and resources required to build out their operations and maintain multi-vendor relationships.
Spreedly’s platform lets its customers — typically global and high-growth businesses — securely capture and store cardholder data in a personalized vault. The startup then uses tokenized payment details from that vault to make business transactions across hundreds of Spreedly-supported third-party payment and e-commerce service connections.
For example, when a SeatGeek user submits their payment information, Spreedly stores all of the payment data, acting as an intermediary between SeatGeek and the ticket marketplace. SeatGeek receives a token, and when the user comes back to make a purchase, the token allows SeatGeek to use Spreedly to recall that user’s payment data.
Spreedly allows businesses of all sizes to scale and optimize their payments operations via one simple API connection. It also lets client companies route transactions through just about any combination of payment services without ever touching end-consumer card data. This helps them get goods to market more quickly and makes compliance easier.
“We wouldn’t do the actual credit card transactions,” Benson says, who co-founded the startup in 2012.
“Instead, we would let merchants work with whomever they wanted to work with while we would focus all our efforts on letting merchants do this safely and quickly.”
“Spreedly allows its customers to rapidly onboard and integrate with a broad range of payment services via an API-based platform that is truly distinctive in the market today,” Michael Radonich, VP at Spectrum Equity said in a statement.
“This approach has resonated with many of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic e-commerce businesses, more than doubling Spreedly’s enterprise annual recurring revenue over the past twelve months.”
Benson also hailed Spectrum Equity as the perfect partner to help them execute their long-term vision. “We’re excited to bring Spectrum’s experience working with other high-growth fintech and e-commerce platforms to bear as we execute on our growth plans,” Benson says. “Their years of investing in similar stage companies and seeing what needs to happen, and what you need to avoid, struck me as very timely.”
The Durham startup caps off a year filled with company milestones, including increasing its headcount by 40 percent. The team last raised a $3 million Series A in 2016.
