E-commerce has soared over the past 8 months, driven by consumers who buy more products online while s spent more time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. , announces a primary funding circular to help you continue to expand your products and your overseas presence to meet this demand.
Mollie, a startup that offers a simple API-based way to integrate invoices into an application, has raised 90 million euros ($106 million) in a TCV-led round of investment. Series B raises Mollie’s total to 115 million euros and catapults the startup’s valuation to more than $1 billion, founder and CEO Adriaan Mol showed in an interview with TechCrunch.
Mollie has been circulating since 2004 and this is only the moment when the budget has increased, the first circular of 25 million euros a year ago, which is perhaps one of the reasons why it has not been much on the radar of start-ups.
“He built the backend and front end through myself when I was still living with my parents,” Mol said. “This is the Dutch method. Start your concept long enough. I think that’s the basis of the business. “
However, Mollie has reached a number of milestones in recent years, so he has now come to the scene, supposedly out of nowhere, with such a high rating.
Currently, the corporation is primarily focused on small and medium-sized businesses – a very underserved but huge market – and has about 100,000 merchants as customers, mainly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. These clients come under well-known names like Wickey, Deliveroo. , TOMS (the shoe company) and UNICEF.
Lately it is on track to process more than 10 billion euros in transactions this year, a hundred percent more than a year ago, with some markets like Germany recording 1000% growth. And he’s been successful for several years at this point. .
“We’re in the right aspect of efficiency,” Mol said – Mollie is his nickname among his friends. “But we want to invest in new products to remain competitive. “
In fact, the payment service provider market is crowded, and corporations like Stripe and Mollie Adyen’s compatriot also build strong businesses with the concept of offering UNdeniable APIs and lines of code to integrate payment flows into other services. These corporations are not only popular. , however, they are very well capitalized and in a position to continue expanding more tools, while continuing to expand their presence abroad.
Mol says Mollie stands out from them and the rest of the festival in two key ways: the first is that it offers highly localized payments in what remains a highly fragmented market, where the personal tastes of the customer and the merchant are used for payment strategies. vary greatly from country to country (and are not yet fully served through other people like Band).
The time is that it provides a very fast and undeniable integration that hides much of the difficulty of integrating so many other types of payment methods. This ease of use for both merchants and consumers means that there is less abandonment of the basket and therefore higher conversion rates. visitors to the site. Mol stated that the cumulative conversion can be as high as 7%.
“If it’s super fluid and fluid, they don’t give up, and that’s a direct gain for our customers,” he said (the price is transparent but not uniform: it’s based on the volume and payment strategies integrated and used).
This, along with the expansion rate of a highly successful and effective business, is a component of what attracted TCV.
“The easy-to-use point is critical,” said John Doran, a TCV spouse. “It’s so simple that a child can just use it. The concept is to build the Apple of the world of invoices. “
Mol came up with the concept of creating Mollie for the first time when he incorporated a payment service into MessageBird, its previous start-up, which provides API-based messaging (think of it as Europe’s reaction to Twilio). he had discovered that all the payments offered were below average and too difficult to use as he wished, and that’s why they, especially Mol himself, who is an engineer, designed the solution. -house (literally, his parents’) house: see above).
I asked him why the company had not only grown and/or rotated to supply facilities under one roof, but Mol said that the companies and concepts were too large and not similar enough to become a single company. So he left the executive control of MessageBird, he’s still a board member, to concentrate full-time on Mollie.
This change to activity has paid off, so to speak.
The next steps for the company, Mol said, will be to continue expanding the facilities adjacent to bills, spaces such as the prospective provision of working capital to its customers, as well as other monetary facilities that SMEs do not discharge from single suppliers. “We see a lot of products that classic banks don’t offer SMEs,” Mol said. They don’t have to invest in them because they don’t make much cash from them. “These, he added, can simply come with point-of-sale invoices, card issuance, bank issuance and other banking products.